Pay No Attention To The Man Behind The Curtain

According to Belghast's schedule for Blaugust, this is Developer Appreciation Week. It used to be a separate event, one I eyed with suspicion.

Who really "develops" MMORPGs, anyway? They're usually built by large teams, sometimes involving hundreds of people. The massive companies that fund them comprise numerous departments, some of which work almost independently, others which have to constantly negotiate and compromise just to get anything done.

Then there's the someone, or several someones, with the unenviable task of wrangling the disparate elements while keeping to a schedule and a budget in the hope of eventually bringing a finished product to market. That, infamously, was the role Sigil Games, makers of Vanguard, lacked.

It's all a bit vague, though, isn't it? In popular music you have the performers, the songwriters and the producer to consider. All their roles are relatively easy to assess. If you're particularly involved you might also look at the engineer or arranger. Literature is even more straightforward: the author and, maybe, very occasionally, the editor.

Movies are probably the closest analogy to video games; huge, collaborative endeavors involving hundreds of individuals. In the early days of cinema, responsibility for quality and success was generally assigned to the Studio, then to the Producer and, of course, the Star.

After Cahiers du Cinema promoted auteur theory, imprimatur shifted to the Director, where it somewhat shakily remained until the recent global trend towards megafranchises nudged focus back to the Studios once again.

For most of the decades I've played video games I couldn't have named anyone who worked on most of them. The exception would have been those idiosyncratic dog-and-pony shows so common in the 1980s, where one individual, coding in his (it was nearly always "his") bedroom, managed to cobble together something that made him a millionaire overnight.

Rather than admire those people I thought of them as bizarre. Rarely did any of them go on to make a second game anyone cared about. I can't remember any of their names and why would I? They were the equivalent of lottery winners.

I played EverQuest for quite a few years before I began to learn the names of the people who created it. The only reason it happened at all was because I was on the official forums all the time and some of the old guard would pop up and post there occasionally.

Also, players would rehash, with incredible lack of consistency, the origins of the game. After a while I got so confused and irritated by the contradictions and misinformation that I started doing some research of my own. From that I slowly began to understand that the games I was playing were created by individual human beings with agendas of their own.

Prior to that I really had never considered how the games came to exist, any more than I would waste mental energy on how my refrigerator was designed and brought to market. A game was a commercial product you bought in a store. It was either good or it wasn't. End of.

As the years went on and I became more and more deeply enmeshed in the culture surrounding MMORPGs, I came to recognize the names of many game developers, particularly the showmen (and they were nearly always men) with the big egos. I didn't think much of most of them.

More than that, I actively disapproved of the cult of personality many of them cultivated and of the fawning adoration expressed by their fans. In my book these people were, at best, technicians. They might be deserving of appreciation and praise by their peers, who could understand the skill sets, but I couldn't see any reason why any player should care, so long as they were competent at their jobs.

I think that attitude finally began to shift during the protracted and often disturbing collapse of Sigil Games. The detail that came out of that, particularly concerning Brad McQuaid, was both a soap opera and a tragedy. And I had to consider that, for all his very human faults and failings, Brad had made two of the best MMORPGs I had ever played and facilitated some of the most joyous and long-lasting memories of my life.

From then on I began to pay a lot more attention to who was behind the games I liked or didn't. I started to make decisions on what to follow or even buy based on the names behind it. I lost all faith in EQNext quite specifically because of the gurning, grinning, self-aggrandizing crew of supposedly charismatic developers SOE chose to front the PR push. Who could possibly take anything any of those people were doing seriously?

By complete contrast, the handover to DayBreak Games came as a glass of ice water on a burning hot day. The first few weeks and months were worrying but once everyone got their feet under the table and particularly when John Smedley departed, I started to get the strong feeling that the grown-ups were back in charge.

In the years since then I've had little cause to revise that opinion. There may be chaotic maneuvering going on at the corporate and financial levels but down in the engine room, where they make and maintain the games, everything has been humming sweetly.

Holly "Windstalker" Longdale, someone I never really paid much attention to when she was buried in the background of the Dave Georgeson circus, has come very much into her own as the ringmaster in charge of the EverQuest franchise. Under her stewardship there seems to be both clear direction and clear intent as well as the capacity to complete. I have confidence in her.

The nature of the MMORPG marketplace and the obfuscated and often concerning nature of Daybreak's corporate structure means no EQ player can ever feel truly relaxed about the future. Still, I feel better about it now than I did for many years in SOE's decline, when unforgivable debacles like the PSS1 scandal threatened to drive the entire operation onto the rocks.

I also have a modicum of faith in good old Brad McQuaid. There he is, plugging away at Pantheon, the game everyone once dismissed as a con or vaporware. Now, for quite a few, it's the Great Hope for The Future. I believe he really does mean to "make worlds, not games". Whether finances will allow him his dream is less certain but I trust him at least to try.

In the end the developers I appreciate are twofold: the visionaries and the caretakers. We need both if we're to have MMORPGS that delight and last. Here's to Brad and Holly, the past, present and future of the games I want to play. Long may they stick around, doing that thing they do.




*** Unusually, I have borrowed all the images here from the web. If anyone owns one and would rather it wasn't used, please let me know and I'll remove it.***

Drunder In The Air: EQ2

This week's left-field notion from those wacky folk over at Daybreak Games is a doozy.

A prison server.

To save anyone clicking the link here's Holly "Windstalker" Longdale's proclamation:

"Later this week we plan to release a server we are calling “Drunder,” which is a “prison server.” What does that mean, exactly? Ultimately, players who are caught breaking our rules and disrupting EQ2 live server gameplay will be flagged for this server, and no others -- ever. Characters on these accounts will be copied to Drunder (the “prison server”) and can never leave or transfer to another server.

This is a server our Customer Service Game Masters have requested over the years in order to manage disruptive players. They will determine who goes there. As gamers, we recognize there are some players who like to step outside our rules.

Drunder will get no customer service support and it will require a maintained membership to access and play. Rather than disrupt live servers in an attempt to join the “prison server,” players can use our /petition system and ask to join Drunder. To be clear: You won’t be able to move individual characters to this server, while maintaining characters from the same account on another server. This is a ONE-WAY trip for an entire account forever.

Ultimately, players who break the rules – or want to – will have a world of their own to do… whatever they will.

As I said, this is an experiment. We wanted to see what happens given it's not a very common option.

Let's see where this takes us…"

Insanity. That's where.

I claim sanctuary!

As Feldon gleefully reported this bizarre idea is getting all kinds of attention from both the gaming and mainstream media. Wilhelm is keeping a handy scorecard of blog responses for future reference.

The whole thing gives me the creeps to the point where I almost do not want to log in. It's an emotional response not a rational one because, in effect, having your account moved to a "prison server" is a more lenient penalty than the one that's been in effect for the entire time I've played EQ2, namely an outright account ban. A ban is morally neutral, though. Being sent to "A Prison Server" is anything but.

If the theoretical possibility of having my account permanently taken away never gave me a moment's pause, why does this feel so much more threatening? Well, emotionally, it feels as though it affects my characters directly, not just me. I am responsible for their well-being and I feel threatened when they are threatened.

If (Brell forbid) I were to engage the wrath of someone in Customer Service to the point where they flagged my account as Banned I would, of course, be extremely upset. My characters, however, would be oblivious. For them, nothing would have changed. They would be able to go about their business doing whatever it is they do when I'm not directing them. It would, in effect, be no different for them than any other period when I'm not playing.

If the whole account gets moved to another server, however, their entire environment will change. That's already going to happen when we get the server merges, which is an uncomfortable enough issue in itself, but at least there we don't expect to be plunged into anarchy, murder and worse. Not even with Nagafen joining us.

They'll never find me out here!

On Drunder my characters wouldn't dare leave their houses. The world outside wouldn't be safe any more (and most of them live in Freeport so their concept of safety is already stretched thin enough). I am not willing to take that risk without their informed consent. We're all going to have to have a group meeting about this. Ironically I guess I'll have to log in for that.

As for we, the players, life on Drunder would be...different. It reminds me a bit of the old Everquest "RP" server Firiona Vie, which turned into a very odd place over time, nothing remotely ressembling what it was intended to be. With no Customer Service and no GMs, the players on Drunder will be able to do anything they like. Botting is going to be the very least of it. Hacking of any and every kind will go unchallenged. Duping? Go right ahead. Speedhack, teleport, walk through walls? Carry on.

If someone works out how to crash the server (as has happened at least twice to my memory) they can, presumably, keep on doing it until they get bored. I wonder if someone will end up reverse-engineering the whole thing and taking the game in a new direction altogether?

How are they going to punish anyone even if they do catch them, anyway? Send them to another prison server? Make them play Landmark? And what happens when we get more server merges? One day Drunder might be the most populated (and profitable) server of all. It could be the last EQ2 server left running!

It's a bad idea in so many ways. But mostly it's bad because its immoral. My characters haven't done anything. Why punish them for my sins?

There's No Place Like Home : SOE, PSS1

It's well over two years since I first posted about SOE's deal with German satellite TV company PSS1. No point rehashing the whole sorry saga. For anyone who hasn't been following this particular slow-motion train wreck, EQ2Wire has a brief outline of the long, twisty trail that today ended, inevitably, right back where it began.

Yes, as many predicted all along, especially those of us who lived through SOE's similarly brief, equally ill-judged (but far less coercive and therefore less controversial) fling with UbiSoft, it just didn't work. As of right now anyone in the PSS1 region who plays or wants to play any SOE game can do so without going through a middleman and as of July all DCUO, EQ2 and Planetside2 accounts made or registered with PSS1 transfer to SOE.

It's always been my strong feeling that this whole deal was pushed onto SOE by whichever division of SonyCorp they report to (is it still the PlayStation division?). Feldon's EQ2Wire article includes one vital piece of the jigsaw that I hadn't previously picked up, which pretty much confirms my suspicions: that being the licensing of the entire Sony Pictures "entertainment library" to PSS1. Collateral damage I think they call it. Or maybe friendly fire.

I always doubted the arrangement would hold long enough for EQNext to feature in any PSS1 package. When Landmark was announced as a standalone project outside the remit of the deal the writing was on the wall. Then, as Player Studio began to move front and center in SOE's five year plan and the extreme complexities of setting up the necessary international legal framework became more widely understood, the likelihood of finding a viable way to include both versions of all the games that would rely on paid-for, taxable player-made content passed out of the realms of wishful-thinking and into the arena of psychotic delusion.

Whatever, it's over now. I'm sure the behind-the-scenes story would be something worth reading. Maybe when Smed retires and writes his autobiography.

It would also be oh so nice to think that lessons had been learned but when you're a small, regional cog in a vast, global machine no-one "important" really cares what you may or may not have learned. You either do what your told or they find someone who will.

So I'm not saying we won't be back here or somewhere strikingly similar in another few years. All I am saying is that, if there's one thing you can generally rely on SOE for it's to bumble through until they get things there-or-thereabouts right. In the end. Eventually.

Sometimes you do have to wait an awfully long time before that end comes around. All too often the road takes an awful lot of wrong turns along the way. Still, better late than never, isn't that what they say?

Now, everyone close your eyes, cross your fingers and toes, click the heels of those little red shoes I know you're all wearing and make a wish for Vanguard.

O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay! : Argo

Yes, alright, it's not that frabjous. It's not like SOE changed their minds and decided to give (or even sell) Vanguard back to its creators. What's so special about Pox Nora that it gets preferential treatment anyway? Not that I begrudge Pox Nora fans their luck. There must be some, right? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?.

Longtime readers of this blog probably have no recollection whatsoever of my brief flirtation with the SEA shovelware "steampunk" MMO Argo. It merited one post and it was something of a guilty pleasure, albeit a considerable one. It was the game I made an Allaplaya account for, which felt a little like forging my own long-handled spoon (not that I've ever actually forged a long-handled spoon, or indeed anything else...)

No sooner had I made a throwaway account on a garbage email address and bowed down to worship the devil himself PSS1, Allaplaya's mighty overlords, than they decided to pull the game from their sad collection of no-hopers roster of quality MMOs, leaving me bereft, or at least mildly irritated.

Yes, I've used these pictures before. What do you expect? Game's been down for 18 months.

In a pattern frustratingly familiar from my distressing experience with the even better SEA shovelware "steampunk" MMO, NeoSteam,  Argo continued to run successfully in Korea. Then, in July last year, it was reported that Games-Masters.com, purveyors of SEA shovelware quality MMOs such as Cabal and Ran (no, me either...) had acquired Argo for the European market.

Well, I'd heard that one before. Some company I'd never heard of, can't remember and really don't have the willpower to google, claimed they had bought NeoSteam for an EU release - that never happened. Fool me once and all that jazz.

Except this time it seems there really is a pony! Massively just reported that the European beta for Argo starts tomorrow and I just signed up. I really shouldn't be excited about this but I am all the same. It's like when your cat goes missing and he's gone for six weeks and you're certain he's gone forever and probably dead and then one day there's a knock on the door and you open it and a stranger says "Excuse me but I think this might be your cat" (True story).

So, I might get in beta or I might not and the game might actually come back or it might not but either either way it's another notch on the "MMOs never really die" tally-stick and that's a warm fuzzy if ever there was one, so be happy even if you never heard of Argo, never play it and have no idea what I'm making all this fuss about.  

Oops, They Did It Again: SOE, EQ2

Using the now-traditional method, a chaotic flurry of disorganized semi-reveals, mollifying forum posts, half-baked statements of intent, tweets and Reddit convos, Sony Online Entertainment, the company that likes to say "Yes! No! Wait...maybe...we're not sure...", announced...something.

Wilhelm has an excellent account of the shenanigans, including links to Sheldon's usual first-rate news coverage at EQ2Wire, so I won't go over the details here. Go read those if you need to get up to speed.

I just wanted to make a couple of quick observations from a UK perspective.

Smed briefly addresses the PSS1 elephant in the room, albeit rather pointedly not by name:

"European players – we have an idea on how to include you in this but we need to discuss with our partners.We have a pretty good idea on this though. give us a bit of time to suss this out."

 Really? I should damn well hope you do have "a pretty good idea". I'd hate to think that you were planning on offering the rest of the world unfettered access to all SOE games for a single monthly charge of $14.99 while leaving the poor relations over here in the myriad countries enmeshed in the PSS1 web to pay separate, individual subscriptions to each game.

Because, and please correct me if I'm wrong, PSS1 has no equivalent of the All Access pass. That was one of the reasons that, while SOE stopped accepting new AA Subs from PSS1 territories long ago, existing Access subscribers have been allowed to retain their accounts and pay SOE for them directly.

Then there's Landmark. The only SOE game specifically excluded from the PSS1 deal. A free-to-play title for which I am about to pay a hundred dollars to alpha test. And EQNext, which, whenever it finally arrives, will be played on SOE servers in America but for which access in PSS1 territories will be through their portal exclusively.

A mess is what that is.

Whatever the upshot, it's going to save me money. If I keep grandfather rights to the new deal I'll be paying $14.99 a month instead of $19.99 and I'll save $5.00. If it's deemed that Access no longer exists and those rights no longer pertain then I'll be playing my SOE games for free and I'll save even more!

The way SOE do these things I'm resigned to watching it play out like a slow-motion train wreck over the next few weeks but nevertheless I'm optimistic. They have the most appalling habit of making everything absolutely as difficult as possible for both themselves and their customers along the way but by and large they do tend to wind up in roughly the right place in the end.

If only they'd learn something in the process once in a while.

No, that'd be asking too much.

Good News, Bad News (Again) : EQ, EQLandmark, EQNext

Yesterday brought a couple of snippets of news from Norrath, one unexpected and welcome, the other unhappy but inevitable. As tradition demands, first the bad news: EQMac will close down in November.

For years I'd had it in mind to go time-traveling, back to Everquest's golden age, a world  locked forever changeless behind the impenetrable gates of the Empire of the Apple. Once I even, naively, looked into the possibility of buying a Mac purely for the purposes of playing it but it seems an old Macintosh really will never let you down because no-one ever sells one on the cheap.

Later rumors began to circulate about the possibility of slipping in around the back somehow by way of a PC workaround. I looked into that, too, but like another even more grey-market option on the past, to get in requires a copy of the long-gone Everquest:Titanium , currently retailing for $80 and upwards plus international postage. Cheaper than a used Mac, for sure, but still expensive for a whim.

And a whim is all it would be. Unlike some, I'm very happy with where Everquest is now. I still play on and off and I when I do I enjoy the 2013 version as much as I enjoyed the 1999. Except for one thing: Freeport. I do hanker to walk the streets of the old city one more time. The revamped version is an atrocity.

The loss of that notional possibility is, of course, the faintest ghost of a disappointment compared to the anguish regular players must be feeling. Almost two years ago, when the closure was first mooted, a strong popular campaign brought about a reprieve but with the recent round of belt-tightening at SOE I'm sure most EQMac players have been only too aware they were living on borrowed time.

That time has finally run out and I'm afraid there will be no second happy ending. In the wise words of Bryan Ferry, nothing lasts forever, of that I'm sure. It's more surprising that MMOs go on so long as they do than that eventually they must stop, although when you consider a game like Istaria (nee Horizons), a complete failure at launch, now about to celebrate its tenth anniversary with a big content update and a bullish wish for ten more years, then almost anything seems possible. Still, with every closure we all feel the chill a little more keenly.

And so to the Good News. EQLandmark will not be included in the PSS1 deal and SOE will handle all the accounts directly worldwide. Ditto for beta applications.

As long-time readers of this blog may remember, the general feeling when SOE decided to throw its European players over to PSS1 was that there was no spoon long enough to sup with the German wolves. Over time and with an enormous amount of public protest and campaigning the roughest edges got smoothed off the deal and something approaching an acceptable compromise was reached.

He's a big monkey but he's out of shape.

I can't speak from personal experience about what it's like playing under PSS1, although indications on the forums are that it hasn't gone much better than anyone expected. I still play my SOE MMOs on US servers using the original SOE accounts and I pay my All Access subscription directly to SOE (well actually to some third-party mediator according to my credit card statement, but anyway not to PSS1).

It's an uncomfortable and precarious position. The fundamental reason we're still paying for two All Access accounts we barely use and almost certainly don't need is because of the uncertainty about what might happen if we gave them up. We've known all along that EQNext would not be included in the grandfather rights because it was made clear that any new MMOs launched after the compromise agreement was hammered out would be excluded.

Once we learned of the existence of EQLandmark there was no reason to believe the same rules wouldn't apply. But, almost miraculously, they don't. My entirely uninformed assumption (see Wilhelm's excellent discursion on MMO bloggers assumptions) is that trying to sort out the legal issues involved in EQLandmark's player-made sales has already made several lawyers' heads explode even without factoring in reciprocal arrangements through a third-party license operating under an entirely different legal system so someone finally said "Stuff this for a game of soldiers, we'll do it ourselves".

Ya just gotta believe.

Whatever the reason, I see it as both unalloyed good news and a crack in the dam. If nothing else it says that SOE is still interested in markets outside the US (they could simply have chosen to make EQLandmark unavailable outside the USA, after all). It also means that if worst ever does come to worst there should still be at least one Everquest franchise title left for us to play.

What we'll actually be doing in EQLandmark remains, as Keen points out, mostly mysterious but my beta app is now in so fingers-crossed. The beta is without NDA, too, so if I get in all will be revealed.

@starmike The Alpha phase will be the only phase with an NDA. More detail on that soon.
— David Georgeson (@DaveGeorgeson) October 17, 2013

Don't hold your breath, though. Smokejumper also clarified that the screenshots he's been releasing are from the pe-alpha version. Beta could be a while, let alone live. Then again, it was always going to be a "Winter" launch and technically Winter runs December through March. We're not late yet!

Supertanker Turn : EQ2

It's ultra-short post week here at Inventory Full. In breaking news, the slow-motion train crash that was the SOE/PSS1 deal jumped tracks to a different metaphor today as the ponderous, lumbering supertanker that is Sony Online Entertainment executed the equivalent of a bootlegger turn and sailed back in the direction it came from.

John Smedly announced, via his preferred medium of Twitter, that existing players of SOE games that are migrating over to Prosieben can keep their SOE accounts and stay with SOE.

Full story at EQ2 Wire, with more to come out of Fan Faire SOE Live I'm sure. I'll wait for the fine details and legalese before I throw my hat in the air, but whatever the ifs, ands and buts this has to be good news.

The whole sorry debacle has been a classic example of what SOE does best, namely the wrong thing followed, eventually, by the right thing. For Tunare's sake, from now on could you please just start with the right thing and save us all the yelling?

Please Take My Money: SOE & PSS1

Something that isn't Guild Wars 2 for once:

If anyone from a PSS1 territory*  has an All Access account they are entitled to keep it running until such time as PSS1 can offer an equivalent. Since to date the only SOE MMO that's transferred is DCUO and transition for the second in line, EQ2, has been delayed with no new date yet given, that could be a while.

To keep your Access account, though, you must continue to keep up an uninterrupted payment schedule. As I understand it (and please correct me in the comments if I'm wrong) SOE is no longer opening new Access accounts for customers from PSS1 territories and moreover, if your current Access account lapses it can't be re-opened. 

What I imagine PSS1 Customer Service to be

If you have an Access account and want to hang on to it as long as you're able, be sure you know when your Credit Card expires and be aware that SOE's account page won't automatically allow you to update payment details for the current card or add an alternate payment method. You'll get a message saying the Access account isn't available in your territory if you try.

Suspecting something like this would happen, I tested mine a few weeks before the critical date. I have subsequently been in conversation with several customer service people at SOE, from whom I have had the usual exemplary courteous and efficient assistance (and no I am not being ironic - in more than a dozen years I've always found SOE's customer service to be excellent). 

That said, I did initially get different replies on the two tickets I submitted and one of the replies wrongly stated that due to the PSS1 issues the Access pass wasn't available to me. If you get that response, query and escalate it because it's wrong. My error quickly got corrected and with the assistance of Customer Service I have been able to update both accounts. The final proof will come at renewal when we'll see if I get billed correctly but at least I have the paper-trail now to confirm the accounts are meant to pass this hurdle.

It took a while to get this sorted, so if anyone is in the same position, don't leave it til the last minute. 

Please give generously - large castle to maintain

Ironically, it's now somewhat in doubt whether I want to carry on paying two SOE subs indefinitely, because what with GW2 and the upcoming Rift expansion (which will also require a subscription and which we are now very likely to buy) we may well decide to let the Access pass lapse anyway.

At least with this sorted out it will be our choice, which makes a big difference in terms of sentiment. We've had fantastic entertainment from SOE for well over a decade and despite my well-documented irritation verging on anger over both the existence and the handling of the PSS1 transfer, I do not intend to let this lead to a permanent parting of the ways (nearly said "rift" then!). 

Indeed, with SOE now embracing the free-to-play model so wholeheartedly, the real issue isn't whether I'll go on playing their games but whether I really need to go on paying for the pleasure.

*(that's Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom in case you were wondering)

You Never Shoulda Opened That Door: PSS1 & SOE

EQ2Wire has a typically excellent account of the latest development in the PSS1 saga. In the light of the many issues that have arisen during and since the transition of DCUO from SOE's stewardship to our putative PSS1 overlords, the conversion of EQ2, which was due around about now, has been postponed.

In the comments thread Seffrid, who's been highly active on the forums on this issue, has about the best summation of the situation that I've seen. I reproduce his comment and my reply here:

Seffrid
August 26, 2012 @ 2:47 am


As I commented on the EQ2 board, and Brasse was kind enough to acknowledge the validity of the point, there’s very little benefit in PSS1 going to an event in America in order to address the concerns of the affected players who by definition under this deal live in Europe!
I’ve no doubt that the EQ2 transition has been delayed because SOE have concerns over some of the problems they encountered in the DCUO transition, not because there are unresolved concerns that the players have. I haven’t seen any commitment not to make the transition until the players’ concerns have been fully resolved and I doubt they ever will be.
Players want choice. They want the new players who PSS1 recruit to have to sign up with them while existing players have the choice whether to do so or to stay with SOE until they can see that PSS1 are an equal company to SOE to hold an account with. If the companies truly believe they can in time bring those players on side then it must be better to keep them with SOE in the meantime rather than lose them to the company’s games now and for all time, which is how it’s looking for a lot of long-term players at the moment.
Recruiting a lot of new F2P players taking a non-committal look at the game is naturally a good thing, but so too is hanging onto a lot of established players who have for the most part subscribed to the games over many years thereby demonstrating a long-term commitment to them. That’s what SOE don’t seem to be able to get a grasp of at the moment.

  bhagpuss
August 26, 2012 @ 3:30 am

Seconded. And a fine summation of where we are now and where we should be going, Seffrid.
I am not rabidly anti-PSS1. I already have a PSS1 account, or rather I have an Allaplaya account. When I can fit in a session or two I play one of their games, Argo. It’s an enjoyable F2P title.
That does not mean I want to give up more than a dozen years of history with SoE. Much less does it mean I’m happy to be sold on like a bad debt.
A deal whereby PSS1 marketed SOE games in their territory and signed up all the new members that marketing brought them to their own financial benefit would not just have been accepted by the UK/EU players, it would almost certainly have been welcomed. This could have been a PR triumph instead of a PR disaster.
If any of these decisions really are within the remit of SOE, something I have always doubted, it’s still not too late to do this right. I suspect, however, that all meaningful decision-making on this takes place somewhere above Smed’s pay-grade and at that level we really are all just numbers.

 And now I'm off to play GW2 (assuming the servers are up). SOE have a lot of competition on their hands right now. My issue is more likely to be when I get time time to play their MMOs in future. They really don't need to be putting barriers in the way of me giving them my time or my money, now do they?

Ill Winds

This is a blog not a news site but since I got started on the whole SOE/PSS1 thing I may as well carry on.

BBC Technology News (which is more than half-decent at picking up game-related stories) had a piece about the closure of Sony's game development studio in Liverpool, England.

I'd completely forgotten that Sony even had a games studio in the UK but on reading the piece it came somewhat vaguely back to me that there'd been a bit of a fuss a long, long time ago, when Psygnosis, an independent studio that was very well-known indeed in UK gaming circles, was gobbled up by the big, bad multinational.

So many wasted hours...

I never played many Psygnosis games back in my ZXSpectrum and Amiga days. All that Roger Dean artwork seemed more than a tad embarrassing in the 1980s although it looks quite sweet now. I did play Lemmings, of course. Everyone played Lemmings. It was the Angry Birds of its day.

Nostalgia or the lack of it notwithstanding, Sony's decision to close this venerable and successful arm of its world-wide empire seems to me to have some ominous implications. Sony's statement includes the following:

"...it was felt that by focusing our investment plans on other studios that are currently working on exciting new projects, we would be in a stronger position to offer the best possible content for our consumers."

I'm not saying anything

It would be nice, wouldn't it, to think that one of those "other studios" working on "exciting new projects" might be SOE. They are, after all, working on both Planetside2 and EQNext. Smed also occasionally drops hints about other projects even more secret than EQNext, which is rumored to be being developed for reasons of security in a secret base somewhere beneath an active volcano.

It would be nice, but as Scott Jennings likes to point out, there are reasons why we can't have nice things. Wilhelm at TAGN , replying to a comment of mine, makes the astute observation that Sony have a record of being mostly interested in selling hardware. They are, at heart, a consumer electronics firm, after all.

Sony don't make desktop PCs. They do still make laptops and a strange hybrid tv-pc that I wouldn't kick out of the living room but to what extent this marries with the MMO market I wouldn't care to guess.

Oh, maybe I would...

Currently residing in the "Where are they now?" file

MMOs are still, primarily, a desktop PC hobby. There have been a few console MMOs and there are a few more on the way but it could hardly be considered the heart of the market. Desktop PCs themselves are almost certainly living on borrowed time and consoles may predecease them. Before very long the combined onslaught of tablets, smart-phones and internet tv could (I would bet on "will") send both dedicated gaming PCs and consoles to the same "remember when" rose-tinted graveyard as VCRs and 8-Track Stereos.

It's possible SOE could be a big part of that transition should it occur, providing MMO-style content for new platforms. I could live with that. You have to wonder, though, whether MMOs are the type of content those new platforms will want to have provided for them.

On the thread relating to the PSS1 acquisitions on the Everquest forums someone suggested they "strongly suspect that the real situation is that SOE are in the process of being sold (by Sony) to PSS, and this is the due diligence period." I'm not sure I buy that conspiracy theory in whole cloth but I probably wouldn't faint if it turned out to be true.

If it's not PSS1 it may be someone like them. That's if Sony don't just decide to call quits on the whole thing, like they did in Liverpool today. Who knows, we might even end up being glad PSS1 took an interest after all.

Breaking The Deal: PSS1 and SOE

Feldon at the invaluable EQ2Wire has three news updates on the ever-rolling train wreck that is the PSS1/SOE deal. If you play any Sony MMOs, I suggest you read them all, starting here.

Here are some highlights:

• To no-one's surprise, PSS1 have now acquired the regional rights to the SOE games they didn't take in the first raid. That means Vanguard (which we knew), Everquest (which we were told they didn't want), Bullet Run (about which no-one cares) and Wizardry (which isn't finished yet). If you thought at least a few of your options were still open, well you can forget that.

• PSS1 has partnered with a French Television station, TF1. At least I've heard of it, unlike PSS1. No-one outside France cares.

• The cost of an EQ2 subscription in the U.K. will rise under PSS1's stewardship by 20%. That's actually only £2.00 a month so it's no deal-breaker, but what the justification for it might be, other than profiteering, I can't imagine.

• The DCUO conversion hasn't gone smoothly, particularly in respect of customer service. Is anyone surprised?

•  There are some potential security issues with how PSS1 store account information. Where have I heard that before?

Still not quite at the deal-breaker stage from where I'm standing although now we're getting very close.

And then we come to:

"Each User may only create one Account."

Now that's a deal-breaker. SOE MMOs have always not just allowed but encouraged the creation of multiple accounts. Multi-boxing is a tradition that goes back almost as far as the creation of Everquest itself.

Could it get any worse? Oh, yes. It seems that "User" in this context could be defined as IP Address. If so, that doesn't just mean no multi-boxing, it means only one person per household. No families. No siblings. No couples. No flatmates. Not if they share the same internet connection, anyway.

In our house we have half a dozen SOE accounts between us and sometimes all of them are logged in at once. No more of that. Instead, back we go to late 1999, when we took turns, one of us playing EQ while the other watched. At least we won't be on dial-up.

Oh, I don't suppose it will come to that. There are noises being made about how SOE and PSS1 " understand your concerns and are working hard to address them". Yes, you keep saying that, but then every time you reach some half-hearted compromise on one issue, up pops something else that was entirely predictable only you apparently weren't able to predict it and everyone waves their hands in the air and wails " it wasn’t as simple as we initially thought".

Just over a week from now I will be playing Guild Wars 2. After that, all things being equal, I might be playing The Secret World, City of Steam, WildStar, Otherland, Rift's Storm Legion expansion and who knows what else. It's not as though all my dragon eggs are in the same Kerran basket. But there aren't any MMOs quite like EQ, EQ2 and Vanguard and there aren't any characters like the ones I have there. Even if I'm off enjoying myself somewhere else I want to know my characters are in safe hands.

And they're not, now, are they?

Taking The Loong View

What a lot of MMOs there are. I downloaded yet another one yesterday. Kaozz's fault. She mentioned that she was playing something called Loong Online. "Smooth as butter and polished", she said. I'd never heard of it, which was provocation enough without the praise on top.

I googled and found it on the Gamigo portal where I had a choice: sign up for Loong alone or make a Gamigo account to play any of their games. They host a lot of MMOs including a few I'd heard of. Fiesta, which certainly gets a lot of advertising, none of which has ever made me consider trying it, King of Kings, which I did once play for about half an hour and Black Prophecy, which crops up on Massively now and again largely to my complete lack of interest. They have several more and others in development. They even have a Golf MMO, and they're welcome to it. Obviously no real point starting a Gamigo account, then.

Quit hogging the camera, cat!

Having made my Gamigo account, when I came to add Loong to my list of games I planned to play on it I noticed a familiar name: Otherland. Otherland is the MMO based on Tad Williams' sprawling, disturbing cyberpunk/fantasy noir. It's an MMO I've had in the back of my mind for a long time, looking forward to giving it a run whenever it appears. Haven't heard much about it for a while, although there was a video recently. I had no idea Gamigo were involved but now I'm signed up. Pre-ordered, I suppose you could say, if you can pre-order a game you don't have to order in the first place. Ah, sweet serendipity.

Gamigo is a German F2P gaming network.  Seems to be the week for those, what with the PSS1 thing and all. There's an awful lot of MMO activity in Germany, now I come to think of it. Bigpoint are another. They host Drakensang and Nadirim, both of which I've tried, and Battlestar Galactica, which I haven't, it being a shooter. Germany is a big, rich country and one where MMOs seem to be very firmly established. Once you factor out the "sold like chattels" part of the PSS1/Sony deal the whole thing begins to look a little less disturbing. If they can get the IP block sorted out and restore freedom of choice, who knows? Maybe something good could come out of the wreckage.

Slot in top of head is not for litter

Leaving that aside for now, pending the supposed SoE/Allaplaya statements due later today, what is Loong like? Well, I only played for an hour or so but it was a good hour. It certainly looks fine. The world is lush and detailed, the views are stunning, the creatures are quirky and that's just in the starting areas.The interface is a bit too gritty for my taste and I can't say I'm keen on the fonts but the functionality is all there. Compared to, say, Eden Eternal, a game I like a lot, Loong appears to be several notches higher in quality. Gameplay, at the starter level, is identical.

Will I play it much? Ah, that's the question, isn't it? There are just so many MMOs. It's all very well downloading them and trying them out, but how often do I get much further than the starting area? Is looking great and playing smoothly enough? Well, no it's not. Even really top-notch gameplay doesn't set the hook deep enough. Zentia, for example, is a first-class game in just about every respect. Gameplay there is as good as any MMO I've played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I were on it all weekend when we first found it and we played sporadically for a fair while after that, but in the end we drifted away.

I told you once. Shoo!.

I think, for me at least, it comes down mostly to character. In Loong I can be a good-looking young man or a good-looking young woman and that seems to be about it. It's not like being a giant tiger in NeoSteam, is it? Or even a mouse in Eden Eternal. I just don't find playing good-looking young people very involving. If I can't be an animal, at least let me be a dwarf or a gnome, something with a big, bushy beard. Zentia let me play a fat old man, which may be why I lasted a few weeks there rather than a few hours.

Do my feet even touch the ground?

It's not just how the characters look, either. It's also how they move. My Loong character travels in sudden, fluid leaps and bounds, so slick and fast that he's sometimes on the far side of where I want him to be before I can make him stop. Rift has a very dull selection of races but movement there is stolid, steady, firm. I can feel every footfall and that really does matter. The more solid the character feels, the better I am able to associate.

I'll plug on with Loong for a bit. On and off. Here and there. Now and again. The world very much looks worth exploring. I'll be surprised if I become more than an occasional visitor, but that's fine. There are so many MMOs after all.