Moving On...

I waited until today to see if my Rift: Prime character would show up. It was supposed to be the last date for transfers to be completed. Nothing.

I can't even see the Trial server, the aptly-named Reclaimer, on the shard list. That's because you can only see it if you have a character there. Clearly, I don't.

Why not? I'd like to know that, too. I read the full text of the official announcement as well as the forum post and FAQ. Nowhere does it say that characters need to have reached a specific level to be eligible for transfer but I got a hint that that might be the issue when I tried to post a query on the official forum thread.

Since I can post perfectly happily on other parts of the forum I'm guessing that Level 10 is some kind of baseline reality check for Prime. I was under the impression I'd passed that bar because, as I mentioned in the previous post, I thought I'd gotten into the high teens when Prime started.

One of the best things about having a blog is that, at least when it comes to gaming, I don't have to rely on my memory. I looked at the post I wrote when Prime launched. It told me two things: I didn't get anywhere near as far as I imagined (it seems I logged out the moment I dinged eight and never logged in again) and I had far less fun than I thought I did.

My review was scathing all round but I reserved particular contempt for the questing:

"The game dumps you at the wrong end of the starter zone and throws a whole lot more lore nonsense at you before offering you the first of what will be a seemingly endless series of the most mundane, trivial quests ever seen in a major MMO... I honestly think I have never seen so many lacklustre quests in one game. Even the dullest of imported F2Ps has more to offer in terms of wit or imagination than this."

All of which makes it quite ironic that I'm writing this up after spending nearly two hours on a random quest I picked up in Meridian, the Defiant capital. A quest I got so wrapped up in that I almost missed my lunch.

It wasn't my plan to start playing Rift again at all, far less start doing extended quest chains on my highest level character. I kind of fell into it. Or was lured.

As I mentioned last time, Rift can be extremely "rewarding". I've played some Rift most days this week but today was the first time I did any actual adventuring. It was the first day I'd had time. Mostly I've been too busy claiming rewards, sorting inventory and setting up hot bars.

On seven characters it takes a while, especially when every single character has twenty-eight "Rewards" waiting to be claimed in the cash shop and half of those rewards open to spill out more rewards that open to spill out more...

I mean, I like free stuff as much as anyone but this is ridiculous.

It would be one thing if it was just a bunch of old tat, like it is in most games, but there's good stuff in here! The highlights were serious upgrades to the main weapons of several characters and the fastest mounts I've ever owned in Rift for all of them.

The massive increase in generosity is just one of the ways Rift isn't quite how I remember it. The game has changed a lot since I last played it properly but all of those changes were completely invalidated by the Prime experiment. I had no chance to evaluate them there. Pete from Dragonchasers has a post up about why retro or progression servers don't work for him and I share a lot of his feelings on the subject.

Classic or re-start servers have a huge appeal, not only because of the crowds and the buzz and the everyone in it together thing but also because the gameplay is so much simpler. It's all kill mob, do quest, gear up, train skill and after twenty years no-one really needs any of that explaining.

Current "Live" servers sag under the accumulated weight of years, even decades of accrued complexity. Nothing is obvious, self-evident or intuitive. It can be daunting, but....

Mature MMORPGs have a plethora of labor-saving devices, everything from fast travel to auto-populating skills. If you're used to those you're going to miss them and even if you're not you're soon going to run up against the reasons they were added to the game in the first place.

I was unaware just how many such short-cuts Rift had taken since I last played on Live until a conversation sparked off in Level 51-59 chat this morning. Someone piped up to say they hadn't played for many years and the hints and tips began to rain down.

Most of the quality of life improvements mentioned were entirely new to me. I had, for example, no idea the game would now call on items in your main bank to complete quests, for example. With inventory space ever at a premium in Rift that's a potential gamechanger, not least because, at some point since I last played, basic vault storage appears to have been doubled, leaving all my characters with a wealth of free bank slots.

Another change is that falling damage has been completely removed. That seems odd, although very welcome. I also happened upon a quest that downlevelled me from 51 to 15 but continued giving me the same amount of xp I would have got at the higher level. That never used to happen. Telara is still as level-gated as always but who knows how many side doors there might be by now?

Sadly, there don't seem to be any very helpful "What's changed since you last played" guides for returning players. Well, there are quite a few but they're all either out of date or relate entirely to end-game, which, reading up on it, would appear to be so different from the Rift I know that they might as well have given it a new name and put it on a separate server.

I admit to being a little impressed by the amount of work Trion must have put in during the last few years. The whole operation seems a lot slicker and more streamlined than the genial shambles I remember from my earlier visits. Pity they went bust doing it.

It's also a shame virtually none of that good work was evident in the rushed and ill-timed Prime experiment. I can't help feeling that, were Rift able to launch as a brand-new MMORPG right now, with all its improvements and polish, it would be hailed as a breath of fresh air in a stale market.

No chance of that. It seems the only way an old MMORPG can get any attention these days is to  dress up in its oldest, drabbest clothes and offer people a bad time. Misery sells, it seems.

And on that theme, I rather think my run on EverQuest II's retro-fitted Kaladim server might be coming to an end, at least for now. At Level 21 the game is managing to put on a surprisingly convincing impression of what I remember things to have been like not so long after launch. There's really not a lot you can do without a group and what you can do solo is excruciatingly dull. Authentic, maybe. Fun? Not so I'm noticing.

Last time I went around this track I got off at around the same junction (Nektulos Forest and Thundering Steppes). I bailed until the Echoes of Faydwer expansion brought Butcherblock into the game, whereupon I managed another dozen levels before the server shut down and my Shadowknight got forcibly transferred to Antonia Bayle.

I foresee the same thing happening again. Neither am I very tempted by the announcement that EverQuest's fastest-ever Progression Server, Selo, will now feature a permanent 50% xp boost. So far I've managed to drag myself to Level Four on both my Bard and on the Druid I made because leveling the Bard was too slow. That was with the previous 50% xp boost...

It's been an interesting few weeks, all the same. I am, at least, beginning to get some glimmerings of what it is I might want, which is more than I had at the start of the year. And I can't help but feel there has to be a better option than anything currently on offer. A combination of the convenience and comfort we've come to expect along with the simplicity and straightforwardness we once had, perhaps. That would be nice.

If anyone finds something like that, don't keep it to yourself, will you?

It'll Be Like Before You Were Gone

On Friday, ArenaNet announced a "Welcome Back" month for Guild Wars 2. More than a month, in fact; five weeks, starting Monday March 25.

It was a very low-key announcement, nothing more than a forum post. Surprise was expressed. Shouldn't there be some kind of awareness campaign? Rubi Bayer, who appears to have drawn the short straw after Gail Gray's unceremonious dumping, clarified:

"There will be livestreams, guides, and some more surprises that I won't spoil now, but there will be a full outline and schedule on our site Monday morning. Today's post is just a heads-up on various channels to get the word out a little bit in advance, so those who are interested but don't remember their login info can work with our CS team to get that taken care of. It's so frustrating when you want to participate in something that has already started and can't remember your password, so we thought a head start for those people would be less stressful."

Does that make sense? Are people who can't remember the password for a game they no longer play likely to be on the forums in the first place? Or following Twitter or Facebook or whatever those "various channels" might be?

Maybe they sent out emails as well. I get a lot of emails from MMORPGs I haven't logged into for years, telling me about their promotions and events. Of course, since I tend to use unique adresses for registering games, adresses I never visit and don't link to my main account, I only see those offers on the very rare occasions I log back in to check something. Usually years too late.

Still, it's a well-established route for marketing departments. A back channel to the past. As Holly Windstalker Longdale openly acknowledged in that recent PC Gamer interview, for an aging MMORPG, luring former players back into the fold is a higher priority than attracting people who've never played before.

It really does make sense. After all, as a six-year old game, let alone one twice or even three times that age, you'd have to assume that just about anyone who was ever going to give you a run would have gotten around to it by now.

No need to feel blue. We're still here. Waiting.

The first few years post-launch offer a handful of well-known opportunities for new account acquisition. You can bring your game to a different platform - console conversions must be expensive to produce but they do open a door to an entirely fresh market. Less spectacular but worth a shot is a Steam launch. Steam isn't really a famous breeding ground for MMOs but it's not nothing.

If you were canny enough to start off with some kind of entry barrier, a box or digital download with an up-front fee, say, or maybe even an actual, honest-to-god subscription, always assuming that decision didn't sink your entire operation, there's a major PR opportunity available when you announce your game is going Free to Play. That's a one-time deal, though, and it can smack of desperation.

Last and very definitely not least, you can run some kind of permanent free trial, allowing the curious and uncommitted to try before they buy. That became pretty much industry standard log ago.

Whatever you do, even if you eventually try all the options, in the end you run up against the same buffer: your game is old and getting older. Potential customers have either heard of it and already rejected it or they are just now discovering it only to find out it's been running for years and everyone playing is way, way ahead.

Your elderly MMORPG already starts with the major disadvantage that, from the perspective of a new player, the graphics look sub-par. Possibly stone age. For those who can get past that, the staggering amount of legacy content, all of which comes before you even get near to the part of the game everyone else is playing, is more than enough to bring the shutters down.

Did I mention we have sitting in chairs now? Tempted?

In recent years companies have tried all kinds of bootstrapping to get new players over the hump  - super-fast leveling, instant max-level characters, flat-leveling the entire gameworld. They all come with issues of their own. You can accelerate or remove the leveling process but there's no way to instantly install all the necessary knowledge of systems and mechanics your end-game players take for granted. It's not much more fun floundering at the top than at the bottom.

That's why people who used to play but don't any more are seen as a more realistic commercial prospect. There's the currently-hot nostalgia ticket to sell them for starters. Re-working your game so it looks a lot more like the one returning players remember seems to be well worth the expense, if you get it right.

Your game probably needs to have been around for quite a while before you play that card. The current Live game needs to have diverged so far from the original conception that bitter veterans hate it and all it stands for. If you alienate them just enough you can bring them back on board as advocates when you appear to bow to their conviction that things really were better back in their day.

Rift probably failed mainly on that count. Once the new server reached the first expansion, Storm Legion, there just wasn't enough difference between Prime and Live. The game never had enough periodic content to run a true Progression server. It might have done better with a straight Classic server, maybe even one with an expiry date, which would wipe and re-start every so often, allowing transfers to Live first, of course.

Starting over clean can be a big draw. Sometimes a Fresh Start server is all that's needed to re-kindle interest. You don't even have to play the nostalgia card with a retro-revamp. A level playing field is enough. Maybe a few tweaks, perks and inducements along the way. A slight variant ruleset. Some titles. A leaderboard. The big risk there is fracking your existing playerbase into smaller shards but with luck you'll give everyone a jolt of excitement and when it all settles down you'll have a few new customers on the back of that buzz.

There's no need to worry. You won't feel silly. We all feel silly.

Brand-new servers have one immense advantage when it comes to persuading former players to return. Everyone starts in the same place. It's almost the same as a new game except for one thing: when confused and lost players plaintively ask questions in general chat, instead of crickets chirping or, worse, sarcastic trolls suggesting a swift return to WoW, they'll get help and even encouragement.

I'm seeing this every day on EverQuest II's Kaladim server. The population is a good mix of current, active players on vacation from Live, lapsed members of the flock re-discovering their religion and a sprinkling of    "I wish I''d tried this game years ago". Questions don't just get answered, they spark amiable discussions and often lead to reminiscence and general bonhomie.

It's a well-trodden path by now. Any marketing department worth its red suspenders should be able to slot in several pre-fabricated options, tested and found successful in other games. At worst it's a burst of publicity for cheap. At best it's a shot in the arm for sales and retention.

For a few MMORPGs, though, there's a roadblock standing in the way of those easy wins. Classic, Progression, New Start: all those options come with a suffix. Server. What if your game evolved to the new normal of a few years back and did away with the entire concept of separate shards?

When you threw that bathwater out the possibility of farming the nostalgia market went down the drain with it. So did any chance of starting over on a clean page. You put all your eggs in one megabasket and your chickens hatched and came home to roost.

There are things you can get on top of that you never got on top of before. This isn't one of them but trust me.

All MMORPG hobbyists know what a hurdle re-starting on a Live server presents. All the new systems you don't understand. All your old assumptions that don't follow any more. The drops and rewards that mean nothing to you. The jargon in chat you can't unpick. All that stuff in your bags and banks you don't know whether to destroy or broker or sell or salvage. The understanding that you know less than everyone around you and they probably don't care, just that you stay out of their way.

If you run a campaign to get former players to log in again but all you can offer them when they do is a world that looks familiar but feels alien, what are the chances they'll hang around long enough to acclimatize?

The good news from ANet's perspective is that GW2 hasn't really changed all that much. You can still fight centaurs and Sons of Svanir until the dolyaks come home. You can do the same events on the same maps that you did in 2012. You can join the World Boss train and knock over a giant loot pinata every fifteen minutes with thirty new best friends you'll never have to talk to.

The races haven't changed, the Personal Story is the same and if you haven't bought either of the expansions there aren't even any new classes and hardly any new maps. Other than a bunch of giant gerbils and lizards running everywhere with player characters clinging to their backs it all looks - and plays - pretty much the same.

If you like it enough to pay some money and buy the expansions or the Living Story packs, well you'll be on exactly the same terms as the rest of us were two or three or four years ago. All the maps are still active for the group stuff  when you need it, although most of it was single-player content anyway and, while Anet's claim that they have the best community in MMOs may be somewhat overblown, by and large it is pretty welcoming. If you have questions you'll get answers, provided you ask nicely.

When you get right down to it, though, nothing much has changed.

So what's the point of this five week long "Welcome Back" event? Better than not having one, I suppose. And it co-incides with the annual rerun of the ever-popular Super Adventure Box, something I'm sure is no co-incidence. There will be plenty of drop-ins for that so why not see if some of them can be persuaded to hang around?

I'd be very surprised to see this result in any significant, lasting uptick in activity, all the same. GW2 has just about the lowest barrier to re-entry of any MMORPG I've ever played. People drop in and out literally all the time. I see names every day that I haven't seen for years. My friends list flickers and sparkles like witchfire and always has.

I wonder how many how many genuine ex-GW2 players there can be, anyway? People who really did stop playing a long time ago and never came back. And of that demographic, how many ever would? It can't be that they wanted to but it was too expensive or too awkward, surely? It's free and simple and always has been. It's the Hotel California of MMOs.

If anyone did leave for good, most likely it was because they never enjoyed the game much anyway or didn't like what it turned into once the short trip to the cap was done. Has any of that changed? Not really. Endless fractals. Dead dungeons. Gutted WvW. Grind, without end, for everything, everywhere, always.

Same as it ever was.

Raiding, I guess, but if you'd left because no raids wouldn't you have come back when raids? And if you left because raids, well, we still have them. Worse luck. No, it all seems much the same to me. Except I'd take a Launch State Classic server in a heartbeat so I guess I may have been boiled in my tank.

Tomorrow we'll find out if ANet have anything more up their sleeves to entice former players to give the game another shot. There's some speculation about things like rentable gliders or mounts in Core Tyria open world to tempt returners into ponying up for the expansions but they'd still have to pay for the real thing. Maybe a sale on Heart of Thorns and Path of Fire? Or the two as a bundle?

If there's no financial or in-game incentive it's hard to see the value of a promotional push that comes down to just some streamers saying how much fun the old game can be. You probably know that if you ever played. Or you disagree, in which case I don't see much to convince you otherwise.

And even if a promotion succeeds in getting players invested it's hard to keep them feeling the love. The huge boost in numbers World vs World saw as a result of the recent, super-hyped introduction of the Warclaw mount (plus a double WvW XP week) has already dissipated, leaving nothing more behind than bad feeling and disgruntlement to show it ever happened.

Still, better to try than not try, I guess. We'll find out tomorrow if there's anything to get excited about. I'm not holding my breath.

Riding For A Fall : Project: Gorgon

Over the past few years, Project: Gorgon has developed a reputation as an idiosyncratic - some might say goofy - MMORPG. It's been a slow burn this far. The passion project, led by husband and wife team Eric Heimburg and Sandra Powers, took a couple of Kickstarter practice runs before it eventually funded.

Progress to an Early Access launch on Steam took longer than expected but it looks to have been time well-spent. The game sits very comfortably indeed on a near-unanimous "Very Positive" rating. The tiny Elder Game Studios team would seem to have weathered most of the storms on the way to an eventual, successful launch.

Until today. Even by the decidedly off-the-wall standards of P:G, the decision to open a new brand new cash shop with just three offers, the cheapest of which goes for $50 and the most expensive for ten times that, seems a little... strange.

It seems stranger still when you consider that almost nothing in any of the three packages is useable - or even visble - in-game. So, what do you get for your money? I'm glad you asked!

For $50 you can buy a horse, some saddlebags and nine months VIP access. To quote the advisory notes

"Some features, including Riding, are not yet implemented at this time. Your account will receive these benefits when the features become available. In addition, your VIP membership will not start until VIP benefits are available"

It's not absolutely clear whether you get the horse right away. It is clear you can't ride it. Also, you don't get to do whatever it is that a VIP can do that the rest of us can't. Not until later. How much later is anyone's guess.

$75 gets you all that, only with VIP benefits extended to a full year, plus a second horse, the Animal Husbandry skill required skill to breed from the two of them and a pair of breeding tigers of high genetic quality because every horse ranch needs on-site access to an unlimited supply of apex predators. 

Be patient, though:

"Some features, including Riding and Animal Husbandry, are not yet implemented at this time. Your account will receive these benefits when the features become available."

So far, so amusing. Those wacky Elder Games guys, eh? Then comes the capper.

If you dig deep and come up with $500 you get all of the above, five years of VIP membership, a custom title of your choosing ("must be game appropriate"), an in-game house, a staff that "helps you command the respect of those around you" and the ability to spontaneously create special snack cakes ("20 per week"). 

The rubric this time doesn't specifically explain that player housing is yet another feature from the "not yet implemented" file but since someone was asking Reddit as recently as January if there were any plans to add it I feel fairly safe in assuming that's the case. Maybe you at least get the Staff of Leadership and the free cakes right away, although I wouldn't count on it.

If all of this sounds completely crazy, well it is, but only from the perspective of any company with a professional marketing department. Mind you, plenty of big developers with one of those have made mis-steps almost as damaging (Hi SOE/DBG, Trion, ANet, Standing Stone...).



The description of each of the Packages opens with a line that explains what Elder Games think they're up to:

"These are pre-release reward packages for early adopters and are considered a donation for the continued development of Project: Gorgon"

Ah, now we get it! It's some kind of in-house Patreon deal. Please give us some money so we can carry on developing this game and in return we'll see you right if launch day comes. When! When launch day comes!

Possibly there are people playing Project: Gorgon right now who would welcome the opportunity to donate some cash to the good cause of keeping the game they're very positive about in development, not to say online. Unfortunately, as any competent PR professional would have been able to predict, that isn't how it's going to play to the wider world. Not that the wider world is going to notice, of course.

Then again, MMORPG gamers are a strange breed. Value for money clearly isn't always at the head of any list of concerns they might have. Sometimes it seems like a concept with which they're entirely unfamiliar.

We've travelled a long way from the days of the $10 horse. For a while we were wailing about whales before we got locked onto lockboxes but now it's all aboard the nostalgia train and full steam for the past.

That's a ticket and a half, isn't it? I was thinking about it this morning, while I was on EverQuest II's latest time-limited expansion server, Kaladim, grinding my way through level 12 in Frostfang Sea at a rate of about a quarter of a level per hour.

Just what is a Progression/Time Limited Expansion/Classic server, when you think about it? For every MMORPG that's gone down that route it means a return to the paid subscription model for a supposedly Free to Play game. Players who haven't considered the Live version worth a glance for years (decades in some cases) come hurtling back, cash in hand, ready to throw money at the developers all over again, and for what?

So they can not have 90% of the game everyone else is getting for nothing, that's what. So they can literally pay a fee to be denied in-game services that were painstakingly developed over many years to add value. So they can pay the full Membership/VIP/Subscription rate and not get any of the perks that are specifically advertised to persuade people it's worth paying in the first place!

On Live, players complain bitterly when companies decide not to roll last year's expansion in free with this year's. On Prog they complain if the expansions unlock too quickly. Some of them beg to be allowed to pay a monthly fee for a server where they never get any new content at all.

In the free game, developers fall over themselves to give stuff away. There are rewards just for logging in, for hanging around for an hour, for sticking it for a week or a month. Anything to stop people wandering off in search of greener grass elsewhere.

There's bonus xp, bonus coin, bonus faction, bonus status, bonus bonuses. Sometimes you can barely see the in-game vendors to redeem your rewards for all the pop-ups offering you more.

Meanwhile, on the far side of the velvet rope, paying customers fall over themselves to congratulate each other on their superior taste and judgment as they scratch a subsistence living selling rat whiskers and rusty weapons to each other in the fantasy equivalent of taking in each other's washing. The only voices of dissent to be heard belong to those who think the scorched earth policy hasn't gone far enough. They demand what they paid for, dammit! Less!

Viewed in that context, perhaps Project: Gorgon's new Cash Shop doesn't look quite so crazy after all.

All right, yes it does.

Drives A Little Slower: EQII

Isey, from I Has PC, chose to celebrate EverQuest's twentieth anniversary with the closest thing he could find to the original experience, Project 1999. It was, as he said in the title of his post, "Slow Progress...":

"I spent three hours this morning on my 7 Enchanter at Orc hill.... By the end I had barely dinged 9 (I was only one bubble away from 8 when I started)... three hours of gameplay for a full level and a bit."

He also lost his level on a bad pull when he was Level Eight and when it was all over, all he had to look forward to was

"...an incredibly non efficient trip ... to High Keep (from Gfay) – my level 8 pet spell is only sold there. I can’t remember how long of trip it is but if memory serves it’s something like 4 or 5 zones plus a boat trip." 

I can't quite match that but my progress, leveling a Dirge on Kaladim, EverQuest II's new Time Limited Expansion server, has been mightily slow, too. I logged out a few minutes ago, immediately after she dinged Eleven. My /played shows I've played her for just over a dozen hours so far.

Allowing for the extremely short time it took to do ten levels of tradeskills (the crafting tutorial gives insane xp compared to anything an adventurer could hope for) that's about an hour per level. My progress wasn't anything like as smoothly distributed as that. I did four levels in a couple of hours on the first day but the next time I played it took me the best part of three hours to do a single level.

A lot of that could well be down to the way I play. For some reason I seem to be incapable, in any MMO, of sticking with the content meant for my level. Dressed in the most basic imaginable gear (actually, nothing at all in about half the slots) my Dirge has been running face-first into the brick wall of quests and mobs meant for characters three or even five levels above her.

She must have died, at a conservative estimate, thirty times at least so far. I've certainly had to do full repairs from 20% three times, plus a few more before things got that dire. It's been extremely difficult to break the bad habits of Live and I have to admit the absence of any meaningful death penalty has contributed heavily to my lackadaisical, not to say suicidal, attitude.

Despite those frequent deaths I've been having plenty of fun. Progress has been slow by modern standards but very fast in MMORPG historical terms. And therein lies the rub. It seems there's something of a battle raging on the forums between those who feel XP is about right and those who feel cheated that it isn't as slow as it was at launch, something that was (kind of) promised in the FAQ.

Will experience values be tuned for Kaladim?
Experience values will be slower, similar to how it was at original launch. Tradeskill experience will be the same.

Leaving aside the bald claim about tradeskill XP, which seems to me to be quite simply crazy wrong, this opens up a whole barrel of issues, not least what was XP like at launch? Presumably Daybreak has some numerical data to rely on but all the rest of us have are decade-and-a-half old memories. Which is enough for many people to make statements of absolute certainty about how things were and how they ought to be.

General chat this morning was ringing with reminiscences of how wonderfully, magically, immersively awful slow it all was in 2004. All those people claimed to have been there. So was I but I have no genuine certainty over how long it took me to level back then. Mostly what I remember was how attritional it felt, which is not the same thing at all as as being "slow".

In my memory, everywhere and everything required groups, not just dungeons but almost all overland content as well. I remember how excruciatingly rare it was to find spell upgrades as drops, while crafted versions were prohibitively expensive because of the appallingly badly designed tradeskill sytem (the same system a few masochists even now hold up as the paradigm of how crafting should work).

None of that difficulty - literally none of it - has been brought back for this or any other TLE server, thank heaven. I'm sure it's someone's dream - forming a full group to go grind heroic difficulty crabs on a strip of Antonican sand for hour after hour in the hope of getting a single spell book to drop, a book which, inevitably, will be usable by no-one in the group. It's not mine.

Neither, I would hazard a guess, is it commercially viable, even in today's sophisticated nostalgia market. All these things some people remember so fondly were changed because a lot more people stopped playing rather than put up with them. It's possible there could be enough potential customers who a) genuinely preferred the way EQII played in its first six months and b) still have sufficient interest in reprising that pleasure to pay a monthly subscription for the privilege, but I doubt it.

Were the genuine status quo ante ever to be recreated in all its true horror, I suspect the unfortunate experimental server in question would bleed population even faster than the original game did all those years ago. As I said, there's slow and there's awful. If there were ever to be a P2004 server for EQII, I very much doubt it would attract and sustain the kind of population P1999 enjoys. EQII at launch was no Classic EverQuest, that's for sure.

Even so, by and large, I'm in favor of slow, if "slow" means "time to enjoy the scenery". The restrictions that apply on Kaladim are having that effect on me so far. There's no Fast Travel, no Broker Anywhere, no flying mounts, no access to housing other than by going to your front door. Getting anywhere from anywhere takes time and it really does make the world feel much bigger.

I'm enjoying it now but I'm not sure how long that will,last. It's very interesting to be able to compare the situation on Kaladim with what I'm enjoying on Live at the same time. I did over twenty levels on my Shadowknight yesterday, from around Level 60 to the mid-80s. I had 100% vitality (for a while), 140% veteran bonus, 100% server bonus and 100% XP Potion, all at once. It was exhilarating and satisfying and I had a great time.

That "great time" consisted of me burning through as much content in an afternoon as took me about six months the first time round. Of course I didn't really see all that content this time, any more than you "see" Europe as you pass over it in a plane. I just saw a few selected highlights as I flew across zones and Fast Travelled from era to era, cherry-picking a few favorite quests and completing in minutes what would once have taken me hours or possibly weeks.

Even though I'm using the same launcher to get to them both, EQII on Kaladim and EQII on Live might just as well be different MMORPGs altogether. They may both nominally share the same content but that's like saying five sets of tennis and a game of fetch with your dog both use the same ball.

As the release date for WoW Classic draws ever nearer I'm increasingly curious to see how Blizzard's reluctant entry into the nostalgia market plays out. From everything I've seen so far in MMORPGs from EverQuest to Rift, one person's faithful recreation is another's slap in the face. The difference this time is that World of Warcraft is big enough for a slap you can hear around the world.

New Kind Of Neighborhood

When Daybreak announced that one of the tent-poles for EverQuest's 20th Anniversary celebrations would be yet another round of Timelocked/Progression servers I was underwhelmed. I understand that they're popular and they make money but I felt I'd been round that particular track a time or two too often already to get excited about doing it again.

Silly me. Since I made characters on Kaladim in EQII and Selo in EQ last night, apart from sleep and eat I've done nothing else. I'm rushing to get this post done so I can get back and play some more and since I don't have to go to work until next Saturday there's a good chance I won't be doing much besides playing EQ/EQII and writing about it for the rest of the week.

Just what is it about starting over on a new server that has this effect? Is it really that MMORPGs - both as games and as worlds - work much better when played in something approximating their original context, where leveling takes time and there are people everywhere you go?

Or is it just nostalgia? The deep thrill of cheating time. We can't grow younger but we can pretend we did.

I spent the morning on Selo, leveling my Bard in Shar Vhal, the Kerran city on the dark side of Luclin, where it's always twilight and Norrath hangs low in the sky like a threat. It was really something to begin there instead of outside the gates of Qeynos or Freeport. I haven't started in Shar Vahl for a decade or more but it all came flooding back.

It took me an hour just to finish the introductory citizenship quest. I remember doing that when Luclin was new. It took me all of a Sunday afternoon, back then. They may have reverted a lot of stuff but I'm convinced it's still easier than it was.

When I'd made enough money killing grimling skeletons in The Pit I went to buy my new songs. Then I broke for lunch. Half an hour later I took a trip forward in time - five years or five hundred, depending how you look at it - to Kaladim and EQII, where I've been dying a lot leveling my Dirge in Sunken City and The Sprawl.

I was having such a hard time I ended up buying a full set of no-stat chain armor from a vendor. I can't remember the last time I had to do that. It was awesome! And it made hardly any difference at all! I still had trouble just trying to get from one questgiver to the next without being eaten by wild dogs.

It was all a much more immersive, involving, satisfying, fun experience than I was expecting. Despite - or possibly because of  - all the being killed, getting lost and generally getting piled on, everything was comfortably exceeding expectations. And then I remembered that DBG had restored the original starting villages for this fresh start.

The villages, when they were around, were something of a mixed blessing. Original EQII began with a lengthy lead-in before you arrived at what you might call the "real game". I don't mean the end game. I mean long before that.

There was the bit on the boat at the start, then the Isle of Refuge, then you had to go to either Qeynos or Freeport and find your racial starting area, where you'd get an inn room and your class quests. I think that's how it went.

The class quests themselves went all the way to Level 20, which took me a couple of weeks first time out. Maybe longer. Most of it happened down in the sewers as I recall. You got into those by way of a drain in your village.

Well, the quests are still missing but the villages are back and so is the drain! I had no idea how much I'd missed them.

Of course, the physical locations never went away. They just got repurposed and repopulated years ago. On Live there are questlines for every race that send you to your racial village every ten levels. Most of those questlines are top notch. I've done quite a few. I probably should do the rest some day.

The problem is, when they did the revamp, Sony Online Entertainment shut off access to the zones for anyone not doing the quests. Since the quests were unique to specific races that meant most characters would never be able to go in most of the villages again and even the right races could only go in when they had the quests active.

What's more, the new storylines put all the villages into a state of conflict. And they scaled with your level, assuming you did the quests as they became available. Even if you could get in, all you'd find was a combat zone. Which was never what any of the villages were about.

And what was that? I'd actually forgotten. They were, like much of the original game, there to tell the tales of ordinary Norrathians, living ordinary lives in an extraordinary world. There were little stories everywhere, vignettes of how it might be, to live cheek by jowl with talking animals, monsters and giants.

The quests are no more but the vignettes and the characters live on. I spent the best part of an hour wandering from village to village, talking to gnomes and ogres and trolls, taking screenshots of cats and pigs and crazy people, like Spezzi the "Street Hag" (we all know what she is...) and Chef Schmenko, psychotic ratonga with a meat cleaver.

These characters may still be running their scripts over on Live, behind the closed doors of the quest instances. Good luck finding out. Here, on Kaladim, you can stroll about in peace, just like we did in the good old days, soaking in the ambience.

What's more, you can bank and shop and craft. All the vendors and utilities have been restored, including the subterranean tradeskill instances. Best of all, you can rent an inn room and settle. Forget your billett at the Jade Tiger's Den in North Freeport (although you have to take a room there too, if you want to complete the starter housing quest). Come back to the village that raised you. Buy yourself a candelabra.

As I was going round I got so excited I felt I had to tell someone. General chat seemed a bit too focused on arguments about leveling speed for the kind of gosh-wow fluffiness I had in mind so I gosh-wowed in the Test channel instead, where fluffiness is a way of life.

Someone promptly sent me a tell asking me if I wouldn't mind going round all the villages in Freeport to run a zone query to get the official map names so he could submit them to EQ2Maps. I was very happy to oblige.

He'd been asking since yesterday and found no takers and I only saw two other players in the villages as I was exploring. My excitement seems original if not unique. Maybe there will be more interest in the restoration project when it finally hits Live. TLE servers do tend to attract the more hardcore end of the playerbase.

Or maybe no-one will care. I didn't think I would. Not until I went there. Now I care enough that I'm going to make another character over in Qeynos so I can see those villages too. Well, I might. I'd have to buy yet another character slot for that. Maybe I'll wait 'til the project comes to the Skyfire server where I already have some Qeynosians.

The one thing that puzzles me is why this is all happening in EQII now, when we're supposed to be celebrating EverQuest's 20th. EQII has its own fifteenth anniversary coming in November. I just hope they've left a little in the tank for that.

Happy 20th BIrthday, EverQuest!

I was going to save this for tomorrow but since I can't log in right now I might as well do the next best thing and blog about it...

Even this morning I hadn't decided whether or not to roll a character on any of the four new Time-Locked/Progression servers Daybreak span up a couple of hours ago: two for EverQuest, two for EverQuest II. In the end, though, I couldn't resist.

I started with EQII's PvE server Kaladim. As usual, All Access Membership (or "a subscription" as we used to call it) is required to play on Progression servers. I had the sub covered there was still a problem: all my character slots were full on that account.

I've been playing EQII a lot more of late. Six of those characters are max level and the other four are too established to delete, not that I ever delete characters anyway. There is a Level 3 wizard on that account, who you'd think would be expendable, but she was a founder member of the guild we formed on Freeport the day EQII went free to play so she's got grandfather rights. Grandmother rights. Whatever. Point is, she's not going anywhere.

Oh, oh, the hokey-cokey!

So I dug into my Daybreak Cash reserves and bought another character slot. Then I made a Dirge. A ratonga, naturally. I've never played a Dirge before. I don't generally get on with Scout classes in any MMORPGs but I've had a Dirge mercenary running alongside my Inquisitor for a while and it looked not that bad. Plus Mrs Bhagpuss used to play one and I remember it being badass.

When it came time to choose a name I did something I almost never do: I went for something that loads of other people were bound to have chosen before me. Only no-one had. I got it. I couldn't believe my luck. Now, even if, as I expect, I never end up playing this character beyond the first few levels, I have that name in the bag.

What's more, if I make it to level 20 (I think you still have to do that first) I can use /lastname to name my Dirge... Lana DelRey! I probably won't do that... maybe Lana Lang...

Room for a little one?

Everything went very smoothly. No login queues, no lag, no crashes. I whipped through the opening sequence on The Far Journey, before stepping into instance #19 of the Isle of Refuge (Outpost of the Overlord), where I hung about just long enough to turn straight round and get back on the boat to Freeport.

I spent a few minutes questing in Sunken City, died three times, made Level Four and logged out. I was itching to get started on Selo, EQ's new superfast unlock server.

Back in the elder game things went somewhat differently. When I made it to character creation, which took a while, I found myself faced with a blank slate. Eight free character slots and no buttons to press. I went to the forums where I found plenty of people talking about that.

By the time I'd read the thread and posted an ironic comment, my character slots had made themselves available. I looked through the various options. I wanted to start on Luclin as a Vah`Shir but the class choices - Shaman, Warrior, Rogue, Beastlord, Bard - weren't doing much for me.

My first time in Luclin, back in 2002, I rolled a Vah`Shir Beastlord. I didn't play her that much right away but a few years later she ended up being my main and for a long time she was the highest level character I had. But Beastlords are a slog at low levels. Didn't fancy it. Rogue and Warrior were right out. Shaman is solid but again it takes a while to get going.

Dark and lonely

Then I thought, why not? I've just made a Dirge on EQ2. Why not make a bard in EverQuest? I know they get tough to play eventually but it's not like I'm planning on playing her all the way to the cap, after all. She'll be lucky to get into double figures.

Riding my luck, I tried for "Lana" again. The server took something like ten minutes to respond. Someone already got it. Surprise. And then I had a bit of a moment.

While I was running around Sunken City I noticed in chat that someone had nabbed "Buffy". I'm currently deep in a complete watch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, start to finish, on Amazon Prime. I got to Season Five last night. Why not? I won't get it anyway. Someone will already have it. Bound to.

Nope. When the server finally acknowledged my request it went right through. I now have a Bard called Buffy. When she hits 20 I could give her the last name Summers. I wouldn't, obviously. Probably. 

It wouldn't technically be breaking the Naming Policy if I did. I checked. They've changed it since I last looked. In both games. I'm certain it used to forbid well-known names from either popular culture or real life but now there's just this:

5. Do not pick a name that violates anyone's trademarks, publicity rights or other proprietary rights. In the event that the holder of any trademarked or copyrighted material contacts Daybreak Game Company LLC and requests reference(s) to their intellectual property be removed, any names containing trademarked or copyrighted material will be changed.

I can live with that. I mean, who's going to dob me in? Spike?

So, having established myself as having a mental age of about fifteen I was set to go. Only, so were a lot of other people, it seemed. Unlike EQ2, which either has much better hardware or a lot fewer players (and I know where my money's going on that one), EQ's login server was melting under the pressure.

Take a look at what you could have won.

The first couple of times I tried I couldn't get a response at all. Then Mrs Bhagpuss arrived home from work with a takeaway so I took a half-hour break. When I tried again I got the 46 minute warning above. It's been longer than that now and I'm still not in.

All of which suggests a nice problem for Daybreak to have. And for all the complaints and chuntering about how come they never learn, you know every MMO company really wants to see news items about how their servers couldn't cope with the demand.

There's a 20th Anniversary Producer's Letter up with some solid news about the promised fan gathering, or one of them at least, and a very nice new Infographic that I'm going to be referring back to instead of the Wiki when I want to know the date an expansion launched. This party's just getting started!

I'm going to give up on Selo for tonight. Tomorrow will be easier. I have the whole week off work (by sheer good luck - I didn't book it to co-incide with EQ's twentieth. I haven't lost all reason) so I can afford to dawdle. There's also a whole new, major update to EQII Live to dig into but that deserves a post of its own.

It's all jolly exciting! Happy Birthday EverQuest. Let's hope for many more to come!

A New Career In A New Town

Every so often I get the urge to start a character and level up for the sheer fun of it. It could be in a game I've played for years or it could be somewhere completely new. When the mood strikes I'm not that fussy.

Well, perhaps I am. In the back of my mind I always have a template and it's drawn directly from the DIKU-MUD playbook. I want to goof around at low level in a western fantasy, quasi-medieaval setting. I want to fill XP bars by killing monsters and kit out my new characters in gear those monsters drop or that NPCs give me for killing them.

That's the minimum entry requirement. For bonus credit I also want to be able to play someone three feet tall or less, preferably with fur and/or a tail.

I have a mental list of games that work: EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft, Allods Online, Rift... The problem with those, though, is I already have established characters in all of them. After a whle I start to feel that perhaps I should "work" on those instead, make some "meaningful progress", push into the higher echelons of the game, see new zones, spend my time "profitably"...  stop goofing around, basically, forgetting that goofing around was the reason I rolled a new character in the first place.

That's one reason "New Start" servers work so well. I can start over on a brand new server and feel like my efforts are meaningful, even though I'm doing something I've done many times before in the exact same place I did it every other time.

Anarchy Online has a New Start server called Rubi-Ka up and running right now. I have some small nostalgia for AO. I was in the closed beta, for which I received an installation CD in the mail. At the turn of the Millennium, no-one could be expected to download an entire MMORPG through a 56K modem. If you even had a 56K...

I never played in that beta, though: I couldn't get it to run. Didn't stop me buying the game when it launched but I couldn't play it then either. It was one of the first, worst MMO launches. It set standards of unplayability seldom matched since, although hardly for want of trying.

Eventually, Funcom got that sorted. It took them a couple of months as I recall, during which time subscription charges were waived. When they started the subscription clock running I played on until the end of the thirty days that came with the box and then stopped. I liked the game but not enough to pay $14.99 a month on top of my EverQuest sub.

AO was one of the first Western MMORPGs to go free to play, as far back as 2004. I've been back a couple of times since but never for long. There's a whole new introduction, tutorial and starting area for F2P and although it's undoubtedly more user-friendly it has zero nostalgia factor for me.

I would quite like to see the original starting grounds again, though, and now I can. In theory. Rubi-Ka features the "classic Arrival Hall and backyards". It also requires a subscription. I don't want to see them that much.

Reading through the FAQ, Funcom's take on the concept of Progression or New Start servers is unusual to say the least. Requiring a subscription is standard practice for milking the nostalgia market but setting the server to last just 12 months and then deleting all the characters on it definitely isn't:

How long will the server be open?

The current plan is to run the server for 12 months- however, if near the end we see the community wants to keep it going, that is an option we are not taking off the table.

If the server closes, what happens to my character?

If the server does end, characters do not carry over from RK2019 to the original server

Other than bringing back the old starting areas, Funcom isn't even paying lip-service to re-creating the original Anarchy Online experience:

What about balance, mechanics, and systems?  Are those being reverted?

We are not reverting any code, systems, or balance changes with the new server.  Existing mechanics and systems such as damage caps, falling damage, XP loss, Improvement Point (IP) menu, profession balance, PvP, etc. will not be reverted from how they currently are.  

The actual "progression" aspect is unusual, too. Firstly, the server begins with a level cap of 10. As I recall, even around launch that wouldn't have taken very long.

What about the level caps and expansions? How will those be handled?

The server starts with no expansions and a low level cap (10)... expansions will be added to the server over time.

If that sounds vague it's because it is. Intentionally so. Funcom appear to be running the whole thing as some kind of democratic social experiment. All the things that other developers wrangle out with the players before launch are going to be decided according to feedback as people actually play:

You’re steering this ship - We’ll be on deck to listen to your feedback and thoughts on when level caps should be raised as well as when expansions would be added to the game.

If it wasn't for the subscription I'd give it a go but I know I wouldn't even last a month so I'm going to save my fifteen dollars. It's not like Anarchy Online is the only New Start in town.

As previously discussed, EverQuest and EQII are each launching not one but two new start servers later this month. I'm still in two minds about those but I'll probably at least roll a character on Kaladim and possibly one on Selo.

Later in the year we have WoW Classic to look forward to, of course. It's odds on I'll resub for that although I imagine that sub won't be renewed. A month is probably two weeks longer than I'll need before my curiosity is satisfied.

There is at least one other upcoming option for some kind of a "fresh start" that hasn't been getting anything like the attention. It's not a new server and it's definitely no kind of time-limited progression: it's the long-postponed transition of Dark Age of Camelot to a Free to Play model.

DAOC must be just about the last subscription-based holdout from the first wave of MMORPGs. It's astonishing it's taken this long to get there but supposedly "early 2019" is the target for the launch of what Broadsword is calling Endless Conquest:

What is Endless Conquest?

Dark Age of Camelot: Endless Conquest is a way for players to experience the core features of Dark Age of Camelot without a paid subscription.

Who is eligible for Endless Conquest?

New accounts are eligible and previously-subscribed accounts that have been closed for at least 120 days can downgrade to Endless Conquest status.

What do I get with Endless Conquest?

Endless Conquest accounts receive complementary access to all Dark Age of Camelot expansions through Labyrinth of the Minotaur. Endless Conquest accounts have access to Dark Age of Camelot’s core features and can enjoy exploring Albion, Midgard, and Hibernia, leveling their character to 50, and fully participating in realm vs realm combat, and much more!

That does sound quite appealing, especially the part about being able to play your old characters. I probably still have my original login and password details lying around somewhere. Or I might just start over from scratch. I always rather liked DAOC's low-level PvE game - it's about the closest anywhere to EverQuest's and unlike EQ's I haven't played through it for about a decade and a half.

At the very least I'd like to take some screenshots. I don't seem to be able to find anything I took in any MMORPG from before about 2004, meaning nothing at all from DAOC.

I wonder who's going to be next on the New Start/Progression bandwagon? Are there even any likely candidates left?

Bring Back The Good Old Days : EQ2

This just popped up in my news feed. I thought I'd share.

There's nothing particularly surprising about Daybreak launching a new Time-Locked Expansion server, of course. We used to call them progression servers back in the day, didn't we? Even nostalgia sometimes hangs around long enough to develop rose-tinted memories all of its own. There's something particularly unusual about this one, though.

When it comes to nostalgia, DBG are past masters. Remember when they brought back The Isle of Refuge? They do and they've done it again:

Return of the Hoods

We will be reopening the hoods and villages for Kaladim, like Big Bend, Longshadow Alley, the Baubleshire and Nettleville. Quest content in these villages will remain changed, but the hoods themselves will be there to access and reminisce.

That alone would probably be enough to get quite a lot of people to make a character or two on the new server, Kaladim. Only you don't necessarily have to:

In time, these hoods will also be available for all other servers.

Just as you can now start on The Isle of Refuge on any Live server, in time you'll be able to stroll around  Greystone Yard or Temple Street with your regular characters, whenever you get the fancy, not just when you happen to have the right quest access to unlock the gate.

I don't remember anyone calling them "Hoods". I thought they were generally know as Burbs. Still, what's in a nickname? Just so we can take the trip down old memory lane.

The server also has a number of other sweeteners on offer, including Heritage Quests and Collections that provide account-wide rewards and what sounds like better thought-out itemization and a more immersion-friendly ruleset than some other TLE servers have had. It's the chance to revisit the haunts of our extreme youth that will grab most of the attention, though.

Alongside this new PvE offer there's also the rebirth of Nagafen, EQ2's infamous PvP server, to tempt those of a confrontational disposition. Apparently it passed the audition in the recent beta.

As the news release says, there's a lot to take in. I'm not planning on playing on Nagafen and I don't propose to precis the ruleset here either. Go read it for yourself if you think you might be interested. I can guarantee that whatever the rules happen to be, almost no-one playing there will like any of them. They never do.

Both servers go Live on Saturday March 19th. Saturday is an interesting choice. Very player-friendly. Not so much for the poor DBG staffer who draws the short straw and has to come in all weekend to try and keep the servers up.

It's all part of the celebrations for EverQuest's 20th birthday. Probably. It doesn't actually say so but the timing is right. I might start a character on Kaladim if only to wander round a few of my old haunts. An All Access account is required but I have one of those. Not sure I have a free character slot on it though.

You might worry it was stretching things a bit thin. I mean, how many servers can EQ2 sustain? Always room for one more, eh? At least for a while.

Anyway, it sounds like fun. Can't knock fun!