Shadow Of Renewal

EG7 or Daybreak if you prefer, since they seem to be pretty much interchangeable at this point, seems to be doing rather well right now. Yesterday, MassivelyOP reported an 11% bump in "monthly active players" over the same period as last year for Lord of the Rings Online, an increase the company rather self-effacingly ascribes to the impact of Amazon’s Rings of Power TV series.

As I think I may have mentioned in a previous post, I watched the first episode of the Amazon show, which I described, unenthusiastically, as "alright". I went on to say that a week had passed since then and I hadn't gotten around to watching episode two. I still haven't.

I haven't even bothered to find out whether the show has been either a commercial or a critical success but I did chat about it, briefly, while I was having a birthday lunch with a friend earlier this week. She'd asked me to get her an expensive boxed set of the books and it turned out part of her reason for doing that now rather than any other time in the last quarter century or so was not unconnected with the show. 

Grey and yellow wouldn't be my choice
for a promo.

As she put it, a lot of fans seem to be reinforcing their interest in the source material as a tangential result of what have been seen as controversial choices made by the makers of the new series. As with the desire to return to the Classic era in World of Warcraft, it's not so much open hostility to the new stuff (Although it can be that.) as a re-ignited affection for the way things used to be.

Put like that, I guess LotRO, fifteen years old and famously stolid in its reverance for the source material, qualifies as a safe haven for anyone looking to rekindle old fires. It would be interesting to know how many of the 11% are brand new to the game and how many are prodigals returning to the fold.

I suspect Standing Stone (And by implication Daybreak Games and by further implication EG7.) are about to add a percentage point or two to that enviable uptick. This morning I received two emails from the EG7 stable, one of which I'll get to later, the other asking me if I'd be interested in the new expansion, Before the Shadow.

I've never bought an expansion for LotRO. Indeed, other than the base game and a few months' subscription, I've never bought anything from Turbine or SSG at all. I hadn't been thinking of starting now, either, until I read Wilhelm's recent post. 

As Wilhelm says, $20, is a pretty reasonable price, even for a mini-expansion. It sounds even better in sterling, where it comes in at just £15.29. Even so, I wouldn't be considering it if it wasn't for one thing; the new levelling experience. 

I do like the low-level game in LotRO. It's solid, entertaining and old-school in the best way. It might be fun to start a new character and play them up through whatever the new zone or zones are - some sort of hobbitty-shire experience I think it is. Not only would it be interesting in its own right, it would also make for a convenient fresh start in a game where my other characters are mired in previous poor decisions and lumbered with bags full of items, the use of which I no longer understand nor care to learn.

I'd have to say this looks a lot more appealing.

As always, the real question is "If I buy it, will I play it?" I'm leaning heavily towards "Yes, I will", on
the fairly solid grounds that LotRO is free-to-play, I always have it installed and I've been back for brief visits many times over the years. Also, playing through something that other people are also playing and talking about is always a bonus for the blog.

Mitigating against the idea is the other email I received, this one directly from Daybreak, wearing their Darkpaw hat. I was somewhat surprised to receive notice this morning that the new EverQuest II expansion, Renewal of Ro, now has a firm launch date and it's less than two weeks away.

As the website has it, "The next expansion for EverQuest II, Renewal of Ro, is set to launch on November 30, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. PST". That is pretty much when you'd expect but I was on the beta forums only a couple of days ago and I had the impression things were lagging a little this year. Then again, when aren't they? I'm sure it'll be fine.

I've already bought this one, of course. The only question is when I start playing. The 30th is a Wednesday, which should give me a couple of days to get started before my working weekend. Then again, based on prior experience, I'll probably be doing myself a favor if I wait a week until everything's working properly.

It's nice to have something to look forward to, anyway. I might not be able to join in with the frenzy when Dragonflight lands (Any date for that, yet? Oh, yeah...) but I should at least have something to talk about.

Back To The Shire?

Do I really want to play Lord of the Rings Online? It's a question I've asked myself many times without ever coming up with a definitive answer. Now I find myself asking it yet again.

Next month the game celebrates its fifteenth anniversary. There will be celebrations. Fireworks are involved. Lots of fireworks. Significant though the anniversary is - it ends with a five after all - it's little more than a footnote to the big announcement in the latest Producer's Letter, a sweeping revamp to the notorious payment model.

Ever since LotRO went free to play that model has been the subject of some fairly sustained, often intense criticism. Standing Stone Games have tweaked and fiddled with it numerous times but finally they seem to have decided to just do what every other mmorpg does - stop charging directly for old content.

With the next update, due sometime in April, "all quests, areas, instances, and expansions released between the original launch of LOTRO back in 2007 and up to – and including! - the release of Helm’s Deep will be available for free to everyone." That's SSG's boldface, not mine. They think it's a big deal and they're right.

It was always a peculiar way to do F2P, charging almost by the quest for leveling content over a decade old. Most mmorpgs do what they can to rush new and returning players through the legacy levels so as to get them into the current endgame bubble as quickly and painlessly as possible. They offer accelerated leveling and sell level boosts - or even hand them out for free. LotRO made you pay for the pain.

Even with the upcoming changes, it's not as though there's an express elevator to the endgame. The level cap in LotRO is currently 140 (I know! I couldn't believe it either.) but the newly-free zones and quests only take a free player to 95. It's still a hell of an improvement over the current free deal, all the same. Right now a purely free player gets Bree-land, Ered Luin, Lone-lands and the Shire, which might get you into the mid-30s if the level ranges on the Wiki are correct.

Of course, during the pandemic SSG did very generously give a lot of the remaining quest packs away for free but you had to make the effort of logging in to claim them and the offer did eventually go away. I got mine but I never did anything with them.

My problem with LotRO has never been the payment model, anyway. It's always been a combination of lackluster interest and some poor experiences. I have very mixed feelings about The Lord of the Rings  itself, for a start.

Despite having read it two and two half times (Finished it twice, got half way through and gave up twice more.) I'm still not sure if I even like it let alone whether it's any good or not. As for the movies, I saw all of them on release at the cinema, including the Ralph Bakshi animated version but although I own the Peter Jackson trilogy on DVD, I've never watched it. Once was enough.

Like Jimi Hendrix, whose influence sent ripples through the culture that set my teeth on edge for decades, it's really not the quality or worth of the original that matters. It's the endless, bludgeoning, boorish copyists, hammering away talentlessly at their half-assed attempts to recreate something they never understood in the first place.

LotRO, to give it credit, is no half-baked imitation. If you were going to set about building a replica of Middle Earth you could do a lot worse and I'm sure many have. It's not so much a question of whether it's been done well as whether it was a good idea to do it all.

Bad time to buy.

I guess it was. It's a solid-enough mmorpg set in a well-realised world. Even without the Tolkein trappings it would be worth a try. I think, though, that only a strong affection for the source material would keep someone playing for long.

Without that added attraction the game does tend to turn into a trudge. Leveling is slow by modern standards and travel even slower. The graphics somehow manage to show off the landscapes to their best effect, while leaving the characters behind. As for the UI and the systems it supports, the less said the better.

And then there are the quests. The new payment model opens up every quest in the sub-95 level range, something I'm sure most current and potential players will welcome. Unfortunately, I'm on record as claiming I had a better time with the game when I played as a free player and most NPCs wouldn't speak to me.

It's true, too. In my original run through LotRO I payed my subscription and quested my way into the forties, when the cap was just fifty. It was fun at first but after a while it turned into a slog and I say that as someone who loves levelling in mmorpgs. 

The thing is, I don't especially like leveling by doing quests. I like quests if they're amusing or entertaining or exciting and I like getting rewards for doing them. What I don't much like is having to do dozens, scores, hundreds of quests purely to get the xp needed to level.

For that I'd rather do tasks or just kill stuff. It may seem like a mere semantic distinction but the thing about tasks is you only have to read a single, brief instruction before you get on with doing them. There's no fatuous backstory. Tasks don't need several hundred words of dull, uninspired dialog and a half-marathon of jogging between different NPCs before you collect your fee.

The prospect of being able to run errands for countless guards, rangers, wardens and farmers for the dubious benefit of learning their tedious life stories as imagined by a bored cubicle worker on slow Tuesday doesn't set my senses tingling. I wouldn't patch the game up for that. Nevertheless, I am patching, as I write this and god knows, it's taking long enough. Coming up on two hours now. Whatever else is new at Standing Stone it doesn't seem to include the infamously awful patcher.

What's inspiring me to give LotRO yet another try is the rest of the stuff SSG has chosen to add to the free pile, namely most of the previously paywalled classes and races and especially the zones formerly locked behind expansions you had to buy. Whether or not I have it in me to do the leveling to see any of them is another matter but at least I could roll up some new characters. I was only thinking the other day I'd like to get back to my old habit of rolling new characters in old games. This seems as good an opportunity as any.

The cherry on the hobbitty cake and the real reason I'm taking the trouble to bring the client up to date, however, is the news that the Shire is getting an extension. Like a lot of people, I always enjoy a run around the Shire in LotRO. I'm not quite sure why. I don't even like Hobbits. It just seems so... restful, somehow.

The April update adds an area called Yondershire to the game. It's unclear whether it's a complete new zone or just a new area attached to an existing one but either way it sounds worth visiting. Described as "a sparsely populated region of moor, thicket, and fen that has long been home to Hobbit recluses and troublemakers", we're promised "more delightful Hobbit adventures". Why not? 

There's no firm date for Update #33 but with luck my client should have just about finished patching when it arrives. I might even have enough time to get in there and do some prep work so the sight of all those tiny icons and overstuffed bags doesn't drive me to log straight out again when the time comes. Or maybe I'll just start over on a new server.

We'll see. I'm not really expecting much. Mostly when I go back to LotRO I last a handful of sessions at best. Whether the relaxing of the reins is going to make much difference I rather doubt. But you have to try, don't you?

Apparently I do, anyway.

Otha Fish or You Can't Get (All Your) Blood From A (Standing) Stone

When the news about EG7's acquisition of Daybreak Games broke last week I wasn't in a position to say much about it . Now that I have the time, the moment has passed. But maybe I can find a different angle.

There's been a wealth of discussion and debate, first about the sale itself and then over the astonishing flood of detailed information concerning the population, popularity and profitability of the games themselves. Wilhelm covered most of what I would have written about and linked to everyone talking about the revelations and the implications. By and large, I feel sanguine about the change of ownership but I wouldn't say there were no warning flags at all.

In contrast to many commentators, I've been happy with Daybreak's stewardship of the portfolio they assumed from Sony Online Entertainment almost six years ago. It's only through the thick glass of a robust pair of rose-tinted spectacles that anyone could regard the later years of SOE's tenure as some kind of pre-lapsarian Golden Age. Daybreak may have had its issues, not least over who the hell was driving the bus, but so did every incarnation of ownership before them, from Verant Interactive and 989 Studios onward.

Rather than objections grounded in anything in particular, much of the criticism of DBG felt more like the generic, endemic contempt of mmorpg players for the companies that run the games they play, a tedious pose that acts as an enervating drag anchor on every discussion of custodianship across the genre. By contrast, during what I tend to characterize as SOE's decline into late-period decadence, there were much more substantive concerns as hubris, arrogance and barely-concealed personal agendas drove the ship onto a seemingly endless series of sandbanks.

From the selfish cynicism of the PSS1 debacle (yeah, I'm never gonna let it go - it's like my personal NGE) to the inglorious self-aggrandizement of the EQNext pipe dream, it seemed there was no limit to SOE's capacity to disappoint. And yet, through the worst of it, SOE remained my favorite MMO studio, albeit mostly by default. 

Even so, the six years under Daybreak has felt like calm sailing in comparison, with most of the drama confined to confused and confusing claims and denials concerning ownership along with a peculiar predilection for moving and renaming the furniture. That's been more of an entertaining sideshow than an existential threat, although the month or so when it looked as though the Russian connection might see the games banned in the U.S.A. had its moments.

As for the games themselves, after a shaky bedding-in period, they settled into a comfortable rut. For a genre that relies almost entirely on predictable, repetitive content, that was close to ideal. And for all the negative news stories about cutbacks, for all the developers "let go" and for all the evident strains imposed by reduced circumstances and resources, the whole ramshackle edifice still felt far more stable than it had in the last years of SOE, when all the stories revolved either around sunsets and closures or grandiose projects that hinted of mania.

If life under Daybreak has been dull but good, then looking into the intentions and ambitions of EG7 suggests it could get better yet and more exciting, too. There seems very little doubt that the new German owners have purchased a portfolio of games with the firm intent not only of continuing to run them but of building on the platform they provide, as this paragraph from the press release amply demonstrates:

"The acquisition of Daybreak will further strengthen and add diversification to EG7’s IP portfolio through acquisition of best-in-class original and third-party IPs (EverQuest, The Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons, DC Universe Online). Daybreak will also add a strong team of both operationally and strategically capable individuals. The Transaction will increase size and profitability of the Company through stable cash flows from free-to-play model with loyal communities for existing IPs. Furthermore, the Daybreak platform offers future upside through upcoming content releases for e.g. DC Universe Online and The Lord of the Rings Online, potential synergies across the group, and strengthened team to identify and execute further M&A".

Whereas theories about the motivations behind the Columbus Nova buyout (CN being the original purchaser of SOE, later morphing into DBG, in case anyone forgets) ranged from the illegal to the exploitative, EG7 clearly seems just to want to become a global player in the online gaming marketplace. As the plethora of financial and demographic information released to consolidate the fiduciary wisdom of the acquisition suggests, the whole point of buying the games is to make money from operating them.

And there's the red flag. It's a small one and it's waving somewhere towards the back but it's definitely there. I spotted it even before I read Yeebo's excellent post on the monetization of the two Standing Stone games, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online, both of which we now belatedly understand to have been owned by Daybreak all along.

As Yeebo explains, "DDO has the highest monthly average revenue per-paying-player of any game in the Daybreak portfolio.  In other words, the income of DDO is disproportionately dependent on whales". This stood out for me, too, when I read the recently-released details we'd previously guessed at but couldn't know for certain. 

What really surprised me, though, was the information relating to EverQuest II. Anyone not in denial must long ago have realized that EQII never really managed to step out of the shadow of its progenitor. EverQuest has been running for longer, has more servers and I believe it also has more developers assigned to it. There's been a widespread belief for the last few years that it also has more players and brings in more money, both of which we now know to be true.

 

It's not quite as straightforward as that, though. The figures we've seen are snapshots. We don't have a longitudinal analysis. Anecdotally, EQII has been hemorrhaging players for several years. Perhaps it once did compete on equal terms with EQ. There was certainly a time when it felt that way. 

Why has EQII lost so many players, if indeed the rumors are true? Almost certainly because of the increasing use of the kind of practices Yeebo ascribes to DDO. The mechanics may differ but the intent and the result is the same. 

EQII has frequently been described as "pay to win" by disgruntled ex-players but what it really is is "pay to play". I'm not talking about the subscription, which is good value but by no means necessary for a casual player. I'm referring to the ever-increasing raft of purchaseable consumables that service the myriad progression systems within the game.

Just off the top of my head, these include familiars, mercenaries, mounts and by far the most controversial, spells. All of these are far more than cosmetic or flavor choices, although most of them are that as well. They all add power and at the top end the game is tuned to expect players to have it.

Over time, all of these systems and almost certainly more that I'm forgetting have been expanded and tuned so as to allow a never-ending spiral of upgrades. If you play casually, as I do, you'll get all the upgrades you need for free just by playing but if you want to move into Heroic dungeon content or, most certainly, raiding you'd better be ready to pull out your credit card.

There's always been a little of that, or at least since the cash shop was added more than a decade ago, but under Daybreak the system has been pushed to breaking point. Probably the most common complaints I read on the forums (and there are a lot of complaints because EQII players are and have always been quick to reach for the tar and feathers) revolve around having to buy consumables to accelerate the many time-gated upgrade processes. 

It's also the reason most commonly cited for players leaving the game and, even more importantly, not feeling able to return. No wonder the time-limited expansion server, Kaladim, is so popular. As yet progress there hasn't caught up with the expansions that introduced these systems.

Where the whaling in DDO and the consumable racket in EQII strike sparks with the EG7 acquisition is in this slide from the Investor Presentation:

Terms like "Industry leading monetization" and "Deep monetization model" may excite investors but are unlikely to settle a nervous player's concern. And not without reason. As you can see, EQII is second only to DDO in ARPPU or average revenue per paying user. The two smallest games in the portfolio by "bookings" (I think that means how many people actually play) bring in the most money per player.

It's a red flag but as I said it's a small one. There's plenty in the presentation emphasizing the benefits of player loyalty, game stability and the strength of the I.P.s and the breakdown of where revenues come from is balanced: "Mainly monetize via in-game purchase, membership subscription and DLC / expansion pack." 

It must be of some concern to the new owners, though, that the games with the highest MAUs stand in reverse order to those with the biggest income. It wouldn't be all that surprising if they wanted to do something about that. Let's just hope that in seeking to do so they don't kill off the goose that lays the silver eggs. (I mean, c'mon, these numbers are maybe better than we expected but they're hardly golden are they?).

As I said, I remain sanguine. In the short term I'd expect little to change and I'm happy with the status quo. Once the new owners get their feet under the old DBG boardroom table (presumably it's somewhere in Jason Epstein's garage right now) I imagine there will be some changes but so long as they stick to the "Evergreen live service game portfolio" (translation - keep the servers up) and go on pumping out the expansions, I'll be happy.

And maybe they'll even tweak the parameters a little so as to realize that "potential to leverage for marketing and reactivation". Win some of those 178m "registered users" back. They might not all be whales but some of them could still be worth fishing for.

Cake/NotCake : LotRO

There's a promotion running in Lord of the Rings Online whereby all quested content for which you would normally have to pay is temporarily available, for free, to everyone. Standing Stone Games just announced an extension of the offer until the end of August.

They've also said that they're going to send out a "Coupon Code" in the next few days that will permanently enable all currently-available quest packs on your account. You have to use the code before August 31, after which, presumably, everything reverts to the status quo ante.

Here's my dilemma:

I love getting free stuff in games. I log into games I don't play just to grab things I'll never use. I've written about that quite a few times. This is a really big, really generous offer. Something no-one who dabbles even occasionally in LotRO would want to miss.

But... and here's the thing... I really don't like the questing in LotRO, something else I've written about a few times. How much more I've found myself enjoying the game when it wasn't shoving quests in my face every five seconds. Tedious, repetitive quests, written in a turgid style, presented in a jarring, jagged format, using an ugly, hard-to-read font.

When SSG began the current promotion I gave it a go and I did not have fun. Plugging away at some of the now-available quests, I found the xp "terrible" and the gameplay "teeth-grindingly tedious". Admittedly I wasn't in the ideal area and I was playing a Guardian, quite possibly the dullest class I've ever encountered in any MMORPG, but I had a much better time with the same character in the same place last time, when he couldn't get any quests at all.

What to do? Miss out on a very generous and ostensibly desirable freebie, something that goes entirely against my natural inclinations? Or take it and risk tainting forever what had been a charmingly pure and unsullied experience?

Of course I could take the offer and then never use it. Just because a bunch of NPCs suddenly decide they're willing to let me run errands for them doesn't mean I have to do exactly what they want, does it? But that would require self-restraint and frankly, if I had that kind of inner resource, I wouldn't be piling up presents I've no use for in games I don't play in the first place, now would I?

And there's the crux of it. I don't, in fact, "play" Lord of the Rings Online. I played it once, for about three or four months, I think it was, about ten years ago. After that it became one of the scores of games I keep on my hard drive, update occasionally, log into sporadically, either on a whim or when something like this happens.

If I'm being honest about it, more often than not, when I fire up any old MMORPG, ex-favorite or passing fancy, my primary motivation is to get a blog post out of it. I rarely even have the excuse of nostalgia. The main game I've been playing for about two or three years now is "blogging" and I suspect that will continue until someone actually makes and releases a new MMORPG worth thirty hours a week of my time.

Let's not despair. I have a plan. A way to have my cake, not have my cake and not leave my cake on the plate, either, all at the same time.

I have more than one LotRO account because of course I do. I have my regular account, the one I bought, paid for and subbed years ago, before there was any other way of doing it. That's the one I still play. But there was a time when you had to have a different account for the free trial, back before it all went free-to-play... or maybe it was when the ownership changed and you needed one to play on American servers instead of European ones or... I don't know. Or something. Reasons!

Anyway, I made another account and played on that for a while. I have characters on there. Not seen them for a few years. Can't remember their names. Or their classes. Or their levels. But they exist.

Here's what I could do. Use the Coupon on the account I usually play, thereby satisfying my urge to Get Stuff For Free. I could even log in Mrs. Bhagpuss's old account and flag that for a coupon too. That should satisfy my FOMO and sheer, pointless greed.

Then all I have to do is make sure not to log in the other account before September 1st. Shouldn't be difficult - I haven't logged it in for years. Then again, try not thinking of a purple elephant...

That way, on the rare occasions when I get the urge to log in and potter around in Middle Earth, I can choose between the productive-but-enervating quest version or the meandering-but-immersive alternative. It almost makes sense! (Not really...).

Even then, it's going to be tough. Standing Stone seem determined to get everyone questing, one way or another. Once the offer expires they'll be offering all "expansion pack quest content" in the store for a dollar each or 99 LotRO points, which you can fairly easily earn in-game.

If I'm reading the announcements and clarifications correctly, something I'm not convinced is the case, it's going to lead to a confusing situation from September onwards. We'll have subscribers with access to everything, legacy F2P players, who used the coupon, with all the non-expansion quests but nothing from the paid DLC, new F2P players with no quests other than the starting zones and a la carte F2Pers with whatever subset they've ponied up for at the time.

Just as well no-one really pugs quested content.

Gift Horse

As I type this, Lord of the Rings Online is patching in the background. Standing Stone Games magnanimously decided to switch off the meter for most paid content through until the end of April, give us all something to do while we're self-isolating or sheltering at home.

That's a very generous gesture but it puts me in something of a quandary. I find it very hard to resist free stuff but in this case the stuff that's going free is the exact same stuff I once claimed LotRO was considerably more fun without.

Almost exactly three years ago to the day, looking back even farther into the storied past, when I played LotRO the first time around, I was scathing as I remembered "the increasingly onerous, exhausting commitment to questing in Middle Earth... All that swimming and riding. All that stiff text. All those unpronounceable names."  There were several reasons I stopped playing LotRo, I said, and quest overload was one of them.

Without quests I felt "as though I am playing the game instead of, as so often in quest-driven MMOs, as though the game is playing me". I said much the same about the endless free trial version of Final Fantasy XIV at around the same time. Clearly questing and I were having some issues in 2017. We probably needed some time out.

My abiding memory of questing in Middle Earth - swimming across this damn lake.

I hung around in both games for a couple of months, roaming and exploring and keeping formal questing to a minimum. I can't recall exactly why I drifted away from FFXIV but I know what eventually dampened my interest in Middle Earth: bag space.

Or, rather, lack of it. I was doing the tasks that require lots of body parts and my bags were full of ears and skins and horns and claws. They all had tiny icons, many of them identical, and they all needed sorting all the time and you really needed a spreadsheet to remember where to hand them in and in the end it all felt like too much hassle so I stopped.

I've written about the dreadful issues LotRO has with its inventory and its UI before. So have quite a few people. It's a notorious game for eyestraining point sizes and illustrations that make postage stamps look like billboards by comparison.

I think I read something about some of that having changed. Maybe. I hope so. I'd log in and check but in the time it's taken me to type this, the patcher has only managed to make it to 75% overall. It's on something called "forward iterations" now and there are more than sixteen thousand of them. LotRO's patcher doesn't have any better a rep than its UI.

The road leads ever onward - to the next quest hub.

The bigger question is, do I really want to play LotRO again, anyway? If it wasn't for the pull of getting something for nothing and the push of being unexpectedly at home for several weeks (at least) I wouldn't even be considering it.

Lord of the Rings Online sits comfortably in the big box of MMORPGs that I used to play and probably will again. Any of them could come out for an airing any time and none of them is ever likely to hang around for long before being put tidily away and forgotten for a few more months or years.

If I was going to make a list of former MMORPGs I'd like to re-visit, ordered in preference, LotRO would be on it, sure, but it wouldn't be all that near the top. Hmm... thinking about it, that's a list I might make. Maybe for Blapril. I'll need some ideas. Better make a note...

Sorry, where were we? Ah yes, no, LotRO could stand to wait a while. I just kind of picked up EverQuest again - at least I've been logging in most days to do my Overseer quests and watch my magician very slowly level up while standing in the Guild Lobby - so my "old MMORPG" slot is currently taken.

But, y'know, free stuff! And I would like to get to the original level cap eventually, just so I could say I did. If nothing else, having quests should make that happen faster, shouldn't it?

I could have sworn the hand-in guy was around here somewhere...

I don't know, though. I seem to remember questing being pretty slow. And dull. Maybe I should do the main storyline. That would be good xp, right?

Just a couple of problems with that. First, I've been avoiding it for about ten years, I disliked it so much the first time. But once again I seem to remember reading that something had been done to improve things. I could at least check it out.

But then, second, it's the one questline free players are already allowed to do. I hardly need SSG to turn on the free quest tap before I trot along behind Frodo at a safe social distance. I could do that any time.

I was hoping that by about now, just as I ran out of waffle, I'd be able to pop in and take some screenshots. I've about used up all my old ones. Only, the launcher is still patching furiously. We're on .dat files now, 3833 of 15894 downloaded so far.

I'm off to play something else.

To be continued. Possibly.

Special Snowflakes : EQ2

As Wilhelm reported, Standing Stone Games have some very pricy pre-Christmas deals going for Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings Online. Daybreak, SSG's publisher, is also running a limited-duration holiday offer for EverQuest II but it's a different beast altogether.

The SSG packages both rely on long-term commitment. The DDO package includes two years of premium membership; for LotRO you get one year. In both cases you also get access to a very large amount of content that would take months to play through.

The EQII offer is called 12 Days of Frostfell. It does indeed last for twelve days, running from Tuesday, December 4, when this year's in-game winter holiday season began, until just before midnight on Wednesday, December 16, and it's much more about instant gratification.

It's also a somewhat convoluted affair, requiring nested purchases in both the cash shop and from an in-game NPC. It took me a couple of read-throughs and a bit of digging around in game to figure it out. The short version goes like this: if you buy specific packs (all labeled "Holiday") in the DBG Store during the promotion they come with a new currency called Glug's Chocolate Coins. You can then spend that currency at a vendor who lurks in the shadows near the wardrobe that zones you into the Frostfell Wonderland Village.

It might seem like an odd way to go about things but I guess you could argue that it turns a marketplace transaction into something more lore-appropriate. In doing so, it also connects what you're doing more strongly to your character, since it's they, not you, who makes the final purchase.

I would argue that, as it happens. Yes, it would be simpler and more convenient just to buy the items directly from the store but simplicity and convenience aren't everything.

Those are the means. How about the ends? What can you buy, how much does it cost, and is it worth it?

The "what" is simple enough. As is usually the case in EQ2 these days, what you can buy with your chocolate money is Mercenaries, Familiars and a Prestige Home. Mercs and Fams (No-one calls them Fams. Let's not start.) are mostly sold in the cash shop via randomized packs but the in-game vendor sells them directly, so you can get exactly the ones you want, first time.


(As an aside, DBG have managed to finesse lockboxes through the store in such a way that I see very few complaints. In fact, in a game where complaints are commonplace and the playerbase is frequently grumpy, lockboxes rarely get a mention, although this particular promotion has raised a few hackles. I believe the lockboxes are broadly accepted because the items inside are both tradeable and convertible to Status, the currency all high-end players crave and can't get enough of. I'm guessing people are more than happy to sell or salvage their spares. Probably some even buy them for that very purpose).

Getting back to the current promotion, while it's quite expensive, it does seem to offer decent value. The various bundles in the cash shop give coins in various quantities. Things like the unattuners that cost a few hundred DBC come with a single chocolate coin and the number you get scales according to cost all the way up to ten coins with the 4999DBC Mindbender Merc seven-pack.

Santa Glug's Curious Clerk, the in-game vendor, charges three, five and seven chocolate coins for the different Mercenaries. The Familiars are all three coins each except for the Blush Gumdrop, which is top of the shop at ten coins. That's because the Blush is Ethereal quality while the rest are merely Legendary.

The Prestige House, which the promo calls "Santa Glug’s Snowglobe Home" but which is known in game as Santa Glug's Cheerful Holiday Home, also runs to ten chocolate coins. The blurb says "This amazingly cozy winter home really has to be seen to be believed! " and fortunately you can do that without buying it if you go to the Prestige Home portal in game and take the tour.

Naimi Denmother did just that and posted a video but it only shows one of the three globes.
Denmum must have been tired that day (she works harder than Dulfy on this stuff and for a lot less reward, I bet) because you can visit all three globes on the tour. I just did.

As well as the one on the counter-top there's another on the mantlepiece and a third on the table. You just have to click on the tiny globe at the edge to swap from one to another. Snow falls constantly inside the globe and flying is enabled, making for some spectacular views.

The breakout zone for the new home (and it's been cofirmed there is one) would seem to be either the Baubleshire Inn itself or, just possibly, the whole of Baubleshire. Only on a Land of the Giants scale, since your character has been shrunk to a suitable size to fit inside a snowglobe.

I find this an immensely appealing prospect. I'm not particularly interested in the Familiars and Mercs (although having Santa Glug as a healer has a certain appeal) but I'd love to break out of the snowglobe and go exploring in the old, no longer accessible, pre-invasion Baubleshire.

(Another aside: one of the less well-known reasons that EQ2's housing is best in genre is the ability to "break out" of the homes into the surrounding area. This used to be a somewhat clandestine activity but is now fully sanctioned, albeit on an "at your own risk" basis. By breaking out you can effectively gain access to an entire zone, which you can decorate (and in EQ2 "decorate is a synonym for "build") just as though you were in the core home instance. The snow globe home has apparently been designed with breakouts in mind and the breakout zone covers an area larger than Antonica!)

To get ten chocolate coins is no small undertaking. Well, okay, it is a small undertaking in that it doesn't ask much more of you than a few mouse-clicks. What I mean is, it's quite expensive. It varies a little according to what Holiday Packages you choose, but it always comes in, near as makes no odds, around 5000DBC.

Five thousand in Daybreak Cash would cost you $45 (or £37). It's a lot less than the $200-300 SSG are asking but I'm not about to spend that kind of money on an imaginary house I most likely will never spend more than a few sessions messing around with. It's also very expensive compared to any other Prestige House, none of which breaks 2,000DBC.

And yet...

All the Holiday Bundles are genuinely useful: the Mercs and Familiars, as I mentioned, can be converted to Status and also traded on the Broker. You might even get a really good one that you'd end up using. Other bundles include things that always come in useful, like extra character slots, server transfers and item unattuners.

Even so, I still wouldn't spend $45 on a whim. Only I don't have to... As a result of SOE's notoriously idiotic policy of running regular double and even treble cash sales (sometimes cited as the reason they never made any money) plus the regular 500 stipend I get for being a member, I have over 20kDBC on my current main account and 17k on the old one.

I might as well spend it on something and five thousand isn't even going to make that much of a dent. So I'm thinking about it.

And because I'm seriously considering the offer, it also clarifies for me the reason why game companies like to put a either a time limit or a limited number on what is self-evidently an infinitely renewable resource. It makes purchasers decide.

If there was no time limit I'd tick the mental box that says "one day" and forget about it for now. And probably forever. I'm extremely good at feeling as though I've bought something just because I thought about buying it. Put a time limit on it, though, and I have to make an actual decision.

It's a wonderful house.

I really would like it.

Let's not be hasty, though.

Still got six days.

Don't rush me, I'm thinking!