There's No Place Like Home : SOE, PSS1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here Comes The New Boss...

I was pretty cross back in February, when SOE's whole "sell your customers" thing blew up. A lot of people were. Then the weeks rolled on and, as is the way of things, it all slipped to the back of my mind. No news is good news, right?

Well, not always, or so it seems from the inordinately long and complicated new FAQ that surfaced at the weekend, found at its most readable over at EQ2Wire. Plow your way through that if you've nothing better to do for an hour, then spend the rest of the evening picking through SOE Community Director, Global Community Relations Brasse's many forum clarifications in this thread.

Wait, I'll save you the time. SOE listened to the concerns of their players as expressed in a 231 page-long thread on their forums, took it all on board, went away and talked to their German partner PSS1 for a month and a half and came back with a worse deal than they'd started with.

Under the original deal that we all kicked off about, existing SOE customers would have been grandfathered in on their US servers and SOE accounts. Under the new deal we gain the ability to play on any server worldwide but at the cost of a mandatory PSS1 account for anyone logging in from an IP in any of the forty countries for which they now handle SoE's MMO stable.

Mine! Hands off!

And if only it were that simple. PSS1 didn't want all of SOE's MMOs. They turned their noses up at the "it's how old?" Everquest and the "where are the players?" Vanguard. So those two wonderful worlds remain with SOE and everyone in PSS1-Land will still need to log in with their SOE account through their SOE launcher to play them.

Oh, didn't I mention? We get new launchers for PSS1-run games. Yes, we did just get new launchers for all SOE games. Now we get new new launchers. Can't have too many launchers, amiright? Oh, and we keep our existing account names for both PSS1 and SOE, but since SOE can't legally transfer any personal data so PSS1 don't get the passwords. We have to come up with new ones. That's always fun.

So, that's the practical side. Two sets of accounts, passwords and launchers. Messy, incoherent and irritating. Then there's the financial side. We're still waiting to hear if we also have to make two sets of payments. Want to bet?

Don't ask for credit as a bitten-off head often offends

 Then there's the cash shop. Leaving aside what it might sell and for how much, both hotbutton issues, PSS1 won't be using Station Cash. They have their own funny money to which our SC balances will be mirrored. They don't issue game cards, so if we want to add any PSS1 toy money at any time, say to buy an expansion, we'll need to give them some payment details. A lot of people aren't happy about that.

There's a lot more but frankly, who cares? It's a done deal. Live with it or stop playing is the offer on the table. Some people are talking about using proxies and VPNs. Feldon's promised to put up a list on EQ2Wire as and when necessary but I won't be trying to tunnel under the fence like that.

I'll make a PSS1 account providing it's possible to do so without entering payment details. If I want to buy anything from them I'll use PayPal, if they take it, which I believe they do, or game cards if they ever issue them. If they don't, I'll stop playing as Gold under my (now defunct but that's another kettle of worms I don't want to let the cat out of) All Access Pass. We get 30 days notice before any transition so when it comes I'll buy a shedload of unlockers with my hoard of SC and just play Silver. I like Silver better anyway.


Probably be playing GW2 anyway...

No Pictures. Because We Can't Have Nice Things

I generally keep my cool when SOE does something stupid. I've been playing their MMOs for over a decade after all. I've had plenty of practice.

I didn't freak out when they dipped their toes in the microtransaction water with Legends of Norrath. I remained sanguine when they jumped into RMT with the LiveGamer deal. I was solidly behind the push towards F2P. Even during the hacks last year I crossed my fingers and carried on playing.

This is a bridge too far.

I knew about the ProSiebenSat.1 deal. It was signed in January, I believe, but it's taken until now for the details to emerge. I naively believed that a deal with a German television company would have little relevance to me, playing on American servers from the United Kingdom. After all, SoE have always been consistently and solidly pro-global and firmly against regional I.P. blocking, and anyway I'd been through this before.

In 2003 they did a deal with UbiSoft to run Everquest for them in Europe on a server called Venril Sathir. It was a pain. We had to be very careful when installing expansions for a while in case we accidentally ended up with UbiSoft accounts instead of adding them to our existing SOE accounts, but there was never any suggestion that we had to move to UbiSoft. It was a choice.

A bad choice, of course. We thought about it for all of a millisecond and then said "Nah!" UbiSoft ran a loose ship. Much complaining ensued. Eventually the deal expired and SOE took Venril Sathir back into the fold, where it eventually merged with some other server. I imagine. That's what usually happens. Don't ask me, I wasn't playing on it.

What with that and the NGE you might think SOE would have learned a lesson. Oh, and let's not forget LiveGamer and their Bazaar servers. That went well, didn't it? Where's The Bazaar now? Oh yes, that's right. Merged with Freeport. And where are LiveGamer? You may well ask.

Freeport. Hmm. Wasn't that the only F2P server for a year or so? Making it the de facto global EQ2 F2P server? Why, yes it was. And is. And as it happens every single person in our Freeport guild turns out to be European despite the server being based in the U.S. Not because we don't like Americans or Australians or [insert your nationality here] but because that's just who we happened to meet.

That's the sodding POINT of MMOs. You run around bumping into lovely or horrible people from all over the world and the lovely ones become your imaginary friends. Virtual friends. Friends for pete's sake. You do stuff with them and build relationships and compile virtual collective assets like guild halls and memories and you do not expect the people you are paying to provide the communications service for all this to come along out of the blue and announce that they have sold you to someone else!

I am fuming about this. So are the people who have been fueling the inevitable thread on the SOE forums, currently at 58 pages and being Mod-Locked like there's no tomorrow. Mrs Bhagpuss and I and the European players in our guild aren't the worst affected by this by any means, though. Yes, it looks as though our personal and possibly even our payment details may be transferred without our consent to a company we would never otherwise have heard of. Yes, the deal omits Vanguard and EQ1 so our Station Access accounts will be rendered effectively null and void (FAQ on this from SOE pending, presumably while someone goes "D'Oh!!!" repeatedly, since apparently that was one of the things no-one thought of. Feldon has a list of those). Yes, we will need to purchase two forms of fairy gold because PSS1 have their own make-believe money instead of Station Cash...

But at least our right to go on playing EQ2 on US servers  is grandfathered in. For now. With no details on if that includes any new characters we might want to make. And no promises on how long before that right might be revoked. At least when the dread date comes we will still be able to log in. If we still want to. Which is in doubt.

Players outside PSS1's remit, which is basically all of Europe plus unnamed countries to be added at an unspecified time, who happen to have characters on Splitpaw or Storms or any of the other European servers will be IP locked out. End of. No matter if you happen to live in Texas but have been playing on Splitpaw for years because you work the nightshift. Nor if you were in the US Military stationed in Germany when you started playing EQ2 so you joined a server with a good ping where they raided at hours that suited you. Bad luck on you when you get back to the States because your characters are staying in Germany and you just lost all visiting rights.

Enough of that. I just filled out my GW2 beta application and I'm off to fill one in for Mrs Bhagpuss. When it comes round to the EQNext beta, if my only choice is PSS1 who knows if I'll even bother?