Silence And Shrinkage: A Tale Of Two Titles

A couple of apparently unrelated items I read, yesterday and today, got me thinking about how games can be all over the news for a while and then quietly disappear without anyone really noticing. Or mentioning it if they did.

The first was this from MassivelyOP about server merges in Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen. It took me somewhat by surprise, for several reasons. 

For one, I couldn't remember hearing anything about server merges in the game before, although the article is very much "Here's a thing we knew might happen and now it has". Pantheon is in that odd position for me of being a game I don't play but whose news I watch with interest so I was a little puzzled that I'd missed whatever had passed for a warning about the contraction. 

It seems MOP reported on the possibility back in March in a round-up of various topics concerning the game. I definitely never saw it because I'd have remembered Chris Neal's opening paragraph, one of the oddest I've seen anywhere for quite a while. It's worth following the link to check it out. It's like he's channeling Chris Morris from thirty years ago...

I imagine I missed it because I was deep in a hole of my own digging as described in yesterday's post but had I caught the news I'd have been surprised to learn Pantheon had enough servers to warrant a merger. In fact, had anyone asked me, which obviously no-one was going to, I'd have said I thought they probably had just one server for each ruleset. I wouldn't have thought they could need much more.

If I'd said that, I'd have been very wrong indeed. Yesterday's report names twenty servers! And that's just in the USA East and West regions, which seem to be the only ones affected by the merger. There are also servers in the EU and "OCE", an abbreviation for Oceania I hadn't happened upon before. Plus another two FFA PvP servers that have just been added. That's more than two dozen!

Things Are Happening!

 

It seems like one whole hell of a lot of servers to me. Way, way more than I imagined the game could possibly support at this stage, even though the take-up when it went into Early Access was a lot more enthusiastic than I'd expected.

The Steam charts show an all-time peak just below 7,000 concurrent players. Even using the most generous of multipliers, 5X, that puts the population around 35k. I just checked and as far as I can tell it is no longer possible to play the game any other way than through Steam unless you already have pre-existing alpha/beta access or a buddy code from someone who does, so it seems reasonable to assume Steam's population count represents the huge majority of the playerbase.

If so, that means each of those two dozen or more servers would have been unlikely to have held more than a couple of thousand people (Assuming a fairly even distribution.) and probably only half of those at most would have been online at the same time, even at peak. I know Pantheon is a retro game, aiming to bring back the glory days of EverQuest and all that but even at the turn of the millennium I seem to remember EQ servers could comfortably accommodate about five thousand players, with a couple of thousand of those online at the same time. It seems to be going beyond the call of authenticity to try and replicate the server technology from two decades ago as well as the gameplay.

In the course of my "research" I naturally ended up looking at the Steam Charts for Pantheon as they are now. It's not a disastrous picture but it's not as encouraging as it might be. 

The game has been in Early Access for around three months, putting it squarely in that ninety day zone identified by the developers of the Star Wars Galaxy emulator as the point when people begin to jump ship if no new content is forthcoming. 

You can have too many new ideas...

Pantheon, as I said, seeks to restore the kind of gameplay, and thereby the kind of retention and loyalty, that golden age MMORPGs such as EverQuest once enjoyed. Back then, players really did expect to play these games for many months at a stretch; often for several years. It wasn't until a decade or so later that the term "three-monther" appeared, referring to the then-new tendency of players to hop from one MMORPG to another, abandoning each after no more than three months.

That had a lot to do with the explosion of new MMORPGs, which made it possible to put one down and pick up another almost without interruption. Before then, there just weren't enough MMORPGs to make chasing FOMO a viable playstyle but many players had been quite happy to stick with one game because, in addition to all those legendary social ties and as I can affirm as someone who was playing at the time, successful MMOs pumped out a continual torrent of fresh content in a way that would seem hard to believe now.

It's not just rose-tinted nostalgia talking. It's a matter of record. You can go read the extensive patch note archive at Allakhazam's mothballed EverQuest site and see for yourself. Back then, when I was playing, the problem was trying to keep up with the new stuff, not scratching around trying to find something new to make it worth logging in.

As I've suggested before, to a degree Early Access games have an advantage over live ones in this regard. By definition, there's still a lot to add to an EA title, assuming the devs are doing their jobs. There really ought to be a steady flow of new content throughout the EA period, although not all of it is likely to be particularly exciting. There may still be a lot of tweaking of detail and systems work going on. Even so, there should always be something new happening.

For that reason and because of the type of game Pantheon promotes itself as being and the kind of audience it seeks to attract, I'd figured retention would be more robust than it appears to have been. I imagined quite a lot of Pantheon players would be in it for the long haul and would already have settled down in their "forever game", as people like to call it. They'd keep on playing, regardless of whether there was anything new to do because Pantheon would be home.

That's most likely true still for some but it looks as though there may also have been quite an intake of curiosity-seekers and tourists. Peak concurrency according to Steam has fallen from that all-time high of close to seven thousand back in January to just over half that in the last thirty days; less than a third in the last twenty-four hours. That leaves a couple of thousand at peak, which with that generous 5x multiplier might mean as many as ten thousand people still playing, still a decent number for an indie mmo. 

Not a disastrous decline, then, but a bigger slide than I would have predicted at this stage. Certainly a steep-enough drop to warrant those server merges, although given they cut the total of American  PvE servers from twenty to just four, it does suggest there were too many to begin with.

The "Latest" News as of 10 April 2025

 

The other news item I referred to back at the top of the post relates not to any kind of announcement giving cause for concern, more the exact opposite: total silence. Michael Byrne of MMOBomb is wondering if Tarisland is "unofficially dead" because he hasn't heard a peep out of it "in months".

That's a bit of a reach as it turns out if you read the whole article because the "months" of supposed silence actually go back only as far as mid-February, which is more like "weeks" to my way of counting. Still, it's long enough to go without any type of PR puff from a major game to suggest something might be going on. Or not going on...

Tarisland is precisely one of those MMORPGs that dominated the news cycle for a while before slipping quietly back into the pack of live service games that no-one really follows or cares about other than the people still playing them. Lost Ark would be another example but the huge difference there is that I still see news items about Lost Ark all the time whereas I had to go look up what the last reports on Tarisland were before I wrote this post. I couldn't remember hearing about it for, yes, months.

We can't use Steam's charts to reveal anything meaningful about Tarisland because although it's on Valve's platform, pretty much no-one ever played it there in the first place. The all-time peak was 582 players! As MMOBomb suggests, most current Tarisland players will be going through the game's standalone launcher or playing it on mobile. It may still be booming for all any of us know.

Except if it was, I'm pretty sure Level Infinite and TenCent would be telling us about it. And pumping out plenty of content to make sure it stayed that way. As with EQ back in the day and as with Wuthering Waves now, just to name-check a game I play that pushes far more content at me than I can cope with (High quality content, too.) MMORPGs that are doing well don't tend to clam up and keep quiet about it.

In some ways, Pantheon and Tarisland sit almost at opposite ends of the MMORPG spectrum, even though in others they could be cousins. One is extremely indie and still in relatively early development, the other is as corporate as they come and went Live long ago. Then again, both are basically diku-mud variants that can trace a very direct lineage back to EverQuest, one directly, the other by way of World of Warcraft.

If I had to bet which would be with us longer I'd put my money on Pantheon. I wouldn't have said that before I read Micheal Byrne's speculations but I do find the developer's and publisher's lack of engagement with both the players and the media suggestive of a general lack of commitment to the game itself. Hardly surprising given the size and scope of the mega-corps involved, for whom Tarisland may well already have either met or missed its profitability targets, consigning it either way to the completed projects file.

Pantheon, conversely, is the one and only engine keeping the Visual Realms ship afloat. If that fails, the entire company sinks. Tarisland could probably have fifty times as many players and TenCent might still shut it down. VR won't give up until the bailiffs are banging on the door.

As a player, it does seem counterintuitive to imagine your characters would be safer in some niche game that may never even make it out of Early Access, rather than in one of the biggest MMORPGs of its day, but that might very well be how it goes.

Sometimes It's The Little Things...

This is just a short post (No, really...) about a couple of Norrathian bits and bobs I happened to notice  yesterday. The first is a small but very significant change to the login process for EverQuest that's going to make choosing a server much more straightforward for new players. It should also make life much easier for anyone coming back after a long layoff.

EverQuest has a lot of servers for a twenty-five year-old game. More than two dozen of them and the number keeps growing. Two new ones were added just a few days ago. If you've been away for a while, it can be hard to remember where you were last time you played. I've created a lot of characters over the years and I always have trouble remembering what server half of them are on. 

Even knowing the name of the server where you were playing doesn't always help. As many servers as the game has now, over the years it's had many more. I long ago lost track of which servers merged and then re-merged. The merger process is hard to keep up to date with not least because it never ends. Next month a server called Thornblade, which I can't honestly say I knew existed, is merging with Mischief, where I think I might have made a character once.  

There have always been a few places you can go look this stuff up but as with all information on the internet, you can't always find exactly what you need and even when you do, you can't always be sure it's current or correct. Now, all you need to do is look at the Server Select screen, which has been re-tooled to be far more useful and informative than ever before.  

Every server is listed along with five topline criteria:

Status - When the server is up, this shows the current online population (Low/Medium/High). Otherwise it will say Locked or Down as appropriate. This information has always been available from the Game Server Status page on the website and it might have been on Server Select before, but never as clearly as it is now.

Ruleset - This tells you Daybreak's official name for whatever ruleset is operating on a specific server, for example Standard, Timelocked Progression or Randomized Loot. More detail about the ruleset in question appears in the description at the foot of the table.

Expansion - This lets you know exactly where each server sits in the progression chain. With thirty expansions to date, all of them adding features and many changing the level cap, knowing which one is in effect when you log into a server is crucial information.

True Box - If a server is flagged "True Box" it means each player can only play one account at a time per computer. There can be variations to the basic Yes/No binary - one server is currently listed as "Relaxed(3)", meaning you can play up to three characters per PC but no more. It's a complicated issue that needs a little background.

The game has a long tradition of multi-boxing, where one player simultaneously logs in multiple accounts and plays one character from each, often making a full group of six to do group content "solo". This used to be quite tricky and often required the use of 3rd party software that would get you banned if you were caught using it. 

These days, EQ is so undemanding of modern gaming PCs you can easily log multiple accounts in on the same machine, making swapping from character to character very straightforward even using just the regular, in-game controls. As so many of EQ's hundreds of zones are often empty and so much of the later game is instanced, multiboxing came to be seen as a legitimate activity, provided multiboxers also abided by the general "Play Nice" rules and didn't get in anyone's way. 

That attitude changed when the often much more crowded and competitive special ruleset servers came into play. There were a lot of complaints and new servers started to include rules on how much, if any, "boxing" was allowed at launch, along with how far the server had to progress before those rules were relaxed.

Even if the server is flagged Yes for True Box, theoretically you can still play more than one character but you have play each of them on a separate computer, old school. How DBG can tell is beyond my remit to explain but apparently they can and they'll ban you if they catch you, so it's good to know what the rules are in advance.

All Access - Finally and crucially, this lets you know if you need to have paid your sub to log into the server in question. Mostly it's the Standard ruleset servers that are Free To Play but there are exceptions.

All of that is great and an improvement and all but it's not worth getting excited over, let alone writing a whole post about. What got me really excited was the additional detail available in the full server description that appears at the bottom of the screen when you select a server.

This includes a full description of the ruleset with unlock schedules for expansions and notes about special features such as increased spawn rates and economic models. All stuff I can never remember, in other words.

There have been more than a few times in the past, when I've had to go digging around in old press releases to find which of EverQuest's myriad special ruleset servers is on what set of special rules. There are so many of them now and the differences between them are sometimes so arcane and abstruse, I'd be surprised if even the people who set the rules can remember them. The new Server Select screen collates all the pertinent information in one easy to find location and will make my life much easier any time I decide to write about EQ.

Even more useful to me is the inclusion of full details of the merge history of each server. Once again, this has always been available online somewhere... I just could never find it when I wanted it. Now I can just log into the game and see immediately that one of my old servers, Lanys T`Vyl, merged with Tunare in 2005, as did E`Ci. Another server I had characters on, Seventh Hammer, joined them all in 2010 and the whole crew now goes by the name Tunare - Seventh Hammer.

Since I can almost always remember the name of the server where I originally made a specific character but almost never where that character ended up after all the merges, this is going to save me a load of time and trouble. I may not play most of these characters any more and most likely never will but there have been a surprising number of occasions when I needed to find a particular character to check something or to take a screenshot for a post. This is going to make doing stuff like that a lot less annoying.

The second thing I noticed yesterday relates to EverQuest II and a vlogger I follow by the name of Borgio. Borgio used to make useful and entertaining video guides that he posted regularly to his YouTube channel. I found them very helpful in getting past a few instances and bosses in various expansions, which is why I subscribed.

Unfortunately, like many veteran players, Daybreak eventually managed to piss him off sufficiently to make him quit (I forget if it was anything specific or just the general drift of the game away from the way it used to be.) and he moved on to other games, then stopped posting much at all. 

He has sporadically popped videos up since - he briefly visited the Vanguard Emu a year or so back, which was nice - but his channel had been silent for almost a year until yesterday he posted this:

While he doesn't explicitly say so, I'm guessing Anashti Sul lured him back.The video is short and - at least for anyone who's ever visited the Isle of Refuge - quite interesting. I was surprised to find I had actually seen and killed all of the Named mobs he shows but if you'd asked me about them before I watched the video I wouldn't have remembered any of them, even though I just played through the whole main quest series on the Outpost of the Overlord just a few days ago.

It almost makes me want to go back with another character and do it again to see what else I might have forgotten.

Almost...

You Can't Take It With You

Sorting my Steam games by time played today, I was surprised to find that at 78.8 hours, Nightingale still hasn't broken into the top five, although not as surprised as I was to see what it will have to pass to get there. Sitting just ahead at #5 on the list with 81.2 hours played comes Bless Unleashed. How did that happen?

It's always possible I left BU running while I was long-term AFK of course, something I have been prone to do with games on occasion, but it's probably just that compared to any other genre, MMORPGs take up a phenomanal amount of time to play in even the most casual fashion. The only reason there are any other kinds of games in the first couple of rows of my Steam list is that I hardly play any MMORPGs through Valve's supposedly universal platform.

Most people don't, I would guess. A lot of the biggest, best-known, most successful, long-running names in the genre predate Steam entirely. Their players, active or lapsed, already have standalone installations, accounts and launchers provided either directly from the games themselves or via bespoke portals mandated by the developer.

For a long time, even after Steam took over many PC gamers' hard drives, almost all new MMORPGs came with their own launchers. It's only in very recent years that MMO developers have chosen to offer their games primarily or exclusively on Steam.

It has become something of a routine for older games to add themselves belatedely, usually with a flourish of publicity, and it does sometimes result in a surge of interest, bringing in new players for a while. When you look at the numbers playing through the platform a little later, though, it doesn't always seem as though many of those new players stayed for long.

Even less likely is the prospect of a significant proportion of the installed base for an MMORPG moving to Steam. I could play a lot of my MMORPG rotation there - EverQuest, EverQuest II, Lord of the Rings Online, Guild Wars 2 - but I don't. In some cases I'd have to begin again from scratch, an obvious non-starter, but even if the Steam version of the game can let me play my regular characters I'd still have to go through all the rigmarole of linking the accounts. Why would I bother?

Clearly most people don't. Taking the EQ titles as an example, Darkpaw would have been out of business years ago if the real average concurrency of the two games combined came to barely 350. LotRO on its own almost doubles that and GW2 makes it into the low thousands, which might just about be viable for a small indie developer but not for a sub-division of NCSoft with several hundred developers to pay.

Daybreak don't like to tell us exactly how many people play their games but you certainly don't need more than three dozen servers to accomodate three hundred and fifty people or even a couple of thousand, if we use the old 5x peak concurrency figure that used to be the top-end estimate for total participation in online games. The Steam numbers for all MMORPGs that aren't also Steam exclusives like New World and Lost Ark are more than just unrepresentative, they're downright misleading.

The disparity is so extreme it does make me wonder whether it's really worth an older MMORPG tooling itself up for Steam membership at all. Yes, there's that initial burst of interest and the concommitant flurry of new players but once the initial excitement fades you're left with a permanent red flag for anyone looking to answer that perennial gamer's question: "Is this game dead?"

If you looked at Steam for any of the titles I've mentioned, the answer would be "As a Dodo". GW2, sometimes reckoned to be one of the front-runners among Western MMORPGs, doesn't even appear on the list until you've clicked through ten screens of results. Then again, it could be worse. Rift, languishing at #1534 on the chart as I write, is so many clicks down in the hole I lost count. 

Rift, however, is the reason I was looking at my time played in Steam games in the first place. I'd seen the recent announcement about server merges and I thought I'd get ahead of the rush by moving my Faeblight characters before Gamigo put them wherever they were going to put them if I did nothing about it.

Given the lack of attention anyone - developers, publishers or even players - has shown Rift since even before Trion shut up shop more than five years ago, it's perhaps more of a surprise to learn the game still has enough servers to need merging rather than that it's actually happening. Server merges, in any case, are an inevitable phase of the life-cycle of any MMORPG and Rift was designed with an unusual degree of flexibility in that regard. Players have always been able to swap servers almost instantly with no charge. I've moved a few times already.

Consequently, I wasn't expecting much trouble when I logged in last night to move my seven Faeblight characters to either Greybriar or Wolfsbane or possibly some to one and some to the other, since I already have characters on both and I'm not sure how the processes handles overspill when you hit your allowed character-per-server buffer. That potential snag I may have thought of; I had not, however, reckoned with another: the guild bank.

It seems that when Trion created the transfer system, they allowed for the smooth  movement of just about everything except the contents of the Guild Vault. I imagine that was intentional to avoid customer service issues when someone tried to jump ship and take the whole lot with them without telling anyone. Rift has one of those very annoying automated systems for handing Guild leadership to someone else if you don't log in often enough so I can see how it could happen.

Moving the guild itself is easy enough. The Guild Leader has to move first and tick a box to say they're taking the Guild with them. Then, whenever another member of the Guild moves across, they're automatically added back to the roster, albeit for some reason at entry-level, meaning everyone has to be re-promoted. A bit half-assed if you ask me but a minor inconvenience at most.

The contents of the Guild Vaults, however, aren't going anywhere. The Valuts have to be completely emptied or you can't move at all. And therein lies my problem.

As I'm sure will astonish no-one whose noticed the title of the blog they're currently reading, my Guild Vaults in Rift are completely rammed. So, for the most part, are the bags of all my characters, although I did take the trouble a while back to make sure the ones I log in now and again at least had one empty bag to collect the inevitable "Welcome Back" bribes.

I considered the possibility of distributing the Vault contents among all my characters but even then there's not enough space. I thought about making a bank mule just to carry the load but I'd have to buy a another Character Slot. It was while I was looking at how much that might cost when I had a small epiphany: this is fricken' Rift we're talking about!

How often do I play Rift? Am I ever going to play Rift again? Do I really care which server my characters are on in a game I don't play now and don't plan on playing in the future? 

More to the point, even if I could buy a character slot for Rift Store Cash or Credits or whatever they're called, of which I still have a ton from when the game converted to F2P, do I even want to spend the time it would take to get the move done? To make a character, run through that damn tutorial, make some bags, transfer them over, join the Guild, meet whatever criteria you need to be able to withdraw stuff from the Vault, take everything out and stash it in another bank...

No. No I do not want to waste hours of my life doing any of that. I wanted to press a couple of buttons and forget about it, not start some major project that would take up hours of my life just to get me back to where I began - not playing Rift. 

Except as the record shows, I do occasionally play Rift. It's my seventh most-played game on Steam. I've spent more hours playing Rift since it moved to Steam than I've given to Palworld, albeit over a much longer period. And one of the reasons I still play Rift now and again is because it's on Steam. I very much doubt I would bother if I had to find and update a standalone client but because the button is just sitting there, sometimes I give in to whim and log in for old time's sake.

It helps that Rift is one of the games where I can play all my old characters. I can't remember if I had to set that up or if it was done automatically when the game was added to the new platform but it definitely makes it more likely I'll keep coming back, if only very occasionally. I suspect that if older MMORPGs were able to achieve seamless integration with Steam at no effort for the players it might help at least a little with retention. Then again, it's not like I ever spend any money when I'm there so there's probably no value in it for the companies running the games, even if they can get a few old lags to look in once in a while.

Having considered the possibilities, I'm going to do nothing. Not yet. The Gamigo announcement acknowledges some players may just not bother to move their characters ahead of time:

"Further details will be provided for those who may not transfer to Greybriar, Wolfsbane, Deepwood, or Laethys in time, ensuring your transition is as smooth as possible."

I'll wait until I hear what those "further details" are. Last time something like this happened they just flagged the old servers as Inactive and when you logged in you were forced to move somewhere else. For me, that would probably be as good as anything. If I'm not playing my characters anyway, I can not play them just as easily on a closed server as an active one.

Until then, it's back to Nightingale to see if  I can't push past Bless Unleashed and maybe even Divinity: Original Sin 2 at 91.3 and Dawnlands at 103.4. Both of those seem possible. 

New World at 235.8 hours, though? That's not going to happen. And as for Valheim at 384.8? 

That's a record I doubt will ever be broken.

Eviction Notice

Just a little FYI for any EverQuest II players out there. There's got to be someone, right? Two weeks from today, on March 21, the Kaladim server will be merged into Antonia Bayle. The Tarinax PvP server is also merging into AB at the same time, although I'm pretty sure that's not going to affect anyone reading this.

None of this should come as much of a surprise. It was in the roadmap, after all. I confess I'd completely forgotten about it, all the same. According to that schedule, Tarinax will be replaced by a new PvP-TLE server next month but there's no new PvE-TLE server this year, hardly surprising since the most recent, Varsoon, hasn't yet unlocked the third expansion, 2006's Echoes of Faydwer.

Kaladim is "only" four years old. I put only in inverted commas because I remember when John Smedley speculated in an interview that the original EverQuest might, with luck, last three to five years. EQ is twenty-four this month. EQII will be nineteen later this year.

Still, by modern standards, four years isn't much of a run. I was surprised when I logged in this morning  to see the announcement. I'd have thought Kaladim might have had a while longer to go before the inevitable roll-up. It just goes to show the industrial nature of Daybreak's special rules server operation, I guess. They roll out, they roll on, they roll up. No drama. And now I come to think of it, at the automated pace of Time-Limited Server unlocks, I suppose four years is the full, expected life.

The process is streamlined to a fault. There's an astonishingly re-assuring FAQ on what you need to do to prepare: in short, nothing. Over the years, during what must by now amount to dozens of similar events, every possible problem has been revealed and solved. Banks, houses, inventory, mail, even those dungeons you made to store tens of thousands of housing items (Yep, that really is what the hardcore decorators use that old, mothballed feature for.) it all just moves seamlessly across.

About the worst that's likely to happen is you might get an x or two added to the end of your name. That's happened to me a few times, even though I generally pick very unlikely names. For Kaladim, though, I chose something so obvious I was excited enough to have snagged it I made a post about it. I'll be miffed to lose my rights to Lana. I never did give her that surname...

I'm actually mildly irritated to find the server is folding at all. It's not as if I play there often but I have been in the habit of dropping by for the holidays to do some quests, pick up a few sticks of furniture, maybe a hat... I had things quite nicely set up and I particularly liked the way everything Lana owns is something she's picked up for herself at low level by doing the kind of things someone who lived in a world like that might feasibly do for fun or profit.

Of course, it will all transfer with her, unchanged, but it won't have the same metaphysical imprimatur. It's the sort of thing that used to mean a great deal to me, when I took virtual worlds a lot more seriously than I do now. Vestiges of that level of attachment still surface occasionally.

I also don't much like Antonia Bayle. It used to be the official roleplaying server - may still be, for all I know - and for a long time it was by some margin the most highly-populated. Then something happened to it - I don't know what - and the population crashed to the point that Daybreak were actively trying to encourage people to transfer there for a while.

I'm guessing it's still the lowest population of the mainstream servers because every merge seems to take Ant Bayle as its destination these days. I don't have anyone there at the moment but only because the last time this happened I moved somewhere else before I was pushed. 

You can do that because Daybreak is happy to give you the choice if you care enough to take it. As the FAQ explains, "Right now, if you log in to your character, you will find a character transfer token that will allow you to pick the server to which you wish to transfer. You will be able to use this token until the servers come down for the merge on March 21, 2023."

I'm going to get right on that as soon as I finish this post. I haven't decided yet where to go. All my other characters bar one are on Skyfire so that's the obvious choice but moving there will strip away any residue of originality that might be left. Once on Skyfire, Lana will have access to all the wealth and resources of my high-level characters, instantly rendering her insignificant and meaningless to play.

In fact, her very isolation over on Kaladim was what held my interest in how she was doing. It was a small reminder of the way I used to play, when I'd regularly start new characters on fresh servers just for the pleasure of having to raise them by their own bootstraps. In the case of Kaladim, I particularly appreciated the way certain overpowering Veteran and special event  items I'd normally have been able to claim on any character I made were blocked until the server caught up with the apropriate era, although it's fair to say that by now all those have unlocked anyway.

Not counting Kaladim, Tarinax, Test and Beta, there are currently eight servers to choose from: the aforementioned Antonia Bayle and Skyshrine plus Halls of Fate and Maj`Dul all use the standard ruleset, while Isle of Refuge is the "Free Trade" server and the most recent addition, Kael Drakkel, is flagged "Lore and Legend". The current TLE server, which, as I said, is Varsoon, also uses a free trade ruleset and the final server is the EU-based Thurgadin.

I'm still mulling over my choice of destination. I'm tempted to give Varsoon a try. If not, I might go to Isle of Refuge. They both at least offer the possibility of something different to the experience I can already get on Skyfire. I already have a character on Kael Drakkel, where you start at 90 and stay there because everything, everywhere is the same level. I tried it for a while but I really couldn't see the point so I won't be going back.

I note that the instructions on the server transfer token, unlike those in the FAQ, do stress that shared banks, mail and broker boxes need to be cleared before moving, so there's some housekeeping I'll need to attend to before I leave. With the deadline just a couple of weeks away, I suppose I'd best get started.

May Shrink Or Leak While In Use

My inner hipster quirks an approving eyebrow every time I add another obscure mmorpg to my portfolio but there are certain caveats that come with choosing to play the games others ignore. Yesterday brought a couple more yellow flags.

I logged into Noah's Heart to a bittersweet welcome in the mail: five hundred diamonds, compensation for another server merge. I'd heard nothing ahead of time. From my perspective, the server where I play seemed as busy as ever. It came as a complete surprise to me.

It took a bit of searching before I could track down the details.

After this week’s maintenance, we’ll conduct server merge among the following servers:
AM Server: S1-Fairy Spring & S6-Elegy Tomb
EU Server: S1-Avant-Garde & S4-Greepersia
S8-Divine Valley & S14-Canan & S16-Star

The first server in the group is the main server and the rest servers will be merged into the first one.

I found the announcement on the game's Facebook page. Facebook's not a place I generally go for game news. I'm inured to having to check Discord to find out what's going on but I have my limits.

It would seem the game's down to three servers now: one in North America, one in Europe and one... somewhere else. Asia? South America? Mars?

 

I play on Fairy Spring, which probably explains why the game has always seemed well-populated to me. The server has been the host for at least one previous merger so I'm guessing it's always been the busiest, even more so as it keeps picking up refugees from all the others.

 

New content still coming in. That has to be a positive.

I was bullish about the game's prospects last time this happened but that was only a month ago. It's hard not to see this latest contraction as a warning. At the rate things are going, pencilling in a celebratory post for the game's first anniversary next summer probably wouldn't be the wisest plan.

 

I'm not too bothered. It feels as though I might be running out of steam with Noah's Heart, anyway. I'm still logging in every day but only for the time it takes to fulfill my guild obligations and rack up my 200 activity points. I bank my three tokens towards the next stage of the current Season then I log out.

 

I like to try to follow the narratives of these weird, sometimes incomprehensible storylines but the time-gating has increased to the stage where it now takes a full week to build up the points needed to move the story forward. It used to be three days. 

When I do get to open the next chapter, it rarely takes more than fifteen or twenty minutes to finish. Major set piece action segments and crafted cut scenes are things of the past. Now it's always a sequence of talking tableaux and a lot of silent movie style intertitles. The approach certainly has its charm but it doesn't occupy a great deal of time.

After more than twenty years, I get a feeling for when my interest in a game is begining to flag and I suspect that time may be approaching for Noah's Heart. Still, if it ends up being six months, that's a very strong run. I didn't play Chimeraland, a game that very arguably has a lot more going for it, for as long as that.

Of course, Chimeraland is another at-risk title, having suffered similar shrinkage to Noah's Heart. The bizarre, monster-smushing game does have a higher profile, at least with MassivelyOP, where several writers seem amused that it even exists, a sentiment I can readily appreciate, having played it. Whether the attention will help keep the servers up any longer than the already all-but-forgotten Noah's Heart, though, I have to have my doubts.

 

The other odd title I picked up recently, ROSE Online, has, as far as I can tell, just the one server, which at least means merges aren't likely to be an issue. It's also extremely busy as of now, which has to be a good sign.

A lot less re-assuring was the email I received yesterday. I won't quote the whole thing... or shall I? Yes, why not?

A data breach is never good news but props to Rednim for the detailed explanation. It looks concerning at first sight but if I'm reading it correctly, all it really amounts to is a small chance that someone might have been able to see an email address and an even smaller chance they'd also have had a shot at a few characters of the password.

I suppose if you were lucky enough to have a very short email address and lazy enough to have chosen a very short password, a curious prodder might have been able to log into your ROSE Online account but even then, unless you're one of those peculiarly shortsighted people who use the same email address and password for everything, the damage would be limited to loss of your progress and character in a free to play mmorpg still in the first week of early access. It's hardly the Brink' s Mat robbery.

 

I changed my password just to be on the safe side, although I never re-use passwords nor even follow any particular convention or format when creating them. I literally make up something random, stream-of-consciousness style, every time. 

As for email addresses, I'm not quite sure what the logic behind keeping them secret is in the first place. They exist so people can use them to contact each other, don't they? Or maybe that's archaic. 

Anyway, I make up almost as many email addresses as I do passwords, and most of them get used just once, to reply to the email that validates them. After that they just lie there, gathering virtual dust. 

Thinking about it, that might explain why the first I hear about things like server merges is when I log into the game. I might be getting dozens of  notifications I never see.

I do maintain ongoing access to the email adress I used for ROSE Online. It's one of several I use when creating accounts for games I don't expect to play for long. Only, as must be self-evident by now, I'm not the greatest predictor of my own behavior when it comes to new mmorpgs. I often end up bedding down for weeks or months in titles I expected to last no more than a session or two.

If there's one thing the whole free-to-play revolution has taught me it's that mmorpgs are like busses. If you miss one, there'll be another along in a minute. Although now I come to think about it, that's the kind of analogy only someone who doesn't use public transport would make.

Maybe what I mean is that mmorpgs are like pets. You love them while they're around but you always know they won't be with you forever. Hmm. No. That's not it. That's really bleak.

Okay, I don't have a neat moral to this tale I can wrap up in a tidy cliche. I guess the takeaway is that mmorpgs can be fragile so it doesn't pay to lean on them too heavily. Seriously, I can keep this up all day...

But I won't. I have games to play. Or I do while they last.