Going Undeground: City of Steam

A week ago, give or take, I stepped off the train into Central, the fading, failing heart of Nexus, City of Steam. I enthused about it. Gushed, even. First impressions count double but do they last?

This time they do, yes. And then some. I've played more City of Steam this week than any other MMO except EQ2 and even while I was in Norrath I had a nagging desire to be in Nexus.

Every day I logged in and played for at least an hour, often longer. What the heck is it about City of Steam? It's not even in alpha, for Pete's sake and yet there already seems more to it than most MMOs I've tried in the past year or two. Let's get some detail in here.

See? Embattled. I said it was!

Central, the aptly named capital city is a safe haven surrounded by danger above, below and on all sides. Merchants trade and the trains still run from Central Station but beneath the chipped cobbled streets lie miles of tunnels, tombs and crypts, a forgotten necropolis where a Skeleton King rules over hordes of undead. Across the bridges gangs own the suburbs while the Central Boiler that should have provided city-wide steam power sinks to rust behind sealed doors, a failed engineering project home to thieves and wild clockworks. The inevitable sewers teem with vermin, the embattled Nexan Archives ringing the Central Square stand closed and guarded. The Mythspikes, those great towers that pierce the Quarters hold onto their mysteries.

It's a  service hub surrounded by instanced dungeons, in other words.

I've spent most of my time so far in Paragon's Gate. At the entrance of each dungeon you get a helpful pop-up detailing its level and how many players would be best advised to tackle it. Paragon's Gate appears to be the entry-level instance, supposedly suited to solo at level four. For a while I thought it went on forever but on my third trip down it tapped out at sublevel seven. It goes deeper but not during this pre-alpha Sneak Peak.

My Goblin Gunner was level five when he went in and boy, did he have a hard time. First run through he died a lot, but then I only had a sketchy idea of his abilities. At least I got to learn how the death mechanic works.

The things I do for art...

If there's a penalty for dying other than some potentially serious inconvenience I didn't notice it. While you're lying on the filthy crypt floor with the clockroach that killed you skittering about on your corpse you get three options: You can revive for free outside the dungeon, you can use a Cardiotonic from your pack, which revives you on the spot or you can open the Store and buy a Cardiotonic for 500EL. That option is currently greyed-out. The cash shop isn't implemented yet.

You start with five Cardiotonics. Vendors sell them for 500 silver, which isn't chump change at low levels but isn't by any means out of reach either. At level seven I have just under 9,000 silver. Of course, if you do use a Cardiotonic you stand up right next to the thing that just killed you. Fine if you just crushed five clockroaches and jump back up to finish the sixth. Not so hot if you only killed two and four of them are still there.

Nevertheless, you don't want to be taking the free option and respawning outside because the instances are non-persistent. If you just spent an hour clearing down to level four that's another hour to get back to where you were, unless you were lucky enough to have reached a Mythdock. Mythdocks are handy teleporters that not only send you back to Central so you can empty all the Oily Cargo Manifests and Powdered Glass out of your pack but also give you a return ticket that lets you port back down the same Mythdock and carry on where you left off.

I'll be back!

Not got a Mythdock ticket on you? Never mind. Look on the bright side. Maybe you'll ding fighting back down and then you might have the edge over the Tombcrawler that killed you last time when you meet him again.

Kidding! You won't ding. Killing stuff gives very little experience. About 2xp per. Quests give 1000xp. From the forums I gather that the devs are set against grinding. The focus is on questing and story. I'd prefer it the other way round but maybe I'll come on board when there are more than a handful of quests.

Those aren't fireflies

If plowing through mobs gives next to no xp and there are no quests to speak of, what was I doing clearing seven levels of tombs over five nights last week? Having fun! Really, it's as simple as that. Paragon's Gate is atmospheric, intricate and has a great sense of place. Everywhere in City of Steam has a great sense of place. Being there is absorbing in a way I haven't experienced for quite a while and the combat itself is slick, simple and satisfying. If you like traditional MMO hotbar combat you'll be right at home like I was.

There's a skill tree that lets you spend points to improve the skills you have or add new ones, just as you'd expect. I found it clear and straightforward, intuitive and easy to understand. Just like everything in the game, come to think of it. It really is well-designed. Nothing's new but it all works and works as it ought to work. Slightly more unusual are the three stances you can toggle between on the fly. They switch you between sword-and-board defense, dual-wield slice and dice dps or two-handed big hitter. You have the weapons for all three options equipped at all times - you can see them on your character's back and at his side - and switching from one to another is instant and without penalty. Supposedly there is, or will be, a deal of tactical gameplay in this, with different mobs requiring different stances even within a single encounter. I didn't pay sufficient attention to notice if this is already in. I was too busy hitting things 'til they fell over.

It better not be Shakin' Stevens

I read a couple of comments that CoS is similar in gameplay to Diablo but I can neither or confirm or deny because I never played any of the Diablo games. I understood Diablo, Torchlight and their ilk were very fast and action-oriented, though. Combat in City of Steam is nothing like that at all. It's steady. I imagine some would call it slow. There are large parts of the dungeons where nothing aggressive lurks. You can see the mobs at a fair distance and you can pull them EQ-style to get something you think you can handle. I felt in control of the pacing throughout, except when I made an error of judgment, like opening a door I shouldn't have.

Being Boiled

Ah, doors. I like doors. Paragon's Gate has plenty. Some are locked, for which you need keys that drop occasionally. Some are hidden, sliding panels or walls that swing open at a touch. Although how you can call something "hidden" if it glows yellow when you run a mouse pointer over it ... . Maybe some kind of "Search" skill is coming. I hope so. Probably just about everything is "coming". It's really hard to remember City of Steam doesn't even claim to be in alpha yet. I swear I've played MMOs that launched with less content. I know  I've played released MMOs with less polish.

This is running on. Again. I still have a lot more to say. There will be a part three. At least.

In The City : City of Steam

I don't believe we've yet seen a really satisfying Steampunk MMO. Fond as I am (was) of NeoSteam, an eight-foot-tall tiger flattening balloon rabbits with a beer-barrel impaled on the end of a scaffolding pole does not scream 19th Century techno-noir to me. I've not revisited Gatheryn since beta so for all I know it may have changed out of all recognition but I remember it mostly as a Victorian-themed fairground portal for some uninspired mini-games. Echo Bazaar is wonderful, of course, but it's more Surrealist than Steampunk and more card-game than MMO.

Half the supposed high-fantasy MMOs that I've played have Steampunk elements. Airships drift, glide or rumble across the skies in WoW, EQ2 and Warhammer. The Empire in Allods is is almost post-steampunk, pushing into the mid 20th Century with its totalitarian politics and constructivist architecture. The Defiants in Rift look to have taken their entire aesthetic from the James Whale Frankenstein . How well technology of this order sits with high fantasy is debatable, although by now it's apparent that once you let gnomes into your fantasy world there really isn't any point trying to hold the line against clockworks.

Until yesterday I'd never heard of City of Steam. Massively posted a news item about a pre-beta "Sneak Peak" that looked interesting but supposedly you had to have registered on the CoS website before the 28th of February when the event began. Massively right on the case there, then. A bit of digging around turned up a website that still had a few keys left from some cross-pollinating offer and with one bound and several registration forms I was in. (Looks like they might still have a few left, although a lot more have gone since I nabbed mine last night).

The Sneak Peak lasts for two weeks so there's a week left. The question is, is it any good? Well, yes it it is, rather and since there's no NDA here's what I've found so far.

City of Steam is in great shape for pre-beta. I've put several hours in and I haven't run into a  single bug, unless Clockroaches count. There's plenty of content in place, all running smooth as gnomish machine-oil. Not that there are any gnomes. Or dwarves. No, wait, hang on there are dwarves but they're clockwork. I think. I spoke to one and he chided me for forgetting about his marvelous clockwork city, tragically now overrun by undead. Nice twist.

The writing is very good.  Mechanist Games, the studio behind the game, may be Chinese but the opening credits name one David Lindsay as both Creator and Producer and the English throughout is impeccable. The text and dialog isn't just grammatically correct either. It's idiomatically comfortable, literate and witty and there's a wealth of interesting detail which I found endearingly old-school. Every item has a mouseover tooltip that reads like an entry from a tabletop rpg rulebook from the 1990s.

The UI is first rate. Elegant, clear and responsive. Can't fault it. I found it intuitive, familiar without being generic and a pleasure to use. The game runs in a browser but looks like it's running from a client. Masses of detail, very gritty feel. There doesn't seem to be a first-person view option but the camera is well-behaved. Movement is click-to-move, which is fine by me. Maybe they'll add WASD at a later stage.

"None" includes Your Reporter

Visually City of Steam is gorgeous. I couldn't get it to run full-screen, which is a shame because I would love to be able to get an even better look at the dirty buildings, moss-covered cobbled streets and juddering steam-powered vehicles. Airships and even flying steam-locomotives cross the skies above the sprawling city in which you begin. It really is a city, too. Seen from above in the opening cinematic it reveals itself as port city that has spread back into the surrounding hills like a stain. Reminded me a bit of Bilbao.

Thus far I've spent most of my time taking screenshots and exploring. At the end of various streets or bridges an option sometimes popped up inviting me into some suburb where the City Guard's writ no longer runs, or down into the inevitable substrate of sewer and crypt. Instanced dungeons, in a word. Two words. For a pre-beta there seemed to be quite a few  already,  stretching at least into the high 20s.

Click here...

... Go there.

One feature I really liked was the signposts. You can click on the destination and your character will make his own way there. I've played plenty of MMOs that have this autoroute feature activated from the quest journal or the map but for some reason having it on a large sign in the gameworld itself seems much more immersive.


Ah, there's that word. Immersion. Some MMOs attain it effortlessly, some couldn't find it in the dictionary. I suspect City of Steam has it and if it does it's down to something I can't show in a screenshot. Sound. The sound direction is about the best I've heard in an MMO. The music is sweeping, elegaic, bittersweet but it's not the music that builds the pervasive atmosphere, it's the ambient sound. Train whistles hoot mournfully, sinister functionaries make mysterious announcements over a distorted tannoy system, dogs bark somewhere in the maze of streets that stretches into the distance all around. It's like being somewhere.

And with that I think it's time to take a break. More on City of Steam to come. Probably. So many MMOs, so little time. I think this one deserves attention.

Just One More Thing...

Sunday Morning. By long tradition a time to sort through packs and bags and vaults. To wake sleepy half-elves and dozing dwarves and send them grumbling down to the mailbox or the bank. Sometimes morning runs into afternoon. Sometimes it lasts all day.

Alright, I'll come clean. Sometimes it lasts all week. An inordinate amount of my gameplay in most MMOs seems to consist of moving items from one virtual storage area to another. There's a reason this blog is called "Inventory Full".

Am I complaining? Hardly! It's one of the things I enjoy the most. It's satisfying in the same way tidying a cluttered room is satisfying, only without the dust and the endless bending over. Nothing better than sitting back after a couple of hours hard clicking to see three empty bags looking back at you. Another 120 slots to fill with Large Meaty Bones and Droag Egg Fragments.

Sunday Morning at the Bank. With Bear.

Available storage space has a big influence on how loyal I am to an MMO. A game that allows me to hoard vast quantities of junk that I'll probably never find a use for has a significantly better chance of seeing me log in regularly and keep on logging in for years than one that doesn't. I may lose interest in progressing the characters, I may never have been interested in the story, but I will always need to visit my stuff.

Spot the odd one out

 Contrarily, MMOs that are extremely stingy with storage space sort of work for me too. It's liberating to know that I can't just pick up everything that falls out of a goblin or hang onto all my no-stats starter gear in case I ever get the urge to stroll around town dressed as a dirt-poor farm-boy. Having just the one bag and a measly bank vault means I spend a lot more time actually doing the things the designers probably meant me to do, like quests and stuff. I've never once felt tempted to spend real money to get more space, though, so that part of the design doesn't seem to be working.

I rarely build up any kind of long-term connection with MMOs where space is a commodity. I find I think of myself as a wandering ronin. Oh alright then, The Littlest Hobo. I'm free to come and go as I please, and after a while I don't please all that often and finally not at all.

So, masses of storage space good, almost no storage space also good, if not for long. It's in the middle that I run into problems. I moaned about Lord of the Rings Online a while back. At the time I was complaining more about how tiny everything was rather than how much of it I had but the sheer quantity of junk that I have squashed into a middling amount of storage space does present a real barrier to entry when it comes to dropping back in.

No I am not a "beardy hobbit"

What I lack in height...

The recently-announced and somewhat controversial Premium Wallet that I read about over at KTR  isn't going to help me all that much. I don't have all that many extraneous currency items clogging up my packs and even if I did I surely wouldn't be paying any ten dollars for aggregation rights. Mostly what I have is crafting raws. And food. And potions. Something else that Zubon mentions could just make a difference to my LotRO quality of life, though, and that's the Shared Bank. I might finally have found a use for the 1045 Turbine Points I have somehow accumulated. Well, 995 of them at least.

Not quite sure what brought all that on. None of this was what I intended to write about when I started at the top of the page. That's Sunday morning for you.

Furglebin's Journal 4: EQ2

So here I am talking to gnomes. Only the first thing I notice is they do not sound like gnomes. They look like gnomes. They are shorter than mes. They are both wearing eyeglasses like gnomes always wears but when they speak there is no mentioning cognoggins or foozlewickets like you usually get with a gnome. Generally you get more of that sort of thing than you know what to do with with a gnome but not from these ones. No, they sound like Erudites or maybe even Dark Elfs with a lot of spouting on about battle and victory and suchlike.

Gnome?

Or No Gnome?

Well, I have my suspicions because I have seen a lot in this city by now and I know that everyone is not always what they wants you to think they are but all the same my whiskers are twitching and that means adventures. So I do what the "gnomes" tell me and go through their magic gateway. Which is another thing that is not right if you thinks about it because if they were really gnomes it would be some clockwork contraption with a lot of whirring and clicking and bits falling off and some other gnome would be cursing and hitting it with a spanner. It would not be a glowy magic thing what looks like a sea-shell that works perfectly every time.

Everyone mill about so it looks like there's more of us

Champions Respite is the place I end up. It is sort of a shopping mall and waiting room for people that want to murder each other. All sorts of people come in, Iksars and Trolls and Dwarves and just about anyone really. There is a Priest of Discord what sorts us all out into teams and asks us where we want to go. He gives four choices, called Smuggler's Den, Frozen Tundra, Battlefield of Ganak and Gears of Klak'Anon. I do not know anything about any of them but when I see that the teams for different places are different sizes I think I better go in the biggest team. Then I can just get into the middle of a crowd and figure it out as I go along.

Are you sure you're a priest?

Smugglers Den is the one where it is two dozen on each side and it is an amazing place, all towers and islands up in the air. I do not have a clue what I am doing so I just chase around with everyone else. Some Barbarian shouts out orders and mostly we do what he tells us. Tiger is being an armadillo, which is great for the killing other people part but does not work so well for keeping me alive so I die quite a lot. 'Course no-one stays dead. I pop back up in a few seconds every time but it is hard to get back to where everyone is so I try not to die if I cans help it.

Just when I am beginning to wonder how long all this is going to go on for it stops. Back in Champions Respite we all get our marks on how well we did and we won and I did alright I think, specially for a first time. I even get some Tokens to spend in the shops on stuff to help with fighting other adventurers 'cos it is different to fighting monsters, or so they say. Seems pretty much the same to me except adventurers don't keep still for you to kill them like an orc does and they swear more.

You take it! I took it last time.

Anyway I get the taste for it so I try again, only with Tiger being a bear which means at least I get healed a bit when the stupid healers on my team keep healing the fat tanks and not important DPS rats like mes. Funny how that keeps happening. The Priest of Discord likes to shuffle all the teams up so now and agains I end up killing someone what I was saving from being killed the time before. Makes it hard to remember who is on what side sometimes but I think it is a good plan cos it keeps things fairer so the same team does not win every match.

I hear there's a cafe at the top

Cutting a long tale short, over the next few weeks I try all the Battlegrounds and they are all good except Frozen Tundra which is rotten. In that one it is all fighting monsters and I can do that anywhere. Gears of Klak'Anon is just this tiny room where everyone piles into the middle and someone grabs a little stone and tries to hang on to it while everyone else fights over who gets to hold it next. Battlefield of Ganak is a lot of running up and down a field grabbing the other team's flag and bringing it back and of course you got to stop them grabbing yours at the same time.

It is all good fun and very exciting but the thing is that everyone in the Battlegrounds is either exactly as far along in learning as I am or they have learned pretty much all there is to learn. It is one thing or the other and nothings inbetween. Which means that if I want to go fightings other adventurers for tokens I cannot learn anything new and that is not right. And that is why in the end I decide I have had enough running around grabbing flags and stones and towers and playing tag with adventurers.

It is about time I got on with learning how to be a Beastlord so that is what I am doing. When I have learned all there is to learn about that, then I will come back and try again.

Taking The Loong View

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

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

Quit hogging the camera, cat!

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

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

Slot in top of head is not for litter

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

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

I told you once. Shoo!.

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

Do my feet even touch the ground?

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

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

Getting Steamed Up

Oh look, here I am writing a blog post at ten past ten on a Saturday night. How did that happen?

Mrs Bhagpuss is away at the moment and I did sort of have a plan to play something other than EQ2 for a while. Then the whole PSS1 thing blew up and I found myself spending more time on EQ2Wire and the SoE forums than I spent playing. Even when I was logged in I was chatting about the situation while sorting my bank vault, which scarcely counts as high adventure.

Three points. Read 'em and weep

So this morning I was keen to throw myself into something. Something exciting. The GW2 beta application put Guild Wars at the front of my mind so I thought I'd go over there and look into this Hall of Monuments thing. Yes, I know I said I wasn't going to bother with it. Yes, I know I said I probably wouldn't even use the same account to play GW2. But I found that nifty HoM points calculator thingy and I had three points (and yes for the last time I know everyone has three points) so I thought, well I bet I could get a couple more and then I'd have a tapestry.

Do I want a tapestry? I don't know! I have no idea what it does. But I could get one, maybe. That would be good because then I'd have a thing that I don't have and that's always good. Isn't it? Don't confuse me!

Anyhooo... I did a little reading on the GW2 site and then I clicked the icon for Guild Wars on my desktop and what happened? Nothing. More than nothing, in fact. It seems my portable drive died in the night. I blame Eligium.

Kinda buff for a panda....

What's Eligium? You didn't follow the link, did you? Good move. You have more sense than I do, that's obvious. I probably shouldn't even have linked it. Eligium is a F2P MMO from Frogster that has pandas. They sent me an email saying they were in open beta so I downloaded it. I can't tell you what it's like because I haven't even gotten as far as character creation. Every time I try to run it it craps out on me. Late last night I tried to get it to run about half a dozen times and it kept crashing. Its on my portable drive and now my portable drive doesn't work.

Ok, circumstantial evidence. Whatever, my drive is fried. I spent a long time trying to get a response out of it with no success. Currently it is sitting on its eighth hour and counting of SeaTools recovery with over 2500 errors recovered. No Guild Wars for me. Also no STO, Allods, Ryzom or half a dozen other MMOs. Fingers crossed, maybe tomorrow.

Wurm then. I really wanted to play Wurm anyway. It's browser based so no problem there. Except it seems there's a client I downloaded and forgot all about that underwrites the browser. I put it on the portable drive, naturally. 

From our live feed

So I played EQ2. My conjuror dinged 89. But I didn't want to play EQ2 so I patched Rift and hit Play. The client hangs. Can't get in. I could work out how to fix that perhaps but it's getting late. So here I am writing this while LotRO patches. Actually it's done now, but it took twenty minutes.

What have I learned?

1. I need a back-up drive with all my MMOs on, fully patched. Like that's going to happen.

2. Maybe I ought to get Skyrim or Kingdoms of Amalur.  Just in case. Like we have candles and matches in case of a power cut.

3. Maybe Steam is not such a terrible idea.

I have been against the concept of Steam from the start. My games but not on my machine? Pshaw! Doesn't seem such a bad idea now, does it?. Tomorrow I'll look into it.

Meantime, LotRO's patched. Time to go hobbitting.

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?