More Than Shooters, More Than Looters

I am not now, nor will I ever be, an Anthem player. All the same, I seem to know quite a lot about it. For one thing, I know it's a "Looter Shooter", a term I don't ever recall seeing until last week.

The name itself may be relatively new but the looter shooter genre (sub-genre, whatever) claims a history stretching all the way back to the 1970s. It also seems to encompass a staggering range of games, most which, on the face of it, have little in common.

The PC Gamer article from last summer (linked above) traces the origins as far back as Dungeons and Dragons' random loot tables, which sounds a bit like tracing the origins of cyberpunk back to Caxton's introduction of the printing press. Still, it's an intriguing timeline that goes some way towards explaining, or at least illuminating, a few anomalous entries in the MMORPG catalog.

I always thought there was something off about including Hellgate: London, Tabula Rasa, Defiance and even Warframe, the only one I've actually played, in the core genre. That's indicative. Even though I sometimes trawl the web for new MMORPGs to try, and even though some of these games arrived when the field was considerably less crowded than it is now, most of them never appealed to me. I was never really sure what they were.

It was always clear, even from the few crumbs of detail I was able to scavenge back then, that neither Hellgate: London nor Tabula Rasa was likely to play much like the MMOs I enjoyed. There seemed to be altogether too much desperate running and shooting and nowhere near enough pottering around pleasant countryside performing trivial tasks for locals too lazy or inept to manage for themselves.

By the time Defiance arrived I was somewhat more inured to the idea of roaming the wasteland, ever alert for the whoomp of an inter-dimensional portal that would herald the imminent incursion of death from above. Rift pretty much turned the key in that lock for me.

Even so, I never really connected the dots between those distinctly low-key entries to the MMO genre and the more recent surge of big names like the Destiny and Division franchises. As for linking any of them to the Diablo series or Borderlands...

Diablo, of course, is another game I've never played in any of its incarnations, although sometimes it's hard to remember that, so very much have I read about it over the years. And, anyway, I always thought of Diablo and its ilk (Path of Exile, Torchlight), as "ARPGs" not "looter shooters".

ARPG is another slippery term. I first encountered it when I bought Dungeon Siege back in 2002. By that time I'd already been playing MMORPGs for several years but I was still interested in some kind of offline alternative as backup for those occasions when my Internet connection was having issues. It's hard to believe now, but back around the turn of the millennium some ISPs considered a day or two to be a very reasonable response to a hardware failure in their system.

Dungeon Siege was a big disappointment. It looked fantastic and it was as slick as butter but I found it utterly pointless. Who wants to run from place to place, mowing down hundreds of enemies, stacking your bags with junk and then sorting through it for the good stuff? Not me. It seemed like the dullest kind of busy-work. Still does.

So much so, in fact, that when I ran into what felt like a similar always-on loot fountain at the start of EverQuest II's Rise of Kunark expansion in 2007 I walked away in disgust. I ran all the way back to the low-loot safety of EverQuest, where I stayed for six months until the taint of too much, too fast faded.

Ever since then I've been extremely wary of anything calling itself an "ARPG". Not that it's always been easy to sift out the suspects. The waters have been muddied by the adoption of the acronym to describe games that use the mouse for combat, like DCUO, Neverwinter Online or Black Desert. Technically, I believe, we should be using the acronym ACRPG (Action Combat Role Playing Game) for those but no-one ever does.

It would, then, be quite useful if the term "looter shooter" replaced ARG for those games whose primary purpose is to kill vast numbers of enemies for vast piles of loot. I would safely be able to put all of those to one side and forget about them, leaving me to concentrate on trying to work out which mouse-mode ARPGs deserve a closer look.

Given my well-established predilection for inventory management it is, perhaps, somewhat surprising that I don't like loot fountain games more than I do. Or, indeed, at all. I'm not entirely sure why it is. There are probably a number of reasons. The foremost, however, is undoubtedly that I find such games silly.

For any form of entertainment there's a point beyond which it becomes impossible to continue to suspend disbelief. Once that point is passed there's really no return. If you're watching a movie or reading a novel and you find yourself thinking "Well, that would never happen..." you might as well give up.

In video games most things that happen would never happen so the bar is set slightly differently. For me, when it doesn't make any real difference what I kill because everything drops everything all the time, well that would never happen...

About the only MMORPG - well, kind of - that used something like this mechanic and got away with it was the original Guild Wars. There was (still is, I guess) an awful lot of loot in that game, all of it color-coded, most of it non-specific to the mobs that dropped it. I didn't like it but it wasn't quite annoying enough to ruin the rest of the game, most of which I did like. Sometimes it came close, though.

Guild Wars 2 has followed that path, somewhat. The sheer quantity of items that drop there these days is staggering. It's also a frequent source of complaint. For a long while it didn't really bother me too much, mostly because GW2 also has a decent range of options for disposing of the detritus quickly and painlessly - auto-loot, auto-banking, mass salvage...

It does seem to be getting worse, though. I am starting to find even the parts I used to enjoy, like opening all the little boxes and bags that drop to see what's inside, irritating. Once again, it's nowhere in itself enough to make me stop playing but add it to the game's other ongoing longueurs and things mount up. I've reached the stage where even one more minor annoyance makes me feel like playing something else instead.

The other major thing I have against ARPGs or Looter Shooters or whatever we're going to call them, something to which I alluded earlier, is the way the mechanic emphasizes the sheer pointlessness of the whole endeavor. Video games are pointless enough to begin with, without having that meaninglessness repeatedly driven home by a never-ending shower of stuff, almost none of which you want or need.

For me it turns the entire process into the fantasy equivalent of sorting your garbage for re-cycling. And yes, I do understand that that's ironic given, as I said, my love of inventory management. It's not for nothing I chose Emerson's oft-misquoted line "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds" as my personal motto. Some inventory management is fun and some isn't. It's important to know the difference.

The upshot of all this is that it really makes no nevermind to me whether BioWare sort out their loot tables or not. No doubt they will, eventually, although whether anyone will be left to care by then is probably the bigger question. Meanwhile it's moderately entertaining, watching them flail and fail.

The real concern from my perspective isn't so much whether any of the particular Looter Shooters gets its looting or its shooting right. No, it's more how that success might cast a longer shadow across the wider genre.

With both EQ and EQII opening retro-servers today that at least pay lip service to returning to the values of the past, I'm kind of looking forward to a return to the days of camping specific mobs for specific drops. I always liked doing that.

Looking ahead, I think limited loot is going to feature quite high on my tick list of features that make an MMORPG worth trying. Assuming we get ever any new MMOs that look worth trying in the first place...

A New Career In A New Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How long will the server be open?

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

If the server closes, what happens to my character?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is Endless Conquest?

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

Who is eligible for Endless Conquest?

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

What do I get with Endless Conquest?

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

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

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

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

Talking To Strangers

This corner of the blogosphere seems to be passing through some kind of reflexive wavefront right now. Everywhere I look I see thoughtful, analytical, detailed discussions. Mechanics, metaphysics, motive, all the tropes of academia - or at least a lively student bar - directed at dissecting, discussing and determining what makes an MMORPG.

There's more to react to than there is time to react, which is both frustrating and energizing. I note with pleasure the long comment threads (and the long comments) that trail many of these thought-provoking posts. Blogging dead? Doesn't seem like it right now.

One of the recent wave of posts that particularly struck a note with me was Naithin's commentary on the Transition from Social to Solo in MMORPG gameplay. We've been round this track more than a few times but there's always more nuance to tease out.

For one thing, I hadn't ever really thought about the provenance of the term "Pick Up Group" before. I tried to think back to when I first heard it. I'm not at all sure it was in use back when I was joining - or recruiting - pick up groups most evenings and every weekend. Google, for once, doesn't have an awful lot to contribute. The earliest reference I could find only went back to 2006. There's a very interesting and detailed game-by-game rundown of usage at TVTropes , which strongly implies a much older heritage, but it sheds little light on provenance.

As far as I recall, we used simply to refer to "groups", without any need for further definition or clarification. I'd probably played MMORPGs for several years before I ever heard the term "Guild Group". People often used to speak of their guild responsibilities and it was commonplace for people to have to leave to "help a guildie" or go on a guild raid, but I can't recall anyone ever leaving a group I was in because they preferred to join an exclusive group of people from their guild just for regular, everyday play.

When I was in a cross-guild chat channel in EverQuest that satisfied most of my grouping requirements, we would fill spots from outside the channel by asking if anyone had friends or guildmates who wanted to run with us. If those people fitted in to our culture we'd invite them to join the channel.

We prided ourselves on being competent and capable but there was a wide variety of skill and experience. We had some very casual players who were great company but needed a degree of direction and some top-end raiders who were there just to chill and relax. We liked to get things done and we liked to challenge ourselves but clearly what was cutting edge content for some of us was slippers and cocoa for others.

In twenty years of playing MMORPGs, the couple of years I spent with the people in that chat channel represent the zenith of my grouping experience. It offered the flexibility and variety of pick up grouping but with the familiarity and structure of a guild or static group. In some ways it prefigured, in social terms if not mechanics, the kind of open group play that eventually grew out of Warhammer's Public Quests.

While, as I said, the members of that chat channel liked to get things done, the real reason we were all there was to chat. Okay, not everyone would have listed their priorities in exactly that order, but fitting in socially was the defining factor on whether guests ended up getting an invite and the way we assessed social suitability had much more to do with affability or snappy repartee than whether you mistimed the odd heal.

In the comment thread that follows Naithin's post there's a discussion about the changing role of text and voice. Jeromai has a theory, to which I also cleave:

"...the design of action-focused games has steadily made it physically impossible or inconvenient to maintain a good typed conversation. Typed conversation has more stately pauses, and takes your fingers away from WASD, causing your characters to pause in whatever they are doing. Given that most people want very much to be actually playing during their game time, every potential sentence is briefly weighed (subconsciously or otherwise) for whether it’s worth utterance."

When I was googling "pick up groups" I came across a fascinating piece of academic research at Wiley's Online Library, entitled "Where Everybody Knows Your Name". It's a dense and very heavily referenced paper and I haven't even begun to dig into the detail, but just on a quick scan some paragraphs positively jump out:

"Text‐based interaction in such worlds is incessant and ubiquitous. There is not just one chat channel but multiple simultaneous ones: public, private, and various group channels. Together, these function as both a one‐to‐many and one‐to‐one communicative space..."

Despite the encroachment of voice chat, that seems to me still to be the case, at least in the MMORPGs I play. In Guild Wars 2, for example, voice communications are almost de rigeur in many World vs World squads but that doesn't mean no-one talks in type. Quite the opposite, in fact. It just adds yet another layer.

It's become a truism to state that the exponential growth of social media and the mainstreaming of instantaneous global communication has stripped the magic and mystique from talking in real-time to strangers on the other side of the world. And it most likely has.

Whether that has very much to do with the changing attitudes to running dungeons with strangers, I'm becoming less certain every time I think about it. As for the accepted narrative that people no longer want to talk to strangers in MMOs these days, the more I think about that, the less convincing I find it.

I talk to strangers every day, in GW2 and EverQuest II and pretty much in whatever MMORPG I happen to find myself. Not, as I once did, in group chat seen by no more then five or six other people, but in open channels where the conversations bounce between dozens of participants in front of an unknowable audience, any of whom might join in at any moment.

It's entirely commonplace for me to be calling out scouting information in Map chat, arguing with someone in Team, making sarcastic comments to Mrs Bhagpuss about other players in Guild and bantering in Squad, all while I'm on auto-run across the map in the middle of the Zerg. It's much the same as I've been doing in a variety of channels in  a multiplicity of MMOs for two decades.

The only element that's missing from the mix are those rambling group chats on personal and out-of-game topics we used to indulge in between pulls and those, it seems to me, were more a function of the specific combat mechanics of those games than any kind of end in themselves. If you have to sit down and do nothing for anything up to five minutes after every big fight you have to pass the time somehow...

I don't feel there's been quite as much of a move away from the old methods, either of communication or socialization in MMORPGs as has sometimes - often - been claimed. I'm not sure there will be, either. People do like to talk, and text is orders of magnitude more efficient than voice in the context of the shared "third spaces" of MMOs.

Which isn't to say that online games in general aren't travelling in a different direction. They are. The widely-praised non-text, non-speech communication system built into Apex Legends suggests that mainstream gaming is evolving away from the kind of personalized, intimate relationships we've so long taken for granted towards a more functional, gameplay-directed future.

Battle Royales aren't MMORPGs, though. Not hardly. MMORPG players like to chat. If they can't do it during fights they'll go sit somewhere safe and do it there instead. I don't see any sign of that ending any time soon.

World of Warclaw: GW2

Well, that didn't take long. The much-ballyhooed and somewhat delayed Warclaw update dropped at 5pm, my time. I took the above screenshot of my Elementalist riding hers at about five to six.

It actually only took me half an hour but I spent a while faffing about doing other stuff. I saw the first person link a Claim Certificate at nineteen minutes past five so I was obviously slacking.

It's a goofy looking creature. Definitely not very warlike. It handles fairly normally, without the extreme lurching of some of GW2's generally abysmal mounts. I'm waiting  to see whether it will end up being an essential part of the meta, an optional extra or something no-one ever mentions again once they've ticked the box.

I'd guess the second outcome is most likely, although I can see the Warclaw's ability to instantly kill downed players being adopted with gusto if it works smoothly. The potential 50k damage per mount to gates could make a big difference to the ability of small groups to take structures, too.

The requirements for the mount were known well in advance so I'm surprised Dulfy doesn't already have a guide up. It hardly needs one. It's very straightforward to get. If you do need guidance, there's a checklist on the forum and the details are on the Wiki but be aware of the current bug that could block progress.

When I logged out to have a muffin and write this post there were queues on all four maps in Tier 1 and all of them were growing. Given that this is still in the middle of the working day for most players, I can only imagine the chaos in North American primetime.

All of the necessary actions to get the mount can be be completed in the Edge of the Mists spillover map, with the sole exception of taking a camp. I believe EotM spins up as many instances as required ( although it's been dead for so long I can't honestly remember.) and it's far more PvE-friendly, so I imagine that's where most will go.

I'd estimate that, for someone who never sets foot in World vs World, it will take several game sessions to complete the necessary Reward Track. You also need fifty skirmish tickets but the collection gives you forty. And some badges, which almost everyone will already have from achievement milestones.

Why anyone outside of WvW would want the thing is another question altogether. It's the slowest of all mounts in PvE and all its skills are specific to WvW. For completionists only, I would guess.

I was dead set against mounts coming to WvW and I remain to be convinced that they will be anything more than an annoyance but we will see. As for the conceit that the event will introduce new players to the game mode, it is to laugh. Ha ha.

What it will do is let PvE players see WvW at its most frustrating, infuriating worst. Team chat will be a conveyor belt of tedious, repetitive questions, insults and memes. Gameplay will consist of mindless Ktraining (zergs rotating around the map taking structures while avoiding each other). Lag will be off the scale. If you have to run to find the zerg you'll be ganked. And before you even get to all that "fun" you'll have to sit in a 30-person queue and stew.

It's an experience hardly likely to persuade any casual PvE player to change modes and it royally pisses off the locals. The only upside is it won't last long. These things never do.

If it turns out I end up liking the mount I'll be sure to post about it. Don't hold your breath.

Here's Where The Story Ends

Yesterday brought the somewhat sad news that Cryptic is shuttering its player-made content platform, The Foundry. Both Neverwinter and Star Trek Online used the engine to allow players to design, build and populate instances for other players to explore and enjoy.

I never tried the STO version but I did spend some time running Tipa's re-creations of classic EverQuest zones in NWO. My review of those experiences, particularly Tipa's "Newfallen" dungeon, positively gushes:

"It was great! At the end, when you get the chance to review and rate the Foundry you've just completed, I gave it five stars. For an old-time EQ player the nostalgia factor is through the roof. The physical reconstruction of Befallen is exemplary"

Tipa herself used regularly to review Neverwinter Foundries on her own, much-missed blog, West Karana. I loved reading those. Probably more than I would have loved playing them. The standard, as you'd imagine, was variable but there were gems to be discovered.

I'm a lot more familiar with EverQuest II's simplified take on the idea. There are nine posts tagged "Dungeon Maker" on this blog, dating back to when it was introduced as part of the controversial "features expansion, Age of Discovery.

I really liked the Dungeon Maker. I used it a lot when it was new and for quite a while afterwards. I made three full dungeons, all of which were quite silly and rather jolly. They were fun to make and  run.

They didn't take long to put together. I don't think any of them took me much longer than a Sunday afternoon. They were quick to run, too. I published them all in-game and they got some play but most people had their mind on something more than cute dialog and silliness when they opened that Dungeon Maker window.

As Telwyn put it in a post about the closure of The Foundry:

"Sadly MMO players being what they so often are, min-maxers to the extreme, exploits were found and the system was heavily nerfed reward-wise... Players also made pits full of monsters that you could easily slaughter with ranged attacks from safety above as a way to speed farm experience."

Almost exactly what happened in EQII. From my own post on the latter days of the Dungeon Maker:

"The dungeons gave no loot per se, only a special currency, but the mobs you killed inside them did give xp. Very good xp. At least, it turned out it was very good if the dungeon-maker stuffed a few rooms with high-value, weak mobs, all piled up to be AE'd.

The most efficient mob slaughterhouses quickly rose to the top of the Dungeon Creator rankings and for the longest time almost all you could hear in /lfg was people forming groups to speed-run them. They had no story, no dialog, no script, no entertainment value of any kind. They were the definition of repetitive tedium but they were efficient so people did them. Over and over and over again."

It may not have mattered all that much when all games were offline and single player. If you want to cheat yourself, go ahead, knock yourself out. Who cares? In the context of a persistent shared space, though, where, whether you like it or not, elements of competetive play exist, such behaviors have an impact that can't be ignored.

In every case I've seen, developers, who one might, at best, call naive or optimistic, introduce systems and mechanics that experience and history should tell them will be exploited. And they are. Abusively, repeatedly and shamelessly.

Over time, if left unattended, these systems become a running sore. Some players gleefully indulge but far more grimly accept. When the widely-accepted understanding is that efficiency comes from doing something dull, repetitive and meaningless, that becomes the meta.

The demographic that enjoys and employs the tools in the way the developers intended - the creatives who put their own time and energy into making what they believe to be entertaining content and the explorers who consume it - find themselves heavily outnumbered by the achievers, who simply want to find the shortest route to the biggest reward.

At its worst, as happened in EQII, the exploits threaten to become a black hole that sucks the life out of the entire game. At which point the nerfs begin.

The developers always try to save their babies and they always fail. A succession of revisions incrementally reduce the attractiveness of the game mode, irritating both those exploiting it and those who want to see it gone, alike. Ever-resourceful, players find a way around the roadblocks. The nerfs intensify. Eventually the entire mechanic is reduced to a rewardless shell. That solves the problem: no-one makes any more content, no-one consumes any. Game over.

In EQII, I can confirm the Dungeon Maker died long ago, at least as a practical source of experience or reward. Holly Windstalker's Producer's Letter from December 2014 gives chapter and verse.  It's still there, should you want to see it. I ran one of my dungeons just now and it still works. You just don't get anything for doing it except the pleasure of my so-called jokes. Other than that, the Dungeon Maker's  mostly used for storage these days. You can stash a lot of house items in a Dungeon Maker dungeon.

I don't know if The Foundries in the two Cryptic games reached that nadir of decline before Cryptic pulled the plug. I don't play either game often and on the odd occasion I do I certainly don't visit the leaderboards to see if anyone's made any new dungeons lately.

The reason Cryptic give for closing The Foundry doesn't have anything to do with misuse or exploits, anyway. All that was dealt with long ago. It's merely that there's no longer anyone left working for the company who knows how the thing works. I imagine very few players are using it any more, either to entertain themselves or others. If it was still popular it would be worth training someone to keep it going.

Player-created content is an excellent idea in theory. It gives everyone more to do and it costs the company less. Unfortunately, players are, as always, their own worst enemies. There's no hope whatsoever that a substantial number won't ruin things for themselves and everyone else if they get the chance.

All of which sugests to me that game developers should think harder before introducing these systems and take much greater care to close all the loopholes beforehand. Yes, I know players will always find exploits no-one thought of but in most cases they're finding ones that anyone could have thought of. And should have.

Gaming has an incredible wealth and depth of talent just waiting to be tapped. No need to outsource or pay - all the resources you need are already there, playing the games, and they'll work for free. In fact, they'll probably pay you.

SOE/DBG's Player Studio shows how a more successful iteration can work. It, too, has had its problems, especially in recent times but it's still there, hanging on, and now Daybreak seem to be ready to blow some of the dust off and hang out a fresh shingle.

Maybe the Dungeon Maker will never make a comeback. Maybe submissions to Player Studio will continue to pile up and process slowly. It's still a better outlook than The Foundry's going to see, more's the pity.

As Wilhelm points out in the comments at TAGN, maintaining legacy systems can be a trial and an expense. On the other hand, closing them down can make you look a little desparate. Here's hoping Cryptic's parsimony doesn't signal the beginning of a trend.

Art House Director

It's long been my contention that the only people who don't believe EverQuest II has the best housing in MMORPGs are those who've never taken the time and trouble to experience it in all its astonishing glory. Their loss.

It's not my job to convince anyone, of course. That would be down to Daybreak Games' marketing department, assuming they have one. I sometimes wonder. Anyway, I just wanted to post a few pictures of a couple of the new artworks that arrived with the Chronoportals event that's live throughout March.

Just for logging in you get the magnificent "Rise of Kunark" oil painting, which is the Keith Parkinson box art from the original boxed expansion. You can buy a 15" by 30" photo stock print of that from the official KP website for $80. Or you can have this one, framed, resizeable to several feet on a side, for free.

There's an absolutely astonishing wealth of artwork available within EQ2. Occupy White Walls might think it's breaking new ground with its virtual gallery gameplay but clearly DAISY hasn't been round my imaginary Maj'Dul house lately.

 If there's one reward that's guaranteed to get me collecting event currency it's artwork. All of my characters' walls are covered with paintings and etchings and drawings. There are statues and sculptures everywhere you look.

One day I really ought to buckle down and find out just what's available. My virtual collection ressembles my real-life pre-MMORPG buying sprees - random, chaotic, occasionally serendipitous.

Niami Denmother, as always, does a superb job of cataloging these things. Here's her list of the latest additions. With illustrations, naturally.

I think my favorite this time has to be the golden statue of Firiona Vie. I've "met" Firiona so many times now I feel I actually know her. It's a bit odd to have a life-size statue of her in my house. Not bad odd. But still odd.

I put her right in front of my trophy wall. There could be implications there that don't bear close examination. Best not think about it.

I bought a couple of the new paintings. "To The Tavern", The Halas one, almost has a hint of Alex Toth about it. Quite a lot of EQ2 paintings have that sensibility.

I'm not sure how much longer I'll be able to go on placing objects in this particular house. According to the stats I'm at 640/700 but I might be able to expand. Doesn't matter. I have plenty more houses. One thing no-one is ever going to run out of in EQ2 is storage space for house items.

Enough about art. Since I'm home, I think I'll go and have a lie down. Read a little. Listen to some music. Saving the world can wait another day.

Death Cab For Cutie

Brad McQuaid's Pantheon team likes to sound the waters for feedback on just how old school they should go. A recent tweet on the official feed asked "If your character died in an extremely difficult area, would you bother to try and get your corpse back or just leave it to rot and take the exp hit/loot loss?".

Keen, who likes to bounce off Pantheon's churning idea mill, posted this morning in response. He opened his argument with a cheerful statement on all our behalfs: "I think we can all agree that no one would leave an EverQuest body full of loot to rot. It's simple untenable."

Oh, really? I beg to differ.

In the first six months I played EverQuest I left my corpse to rot three times. Three times that I remember.

The earliest was in Nektulos Forest. I was playing a Dwarven Cleric because some demented guide I'd found online claimed it was a good class/race combo for soloing. I mostly soloed when I started in EQ. Just being there was overwhelming enough without having to talk to people as well.

Clerics, dwarven or otherwise, did not solo well in Classic EverQuest. After two weeks of playing several hours every day I'd made it to level nine or thereabouts. I was hunting Wisps in the extremely badly-lit dark elf starting area when I ran over a small ridge and fell into a river.

I would have made it out if it hadn't been for the piranhas. I tried several times to swim down to my corpse so I could get my stuff back, such as it was, but all I achieved was a couple more fish-bitten corpses.

I was pissed off but I was already somewhat fed up with the tedious, slow grind of leveling a cleric so I took it as an opportunity to re-roll. On a different server.

These fish are no respecters of level, either.

Not too long afterwards I was playing my ranger in Blackburrow, when I made the mistake so many had made before me. I poked my nose into the hollow tree stump near the entrance. Next thing I knew I was deep underground, treading water in a shallow pool with a bunch of deep-red con gnolls staring down at me. The fall hadn't killed me but the gnolls soon fixed that.

I spent hours trying to get back to my corpse. I had a little help from sympathetic adventurers but we were all low level and no-one else wanted to die in the depths.

I never got my corpse back and I very, very nearly quit. It was the first time any video game had ever affected me so viscerally and there was absolutely nothing positive about the experience at all. I stopped playing for three days, which at the time was the longest I had ever stepped away from the game since the day I installed it.

The lure of Norrath was so strong, though, that I couldn't stay away. Not to mention that Mrs Bhagpuss was still playing, so I couldn't even pretend the damn game didn't exist. I re-rolled again and moved on to yet another server.

My third unrecoverable corpse came with the launch of Ruins of Kunark on April 24th, 2000. Well, it might not have been on the actual launch day. I can't remember if I was able to log in right at the start and I think I began by rolling an Iksar, anyway.

Suffice it to say it was the first time my Druid, then in the her very low twenties, stepped off the boat in Firiona Vie. Off she went to explore the new lands. Lasted about three minutes.

Nice. Bait the trap with your own kid.

Somewhere in deep undergrowth, with ferocious frame-rate lag (caused by the soon-to-become infamous trees) turning the game into a slide show, she ran into a nest of thrashing leeches.

I spent what felt like several hours trying to find the corpse. Even when I knew where it was I couldn't get to it. After a bunch of deaths, not all of them mine, I decided to cut my losses before someone lost a level. I left my corpse and everythng on it to rot in the steamy jungles of Kunark and went back to leveling in The Karanas.

Those are the three unrecoverable corpses I remember. There may have been others. Certainly I died in much worse places later on but by then either I'd worked out better techniques to get my stuff back or the game had changed to make it easier or both.

The time eventually came when I actively enjoyed corpse recoveries. I turned into that guy, the one who'd respond to your desperate plea for help in /ooc or guild chat. I'd get my druid to port you or my enchanter to invis you and together we'd get you up and running again.

I remember spending an entire session helping some Erudite recover his corpse from the Qeynos sewers. That was some of the most fun I'd had in the game back then. I remember when six of us stayed up until five in the morning on a work night getting our corpses back from the sixth floor of The Tower of Frozen Shadows. I remember the time a guy paid Mrs Bhagpuss to drag his corpse the entire length of West Karana and then had a paranoid fit that she was going to steal all his stuff and threatened to report her, so she just dumped his body by the side of the river and left him to get it for himself...

So many stories. But losing all your gear because you can't get your corpse is a thing of the past, of course. Are there any mainstream MMORPGs left where it could still happen? I can't think of one. Mostly what you get these days is a swift trip back to a nearby waypoint or graveyard or bind spot. You might lose a bit of xp, maybe your armor takes a tick of damage.

In EverQuest these days you can just pay an NPC in the Guild Lobby to summon your corpse and your Mercenary will rez it and get you 96% of the xp back. In EQ2 you get a tiny sliver of xp debt and a free trip to a safe part of the zone. In GW2 you pick a waypoint, pay a silver or two and start over as though nothing happened.

She died of a surfeit of lampreys.

About the only MMORPG I occasionally play that still makes it relatively awkward is, most surprisingly, World of Warcraft. It always puzzles me that the poster game for convenience expects you to run back to where you died if you want to avoid some fairly annoying penalties. And in black and white, too.

Looking ahead to Pantheon, I suspect the team will attempt to please everyone. Some version of corpse runs will exist for those who claim to like them (as I once did and still, perversely, might even now). For the average player, who at best finds the interruption to gameplay irritating and at worst might decide to give up on the whole thing, I'd bet there'll be some other option.

As there should be. While I would be the last person to claim that having to recover your corpse to get your gear back isn't immersive, that's the damned problem. It's too immersive.

Even twenty years ago, when I took all this stuff far more seriously than I do now, I wasn't playing MMORPGs so they would stimulate my emotions to the point where they actually hurt. It happened. It happened too often. It was never good, it was never fun and I never want to do that again.

There's a vast difference between a frisson and a shock. A little tingle can be exciting. A burn hurts. To my way of thinking, if a video game is engendering feelings that emulate those you'd avoid in real life, it's doing something wrong, not getting it right. Yes, you get some great stories but the cost is too high.

I'm all for being given the option to sneak back in and put one over on the dumb goblins that got lucky by snatching the loot back from under their noses. I understand the satisfaction of payback, calling in some favors, going back mob-handed to take names and kick ass but it needs to feel just real enough to give you a glow - no more than that.

Shouldn't be that hard to arrange should it? You just have to leave a back door.