Funcom, listen, I like Age of Conan a lot.  The game looks fantastic and the combat system is a lot of fun to me.  The setting is fantastic as well.  There are no other dark-fantasy MMOs out there that can compete with you.  Your level 1-20 experience is, hands down, my favorite newbie experience of any MMO ever, with the only possible exception being the World of Warcraft Death Knight starting quest line.  However, as much as I want to dive in a play your game you keep pushing me away with your bugs.

I know I mentioned this in episode 64 of Shut up We’re Talking, but I will elaborate here.  When Age of Conan release I was all in from day one.  It came out at a time when my interest in World of Warcraft was in a lull and I hadn’t started raiding yet.  While I recall being initially disappointed with the instancing of areas, I quickly got over it and absolutely fell in love with the game thanks to the rich Tortage experience.  Once you leave Tortage the game does immediately seem to just dump you into the “real” game world, losing some of the intimacy of the first 20 levels, and while I did sort of bitch about this on the podcast, that is not THAT big of a deal to me.  However, what truly sucked was that once out of Tortage the game would crash, without fail, to the desktop on me after a few minutes of running.  I was so frustrated by this since nothing I tried seemed to help.  After a week of solid play the game had me hooked.  I was dying to get out there and explore the lands beyond Tortage but I couldn’t.  Days turned to weeks and having wasted half my free initial month, I gave up and unsubscribed.  I suppose I should thank you since shortly after this I well and truly became addicted to World of Warcraft and completely invested myself in its end game experience.

When I read about the release of the Rise of the Godslayer expansion pack, I remembered how much fun I had with the game when I could actually play it and I figured that a year had been plenty of time to squash the majority of the major bugs.  I was wrong.  About a week prior to the release of Godslayer I resubscribed and jumped back in.  I created a new character to not only re-familiarize myself with the game, but also to see Tortage again.  That week was fantastic.  I felt like I might actually stick with the game for a while.  I raved to my brother about how much fun I was having and about how cool some of the Godslayer stuff looked.  Dark fantasy with an eastern themes expansion?  Holy shit, yes please!!  I mean, look at this freaking tiger mount for cryin’ out loud!

AoC's dope ride

I recently read a post by Darren over at commonsensegamer.com linking to a story about how changes to the Facebook notification policy have decimated the player numbers for many “games” on the site. Apparently the notifications were the primary viral method of attracting new players to the game.  Farmville in particular lost 7.7 million players in the past month, a game that once boasted that more than 10% of Americans have played. What this tells me is that their 10% number is a worthless stat.  A more interesting number would be the number of people that played Farmville for an hour or more last week.  They must have been padding their “player” count by including anyone who has ever even started up Farmville once.  Losing 7.7 million players in a month further tells me that a ton of people started the game and never went back once they realized what a waste of time it was.  Including one-time log in players in your numbers might be interesting to advertisers, but to players it makes the value difficult to use to make any sort of judgment about the game.

For Farmville though, a huge active players base doesn’t do all that much for the individual player though.  However, player count metrics are important to an MMO.  Population is the lifeblood of any online game.  Without a healthy population players languish, looking for people to play with and help with in game tasks.  With an MMO that uses a typical subscription model, listing the number of active subscriptions is a decent way of measuring the population health of the game.  Although there are likely plenty of accounts that pay but hardly play,  these people are at least paying for the game, thereby contributing monetarily to the game.  Then there are the global considerations.  WoW boasts incredible numbers, 11 million, I believe.  However, many of those players are from eastern countries where, rather than paying a flat monthly fee, they pay as they go.  This means that someone can pay $2, plsy for a day, and be counted as a player, even though they contribute to neither money or time to the game.

Free-to-play games can boast massive player numbers since the cost to a person to log in and try their game once is zero.  When a new MMO comes out, typically you have to shell out around $50 for the game box, and after some period, usually 30 days, you have to pay $15 a month to continue to play.  That is a hefty initial investment in a game and a large barrier to entry for people.  YOU have to at least be somewhat invested in the game to even make the initial log in.  With Dungeons and Dragons Online and now Lord of the Rings Online going free-to-play I suspect we will be seeing some very healthy looking numbers for their games, but we will have to remember to filter it through the fact that many of those accounts are people who logged in once and never came back.

A much better measure to me would be for MMO game companies to list the number of unique log-ins over a given period of time and the average amount of time spent playing during each session.  It is a lot more complicated and hard to make a quick quote out of for an article, but it is much more useful.  Although, I suppose that the better measure for the health of a free-to-play would be the amount of money they are making from their cash shop.

I just got an email from SoE informing me that all of the three remaining Vanguard: Sage of Heroes servers would be merging into a single server:

Bringing Worlds Together
Beginning July 7th, 2010 at approximately 10:00 AM PDT, we will start the process of merging the three current U.S. servers of Telon into one server. It is our hope that this integration will result in a more consistent and higher player population which will, in turn, lead to an even more enjoyable and beneficial player experience.

While, in general, I think that server merges can be a good thing, they are portents of things not going so well for the game being merged.  Despite having not played in months, I am kinda of sad to hear this is happening.  I shouldn’t be surprised though.  Vanguard has clearly been in the downward spiral for a long time and I am honestly surprised that it has not reached its inevitable conclusion yet.

The death of Vanguard seriously jeopardizes the future worth of the SoE Station Pass for me though.  Having access to both EQ2 and EQ is nice, but it was always Vanguard that pushed it over the lip and made me spend the extra cash.  Star Wars Galaxies used to be on that list too, but I really lost interest after infamous NGE.  What else is there?  It feels like SoE’s lineup is chock full of dying old games (or dying new games in some cases) and Free Realms, which I have very little interest in, to be honest.

There is DC Universe Online coming as well as The Agency, but neither of those titles is currently a “must check out” title for me.  In fact, I feel like those games should have launched a year ago.

Have you all seen the latest EQ2 publicity stunt?  If you are unsure, then I can tell you that you have not because if you so much as catch this as campaign in your peripheral vision your brain begins to hemmorage.  Really SoE?  This is how you usher in the arrival of the Halas Reborn content update?

The goggles, they do nothing!

That image is one of the less offensive versions of the ad.  There is another one that says “Your MMO fails.  My MMO FTW!”.  Ouch.  I honestly feel bad for re-subbing to EQ2 for the Halas update just because I don’t want to reinforce this kind of behavior.  You had me at Halas, you fools!

So, I decided to investigate further and taking the bait and clicking their subtle neon “DO IT!” button opens a survey where every time you answer a question they put up text about why is so great.  Thats fine and all, but at the end, after submitting the survey, it pops up a little div area with a link to their 14 day free trial.  This div area has a “close” button that when clicked doesnt close, but instead takes you to the website for the trial anyway.  I HATE this.  It is completely rude to the user, especially a user you are trying to convince to try your game.  I am embarrassed by this, and this is coming from a guy who LIKES the Mohawk grenade ad campaign that Blizzard does.  I guess I just always thought of EQ2 as being a bit more classy than this.

I realize that they are trying to be funny, but it is just so full of fail that I cringe.  Hell SoE, at least Evony showed us some skin!

Recently I came across an interesting post on Reddit that linked to a wikipedia article about The Ring of Gyges, which, well, wikipedia says it better than I can, so:

The Ring of Gyges is a mythical magical artifact mentioned by the philosopher Plato in Book 2 of The Republic (2.359a–2.360d). It granted its owner the power to become invisible at will. Through the story of the ring, The Republic discusses whether a typical person would be moral if he did not have to fear the consequences of his actions.
…
In The Republic, Plato puts the tale of the ring of Gyges in the mouth of Glaucon, who uses it to make the point that no man is so virtuous that he could resist the temptation of being able to steal at will by the ring’s power of invisibility. In contemporary terms, Glaucon argues that morality is a social construction, whose source is the desire to maintain one’s reputation for virtue and honesty; when that sanction is removed, moral character would evaporate.

Sure this tale smacks of themes encountered in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, but aside from that, I think that The Ring of Gyges makes a great analogy to the anonymity afforded to us in online communities.   I believe that online anonymity allows us to take the thought experiment of the tale of the ring and observe a real life experiment of how people act when consequences for their actions are removed.

Go into trade chat in World of Warcraft and you will inevitably encounter some of the less savory aspects of humanity.  Play a round of Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox live and you stand a good chance of becoming acquainted with four-letter words that you didn’t even know existed.  However, that is not to say that everyone online is a massive prick just by virtue of being anonymous.  I know that I often times go out of my way to be nice and helpful online.  I have met tons of fantastic people online, many to the point that I spend hours every week in their company, chatting away.  Like many things in life, there is no simple answer.  I thought it an interesting parallel though.

I was selected to be a guest host for episode 64 of the podcast Shut Up, We’re Talking.  This was my first experience being on a podcast and it was pretty interesting.  I hope I didn’t get too rambly at times.   It was a ton of fun and seemed like a great episode with some good topics to cover.  In fact, the day before the show was when the news dropped about LOTRO going free-to-play, so we sort of shuffled around the show notes at the last minute to work that in there. I can’t recommend  Shut Up, We’re Talking highly enough.  It is very well produced and the hosts, Karen, and Darren really know their stuff and are great to listen to.  The other host on the show with us was John from the blog The Ancient Gaming Noob and if you are reading this blog and not his, that is a shame because he is one of the best out there … and he updates a lot more often.

P.S. – How cool is it that I was on episode 64, given that the theme of my site is all about the commodore 64?  … well, I thought it was cool.

The ICC 10 man group I run with on the weekends had a breakthrough this week. We managed to not only blast through the blood wing, downing Blood Queen Lanathel for the first time, but we also finally gave Sindragosa permafrost dirt nap at long last. This meant that we were clear to head up to the pinnacle of Icecrown Citadel and give Arthas a few nasty looks.

Oh boy ...

We were able to blow through phase 1 and get to phase 2 on the first try. We felt good about that, but quickly realized that phase two is NASTY. Particularly the defile mechanic. A random raid member is targeted by defile every 30 seconds. As soon as they are, they have to run out away from the party, while the rest of us scoot away in the opposite direction. Any person standing in defile is not only dealt damage, but the defile puddle also grows a little bit when this happens too. If more than one person gets caught in a defile it is likely a wipe, as the puddle quickly overtakes the entire platform you have to stand on.

The real kicker though is that roughly every 45 seconds a Valkyr spawns, grabs a raid member and begins dragging them to the edge of the platform. If the Valkyr reaches the edge, the party member is dropped and cannot be battle-rezed. Both of these factors make this fight pure chaos without both a solid plan and lots of experience. This is truly a fight where every single raid member has to know what is going on and any amount of slacking will likely mean a wipe for the raid. It is tough, but fantastically fun.

On top of reaching the Lich King for the first time, I managed to complete the Loremaster of Kalimdor achievement.

Loremaster of Kalimdor

I had previously completed the Loremaster of Eastern Kingdoms achievement, so only Outland and Northrend stand between me and the Loremaster title. This is a huge goal of mine and Kalimdor, by far, is the hardest region to do this in. I am glad it is done. I plan on wrapping this, and many other old world related achievements up well before Cataclysm since who knows how the world changes that a coming will change things.

The Tyrannis trailer, like all EVE online trailers, does a fantastic job of making me wonder why I am not playing EVE anymore.

The new features sound really neat, especially the fact that planetary bodies are no longer just for show.  There are simply too many online games and way too little time for me.

After seeing the copious amounts of pure profit that Blizzard made with its Sparklepony, it was really only a matter of time until SoE jumped on the bandwagon with their version of a $25 mount.  However, I think that SoE goes too far with this one.  Why?  Well, here is what I know about the SoE mount:

• You have three models to choose from
• They cost $25 a piece
• Each different mount model has different stat boosts that are provided to your character

Now, I don’t know this for sure, but I am almost certain that unlike WoW’s pony, these cats are one time use, meaning you choose one character to redeem the mount for and thats it.  Yeah. Now, people question whether or not a virtual mount is something that is really worth $25.  The answer is, of course it is … if people are willing to pay that much.  And, whoa boy, where they ever.   Personally, I think that the sparklepony was just a tad too expensive for me.  But really I didn’t want it because the aesthetic didn’t really fit with my characters.  That being said, I did throw down $20 + $30 to pay for a recruit-a-friend second account mostly for the two seater rocket mount.  However, I am also using this to dual-box and level a handful of toons up to 60 really quickly, so there is a lot more benefit in it for me.

The fact that SoE’s $25 mount is a one time use really sucks. Not only that, but they tease you in the ad by saying “The Prowlers are guaranteed to be available for at least one month” implying that if you don’t act now they might be gone forever!  WoW’s pony is an item I can buy and from them until the end of time every character I ever create has access to the mount.  THAT is as aspect that makes it almost worth $25 to the dedicated WoW player.  SoE just doesn’t get it.  Clearly they are hoping that you will buy one, enjoy it and want to buy all three!   Or buy multiple mounts for ALL your characters!  My God … what is $25 x 6 x numberOfActiveEQ2Players?  They could be gazillionaires!

However, the real kicker that gets my panties in a tizzy is that these mounts boost the stats of your characters.  Now, I don’t actively play EQ2 anymore so I have no feel for how beneficial these boosts really are, but the fact of the matter is that SoE has opened the floodgates here.  As of right now, in EQ2, spending $25 can make me more powerful than you.  Where does this end?  I am sure that SoE will tell you that they will keep it reasonable and that any boosts in power for money will be kept in check so as to not ruin the balance of the game, but anyone who is not a naive simpleton knows that this is about making money and if there is money to be made in selling your mythical for $200, SoE will do it.

I am sure I am being overly pessimistic, but does anyone else feel like this is a true sign that EQ2 is in deep trouble?  I am hoping that this is simply SoE jumping on the phat cash mega-transaction bandwagon, but given that Sentinel’s Fate was kind of a flop, launching with missing content and likely costing Brenlo, a 10 year veteran of the company and a guy who was pretty much THE voice of EQ2 for many people, his job.  Remember Battlegrounds?  It is like SoE sees that they have a dying product on  their hands and they are trying disparately to copy the success of WoW in order to put it back on its feet.

UPDATE: Ok, so as of right NOW the mounts are a one time use thing, but this is a bug.  They will be made into Heirloom items, usable across all characters  on the account.  That is good at least. :)

UPDATE UPDATE: Reading more into that SoE forum post, people are going fairly crazy over the stats on the mount and many people are calling them out because it seems the purchasable mounts are faster than some other high-level mounts in the game currently.  Hmm.

UPDATE UPDATE UPDATE: I should add, reading the forum post link above, that while many people are not pleased with the stats on the mount, that there are many people, including official SoE people like Kiara pointing out that there are already speedy, stat filled mounts available via LoN cards.  Wow.  You guys really don’t get it.  The fact that official SoE people are saying that really convinces me that we will not be seeing the end of this any time soon.  All the probably need to start selling raid gear in the SC store is for some other successful game to do it first.  Saying that +5 to combat stats is hardly a real boost totally misses the point too.  This is about the escalating in game value of these real money items.  Even if you CAN get an identical item in the game, the problem is that you can also pay cash for them, meaning someone with money can suddenly have an advantage.  SoE and fans can defend this mount all they want, but the worry is that there is now a CLEAR escalation taking place, the very thing all the tin-foil hat people warned us about.  It also strikes me as funny that Kiara is so quick to respond to, and be hars with criticisms people level at SoE over this matter.  At one point she does tell someone that she is “:adjusting their tin-foil hat”.  Kiara, dear, SoE has given these people every reason to be worried.  At first it was LoN, then it was the SC store, and all the while we were told to not get into a huff because the items would always be pure fluff.  Well, now you can never say that again.  The best SoE can promise is that items will never be more powerful than these +5 stat mounts.  However, just how good is your word anymore, given your track record?  Why even have stats on the mount if the stats make so little of a difference?  You could have avoided all this controversy … and yes this goes for both the LoN mounts and the SC store copy cats.

LAST UPDATE I SWEAR!: I suppose I should say that I am curious about the mounts.  I like the look better than the sparklepony for sure.  While it is a lot of money, I could see getting one to check out the game again when Halas goes live.  I have no problem at all with companies making money off selling in game items.  I hope that this mount sells a ton and makes tons of cash for SoE.  However, what worries me is that all signs point at a future where the incentive to buy RMT items is driven by their value in game.  Folks, that IS where we are headed, despite what SoE might say.  And it is not going to just be SoE games doing it.  While this pay structure may become generally accepted, it will fundamentally change the tone of these online games.  One of my major goals in WoW was to earn my entire tier 10 armor set.  I have spent countless hours running dailies, weeklies, and raids to get those frozen emblems that I can use to buy the armor.  I am almost done now and it has been a LOT of work.  However, that was my personal goal and largely what has been fueling my desire to raid.  I enjoy seeing the content too, but in order to stomach the endless weeks of grind I needed a personal goal that I could inch forward with.  Now, imagine that I had the option to just buy my T10 armor.  If that had been the case, then I wouldn’t have seen that as a good enough goal to keep me playing.  Maybe seeing the content would have been enough, but I doubt it.  I have been raiding ICC weekly for months and we still haven’t finished it.  The early bosses are a joke, and the only good thing about doing them is the fact that they drop good items.  You go into the raid for one more roll of the dice to see if you finally get that rare piece.  Thats the hope of every raider out there.  If I could, instead, drop some cash and just buy the item I want, that would kill the incentive to raid, and ultimately, to play.  If you think that it is far fetched that RMT would ever go that far, I ask, why not?  If there is truly great demand for those items, then that demand could easily translate into sales for the RMT store.  You spend money to save time.  If there is profit to be made, people will do what they need to do to make it.

I LIED …: In the comments section of Tipa’s post on the matter, She makes a really good point:  Most mounts in EQ2 have stat bonuses and without them no one would want to buy these mounts.  I didn’t know that, and it does somewhat change the nature of this whole ordeal.  So … apologies for any harsh words SoE.  I should have probably done a little more research into the matter before jumping on the RMT Armageddon bandwagon.   $25 is still a lot to pay for a mount, but then again, my problem was never with the price, but with my perception that this was buying yourself an advantage, stat-wise.

Most of you probably have no idea what I am talking about.  In fact, I didn’t have idea what any of this was about until tweets went out over the weekend that someone was bad mouthing the rawrcast crew.  Before I go deep into this, it should be said that I am hardly an impartial party.  I am a huge fan of the work that Haf and Stompalina do with Rawrcast and their World of Warcraft guild, Bound.  Before Saturday, I had never even heard of Azeroth United.  So much so, that I switched servers and joined Bound.  I have been running with them for a few months now and I have nothing but positive things to say about them and the guild and everyone in it.

So when the new broke that the guys from Raid Warning were bad-mouthing Rawrcast, I was at a loss for what could have happened.  I listen to the podcast and I play with these guys, chatting on their vent, for hours every night.  While I may not know them in-real-life, I feel like I do at least have decent understanding of what their personalities are like.  The Haf and Stomp I know are very dedicated and fair people.  They dedicate themselves to the guild and sacrifice tons of personal time and effort in seeing that things are running as smoothly as can be.  They put forth similar dedication to Rawrcast.  Think what you will about the podcast itself, but I think it is one of the better produced and dedicated podcasts out there.  It is not some shoddy, off the cuff, recording made ad-hoc and tossed up onto iTunes with nary a care.  You can at least tell that they put a lot of effort into producing it and they want to spread the word about it in any way they can.

As far as I can tell, the problem is that people felt that Haf and Stomp were promoting Rawcast more prominently in the Azeroth United community.  The incident that sparked this was the Hearts, Hands, and Voices charity that they recently held for Child’s Play charities.  Brigwyn, formerly of The Hunting Lodge podcast made a post recently, giving some reasons for him pulling back from the community.  One of the reasons he vaguely puts forth is that Rawrcast were basically using Azeroth United and the Hands, Hearts, and Voices as a publicity machine to drum up some publicity.  Shortly after this, the folks over at Raid Warning launch into a tirade on their podcast, calling Haf and Stomp out their podcast and echoing Brigwyn’s thoughts.

Now, I don’t listen to Raid Warning.  I did listen to the recent episode just to find out what was going on and hopefully begin to understand what exactly was going on.  In that episode they give only a single concrete example that I was able to follow up on.  The accuse Rawrcast of playing favorites because the link to Raid Warning in the Azeroth United info page about the participants donating prizes for Hearts, Hands, and Voices actually links to the specific Raid Warning show where Haf and Stomp were guests, rather than the Raid Warning home page.  Other than that, the Raid Warning guys basically attack Haf and Stomp for not sending out the Hearts, Hands, and Voices prizes in a timely fashion, a job that was Brigwyn’s to begin with.  Brigwyn claims that he delayed because people agreed to all chip in to cover shipping, but no one actually did, and he didn’t have the money to do so.  Raid Warning goes on to talk of broken trust, going so far as to bring into question whether or not Haf and Stomp pocketed some of the money from the donations.  They also talk about Rawrcast putting up a “Send us to Blizzcon!” widget on the Azeroth United page, but unless that was taken down somehow, I have no idea where they got this idea.

Then on Sunday, Haf and Stomp briefly address this issue on their podcast.

It is a quagmire of fuck if you ask me.  Here is what I think:

- The link on the HHV page probably SHOULD link to their home page and not the rawcast guest episode.  Was this intentional?  Who knows.

- I have been a long time listener to Rawrcast and I am in Vent chat with Haf and Stomp on a nearly nightly basis.  Until this past Saturday I had no clue what Azeroth United was.  If they were so gung ho about abusing it as a publicity machine, I would think that they might have mentioned it at least a few times.

- It sounds to me like the Raid Warning guys were looking to pick a fight either to blame someone for the demise of The Hunting Lodge, or something.  I dunno.  If they had presented me with some actual evidence of wrongdoing other than a single errant link, I might be able to sympathize with them a bit, but as it stands, they came off to me like a couple of (admittedly) drunk boys having a good rant. Their postulate that Rawrcast might be staling from the charity was irresponsible and their claim that Rawrcast had been abusing Azeroth United to garner donations for going to Blizzcon was blatantly false.  So pardon me if I stick with my friends that I DO know and choose to not believe the comments of a few angry drunks that have proven themselves to at best be confused on the matter, and at worst have lied about it.