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New Hot Bars – EverQuest Has Them November 16, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EverQuest.
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6 comments

Something new for everybody in the Veil of Alaris expansion.

There is a new splash screen!

Okay, there is more than a splash screen.  There are also new hot bars.

It seems like a silly new feature, but the hot bars in EverQuest now look… well, more like you expect if you have played any MMO since 2004 or so.  And you get more of them, and 12 is the standard number per bar.

12 buttons

There is a new help file on the changes, and the changes apply to everybody who plays the game.  I am sure somebody will complain how this will ruin the whole progression server retro experience.

The help text for the new hot bars - click to make readable

They still seem to act pretty much the way they used to however.  It is one of those things that takes me a while to figure out every time I go back to the game.

And that is pretty much it for me and the new expansion.

SOE – What Other Titles Will Go Free to Play? November 15, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EverQuest, EverQuest II, Sony Online Entertainment, Vanguard SOH.
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10 comments

With last week’s announcement that EverQuest II is going free to play on all servers, and DC Universe Online having just made the transition to free to play, Sony Online Entertainment feels like it has turned a corner.

The company has gone from being a subscription MMO company with a few free offerings to a free to play focused company with a few legacy subscription games hanging around.  The weight of games… and the absolute weight of most of their popular titles… has tilted towards free to play.

The SOE Options for New Players

Technically, the title line up will shortly be five free and five subscription, if you consider EverQuest II to be a single merged game now, and you count Star Wars Galaxies.  But new players cannot join SWG, and it will be going away on December 15th in any case.

And the lineup definitely looks biased towards newer, more popular games going free to play.

Okay, Pirates of the Burning Sea isn’t popular by any stretch.  But EverQuest II is arguably the flagship game for the company.

While the subscription only lineup looks pretty long in the tooth.

Those are some old titles in terms of video games, and the only one that still draws a crowd is EverQuest, the one time champion of the subscription MMO world.

So what happens to subscription titles at a company that appears to see free to play as the future?  Will any of the remainders join the free to play bunch?

EQOA, peaking at ~30K subscribers, has never been a big title.  It is only for PlayStation 2 and hasn’t seen any new content for almost five years.  It is being sustained as long as it remains profitable to run, but its days are numbered.  I think the era of benign neglect will continue until the subscription base dwindles to the point that SOE turns out the lights. (You can read more about EQOA over at Massively or, as Harbinger Zero suggested, check out Stoney’s EQOA Blog.)

PlanetSide, also something of a dormant title, down a single sparsely populated server.  PlanetSide will remain until PlanetSide 2 launches and that will be that.  PlanetSide 2 will, of course, have a free to play subscription model.

Vanguard is probably more popular than Pirates of the Burning Sea, which made the move to free to play, so it seems like it might have a chance for a move as well.  But PotBS is not actually an SOE title.  SOE only hosts and publishes the game.  Flying Lab Software is responsible for development and apparently are able to sustain themselves on its meager population.

Vanguard though, appears to be in a maintenance only mode, with no devs assigned to it.  A transition to free to play requires an investment of resources.  Previously SOE opted to add in LiveGamer, a system that allows players to buy and sell from each other with realm money; sanctioned RMT.  However, LiveGamer is going away, so perhaps the door is open to some change on free to play front. (Though LiveGamer seems to be doing okay without SOE.)

But somehow I doubt it.

There are only two groups of players that are going to be more prickly about adding in a cash shot with enough viable items to make money, and one of them is Vanguard players.  And for a game that is not generating enough revenue to get more than bug fixes slowly over time, the possibility of annoying the player base has to be viewed as a serious risk.  My guess is that SOE will just leave Vanguard on the subscription model and keep it around as long as enough people are willing to pay.

And then there is EverQuest.

Here is the one game on the list that has the population and the name recognition to making going free to play a viable option.

But EQ players are the second group of prickly players when it comes to cash shop items.

On the other hand, SOE has actually been working on the UI in EQ.  One of the features of the latest expansion, Veil of Alaris (which goes live today), is improved hot bars which, from the description, sound like they are going to try to make them work the way they do in most current MMOs.

That makes me wonder if SOE is planning some sort of free to play option for EQ in the next year or so.

What do you think?  Will EverQuest get a free to play option?  Will Vanguard?

And will it matter?

While the free to play option is out there, the subscriptions still exist if you want to play without some of the more onerous restrictions on a free account.  And with the new and attractively priced SOE All Access available if you play more than one SOE game, is free to play anything more than an unlimited trial at SOE?

Do you still have to subscribe to “really” be playing any of these games?

Star Wars – Impressions from the Weekend November 14, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Misc MMOs, Sony Online Entertainment.
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11 comments

That December date is coming up quickly.  It is just over a month away.

I am fortunate that my account is flagged so that I can play at this point.

So once I got the client up to date, I jumped right in.

As with everything Star Wars, it opens with the usual line about a galaxy far, far away.

Required item #1

Then, naturally, the Star Wars name/logo.

Star Wars? Ya think?

And once you have those two, you cannot skip the inevitable bottom to top text crawl of the situation.

There is conflict! Oh no!

These are the tropes of the Star Wars universe.  On the one hand they do seem a bit tired more than 30 years after the original movie.  But on the other hand, they do put you in the right state of mind.

And the game seems quite intent on placing you in that state of mind.  So it brings out the old stand-by smuggler.

We've seen his type before

He, of course, flies a ship… the fastest ship around naturally… that is of obvious Corellian manufacture and looks kind of like one we’ve seen in the movies.

I mean, it is about the same shape and all...

Naturally, there has to be a dramatic, last minute escape.

In reality the explosion would have killed us...

And then a narrow escape through very familiar “bad guy” ships.

Not the local bulk cruisers...

Which, of course, includes fighters of the usual configuration…

Fighters, 6 o'clock!

…and a manning of turrets to hold them off.

Scratch one fighter...

The bad guys are never happy about this sort of thing.

You and what... oh, yeah, that army...

All of which is wrapped up with the dramatic jump to lightspeed.

That was soooooo cool... in 1977

That is all exciting and good and puts you in the spirit of things.

Then things start to fall apart for me.  You have chosen your class.

9 choices there

And you get a quick intro into combat, but it becomes unsatisfying… to me at least… almost immediately.  Standing toe to toe and exchanging blaster fire just seems silly.

Bang! Bang! You're Dead!

Close combat like this makes sense in a fantasy game, where a sword fight requires you to get up close and an armored opponent might take several hits to die.

But here we have ranged energy weapons that ought to drop you with a single, solid hit.  Star Trek Online tried to cover this up a bit by giving you a personal force field.  But here blasters are either so weak or characters are so strong that the average player can take half a dozen hits without a problem.

Yes, you can use objects for cover.  The game tells you so.

Don't just stand there!

There is the usual corpse looting, this time for credits instead of gold.

I swear I thought he had a quest...

And experience points.  You cannot have a game like this without experience points it seems.

...or have you been experienced?

I did spend some time running around, doing a few quests, and trying to spot things that made the game different.

NPC interaction wheel

Honestly though, I couldn’t stick with it for a long stretch.

Fortunately, patching was quick and easy, so I did not have to wait to get into the game.  Not a lot of new stuff going in at this point I guess.

2.7 MB? Practically no patch at all!

And getting onto a server was no problem.  There are only a few from which to choose and there are no queues or anything to delay logging on.

All of this did give me a chance to get a small taste of what the first Star Wars MMO, Star Wars Galaxies, is currently like.  I will probably go back for a bit more between now and December 15, when the game shuts down for good.

I though it was important to have a feel for what had come before so that I could truly appreciate the changes and innovations that BioWare is bringing to the table with their Star Wars MMO.

Azeroth Travel Poster Contest Winners November 13, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in Blizzard, entertainment, World of Warcraft.
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6 comments

The time has come to announce the winners of the Azeroth Travel Poster contest.

First, I want to thank everybody who entered.

I miscounted on my last post, but my final audit puts the total number of entries at 17 from the 13 people listed above.

Selecting a winner was not easy.  There were a number of contenders vying for my attention, each with their own strengths.  But in the end, I had to choose one winner.

And the winners of the Azeroth Travel Poster contest are…

(more…)

Hulkageddon V: Unholy Union – Coming Soon November 12, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.
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16 comments

The unholy union is the fact that the Goons are sponsoring the event.

The Mittani and Helicity Together

From the announcement thread on the EVE forums:

Conflict is the life blood of New Eden.

Conflict is in the heart and soul of the Capsuleer.

Created by the artifice of man we transcend the limits of mortality and walk amongst the stars like Gods.

But the bloodline of Gods is tainted by weakness. The generations that have followed us have grown soft and weak. They cling to the skirts of the oppressive Empires that gave birth to them, they toil like slaves in the Asteroid Fields, they hide under the watchful gaze of CONCORD.

The dilution of our sacred blood must be ended, those who fear conflict will never grow strong, those that cower in slavery to the Empires will never grow strong. While their pitiful state continues, we are diminished as a whole.

So come now, all the outcasts, all the disenfranchised. The Brave, The Cruel, The Few. Come now and arm yourselves and strike down that which weakens us, so we may grow stronger.

The Empires seek to make you weak. And for their hubris, we will burn them to the ground. For we are capsuleers, and our very words and thoughts command the engines of War. We are Capsuleers, and we are Free.

…And this time we are not alone, our brethren from the outer rim, the mighty Goons have pledged their support, backed by their vast financial power we will carve a hole in the hearts of the weak and reap a bloody harvest.

There can be no other Destiny. Let them all burn.

No date has yet been announced, but it will presumably start at some point after Skyrim has settled down a bit… and when The Mittani isn’t busy fleecing suckers.  The guy in that last thread chose the name Admiral Thrawn and yet fell for that?  Clearly a naming violation of some sort there.  For those who want a more concise summary of that scan, you can find it here.

Quote of the Day – A New Fleet Interdictor In EVE November 12, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online, Other PC Games.
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5 comments

no one in the deklien coalition can get a fleet going because everyone is playing elder scrolls

-a friend in the alliance Tactical Narcotics Team

The plague that is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim seems to be everywhere tonight.  Fully half the people on my Raptr friends list are playing it or were playing it earlier.

Is it any good?

The Launch Day SWTOR Patch – How Big Do You Think It Will Be? November 12, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Star Wars: The Old Republic.
5 comments

Not that I have any reason to be pondering the SWTOR patch process *cough* but I have been thinking about it over the last 24 hours.

Launch day for Star Wars: The Old Republic, pegged at December 20th, is not much more than a month away, which means that the final DVD that will ship in the box has either already been mastered or will be very shortly.

A dark box for dark Jedi

Working schedules backwards as a project manager was one of my favorite ways to confound the ship date desires of product marketing people.  The good ones appreciated that sort of peek into reality, the bad ones would complain up the management chain that I wasn’t being a team player.

Anyway, to get to a December 20th ship launch date that includes product on store shelves, you have to make a master, give it to the replication house to have it produced, stick the final discs in their sleeves, drop them in boxes with all the other materials, seal the boxes, put the boxes in case packs, label and send them off to various distribution centers, which in turn need to be shipped to all the possible retail outlets, all during the busiest shipping time of the year and with enough slack to ensure that nobody gets caught short.

This was all a truly painful process back in the day when you couldn’t count on internet access for immediate patches… and when companies cared about their documentation.  Did you see how big that Civilization II manual was I got?  And it was accurate and useful, not just ballast in the box to make it feel like you were getting your money’s worth.

But now, you can burn your master disc way in advance and be saved at the last minute through the miracle of the internet and its ability to deliver a launch day “make it right” patch to almost all of your customers.

And if you are shipping an MMORPG, you can patch up all your customers, guaranteed… unless you really screw up and ship a broken patcher… but that is another story.

So it is almost assured that what we get on disc for SWTOR on launch day will need to be patched before any of us can play.

But the question is, how big will that first patch be?

Anyway, back to waiting for my own patching event to finish.  3.4 GB left to download.  Time enough to watch Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part II.

EVE Online “I Was There” – The Parody November 11, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EVE Online.
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2 comments

The only objection I have seen to this from EVE players I know is that it simply isn’t profane enough.

Not safe for work if somebody can read the subtitles over your shoulder.

EverQuest II Extended Is Dead – EverQuest II Goes All Free to Play November 11, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, EverQuest II, Sony Online Entertainment.
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8 comments

Another of my demands for 2011 has been met.  The two EverQuest IIs will be reconciled.

SOE has announced an important new aspect of the Age of Discovery expansion… which is apparently they have discovered that their free to play experiment known as EverQuest II Extended worked pretty well, so they have decided to apply the business model across EverQuest II.

No longer will there be a free to play server running in parallel with a pile of servers that run on the old standard subscription model according to the latest EverQuest II Producer’s Letter.

This will all go live in “Early December… or November 30th… or Winter 2011 (December 22 on my calendar)” or maybe some other date.  SOE seems confused on that point.

There is a new, revised subscription chart.  You can see the old Extended one here if you want to compare.

Subscription Options - Nov. 10, 2011

The key item is that Gold is now the top level account, with Platinum being phased out.  If you have a Platinum account and it is set to recurring, you can continue at Platinum, but no new Platinum subscriptions will be allowed.

Gold also now offers all of the benefits that the standard subscription plan offered for the EverQuest II servers, which is a boost for people playing on Extended.

The Station Cash Marketplace is going to be unified across the game now, which will mean the removal of the following items from the former Extended server, Freeport:

  • Power potion
  • Health potion
  • Self-rez scroll
  • Wand of Obliteration
  • Rune of Devastation
  • Mastercrafted Equipment (all)
  • Tradeskill Components

That is pretty much a solid win for the old-school players, the vocal members of which seemed dead set against being able to buy any of the above.

In fact, the whole thing is pretty much a big win for the players who stuck with the EverQuest Live servers.  They felt sidelined by the whole EverQuest Extended experiment, and rightly so.  Extended certainly absorbed a majority of the new players entering the game.

But will this change alone be good for the game?

One of the best things about the EverQuest II Extended was that it took place on a single server.

That single server became a wild, vibrant place, full of life with new players and copied over veterans intermingled.  It was very nice to play on a server where almost everybody under level 50 wasn’t a twinked alt of a level cap player.

Soon the Freeport server will simply be one of 18 EverQuest II servers and new players will be dispersed by whim and random chance across the range of choices.  And a lot of those servers never show anything above a low load level on the SOE Server Status Page.

It isn’t that I want to deny all those other servers the life’s blood that is new players.  It just felt like Freeport really came together as a lively server and I hate for the game to lose that.

Ah well, what can you do?

Stalking Death Rifts in Freemarch November 10, 2011

Posted by Wilhelm Arcturus in entertainment, Instance Group, Rift.
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4 comments

Saturday night found most of in Rift.

Earl was back, having survived the cold, the snows, and the broken branches.

Big Earl is looking a bit blue

However Jollyreaper was nowhere to be found online, so the question came up as to what we should do.

We started off with some quests, just to warm up, knocking out the quest line at Kelari Refuge, which involved, among other things, trapping flaming squirrels.

Flaming Squirrel!

That lead to a series of squirrel and squirrel bite related stories.  The general consensus in the group: squirrels are to be avoided and that flaming squirrels would be like a plague.

Kelari Refuge went by quickly and we moved to the next quest hub.

Kelari Refuge

Once there we held up after a couple of quests.  We decided we did not want to get too far ahead of Jollyreaper in the quest line.  We decided, instead, to pursue rifts.

We actually started the evening with a nearby rift to bring Earl up to speed on the structure.  His first rift was a water related one.

Like fighting in an aquarium

But we decided to make them our target for the night, which turned out to be well timed as just about then a zone-wide invasion event kicked off.  Death invaders and death rifts were the flavor of the evening.

We started moving towards one of the ward stones that had been taken over by the forces of death, but in moving up the road we ended up battling wave after wave of death invasion teams.  It was a running battle from group to group until we finally made it to the besieged camp.

Camp to be freed

I couldn’t help but think of Zerg creep when I saw the camp.

The fight there was short and easy.  Ward stone take overs seem to be designed as solo encounters for the most part, probably so you can free up your own damn quest hub should it be overrun.

We then turned to death rifts, as the event required 10 to be defeated before it would advance, and there were still 9 to go at that point.

Death rifts look… like death.

That's some big undead...

We chopped our way through a number of death rifts.  The four of us did not seem to have much problem with any given encounter, though there were a couple we almost blew because we jumped in to combat before figuring out the actual objective of that stage.  We generally prevailed, and closed a number of death rifts on our own.

Rift Sealed!

We finally got the message that the first objectives had been accomplished and that the Harbinger of Alsbeth had arrived and needed to be resisted.

Marked on clearly on the map and thankfully not to far away from our current position, we went riding off in pursuit of the Harbinger in hopes of zeroing it out.

Arriving there, we found another group already engaged.  The “join groups” button showed up at the top of the screen and I clicked it, bringing us all together into a raid.

The fight itself was short, though not necessarily a cake walk.  Hakawati got stomped at one point, but was able to soul walk and come back before the fight was over.  But we were able to defeat the Harbinger.

The Harbinger of Alsbeth Defeated

We collected our little piles of planarite and such, and then I started looking to get us out of this raid and back into our original group.  I was about to tell people on Skype that we should just all leave the raid and reform a fresh group, when I found the option to unmerge the group from the raid.

And it worked like a charm.  Nifty.  We were back in our original little group.

We ran around for a bit more after that, picking off a foothold or two, but activity was tapering off.

Group picture after one last rift

We ended up back at Kelari Refuge to train and sell off the excess in our bags.  We each ended up a couple of levels ahead at the end of the night, but not so much that Jollyreaper cannot catch up.

If we can all get on this coming week, we ought to be able to make it to Meridian.

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