This week I’ve mostly been pottering about on Landroval, a US Lord of the Rings Online server. I played LOTRO a bit in Europe when it first came out, but I was another victim of the post-Bree North Downs/Lone-Lands slump which caused many a player to fall at the wayside back then. Hopefully I can get past that stage this time without falling into the same pit of ennui. So far, so good, and after about a week of getting bossed about by Rangers while doing all three of the prologues, I’ve managed to scrape together enough cash to buy my first home. I WAS going to write about the Autumn event, but unsurprisingly EVERYBODY has already done that, so I’m going to talk about my new house instead!
Player housing in Lord of the Rings Online is much less complex than in EQ2 or SWG, but that’s probably to be expected, as it was added in a patch rather than being a launch feature. I’m told that it is similar to the housing system added to Asheron’s Call, LOTRO’s pointy-looking older brother. Rather than being able to move objects freely, you only have (in a regular house) about 30 static “hooks” in which you can fix particular sorts of item. As any house decorator knows, that’s not a lot of space, and I’ve already run out of wall-space for my Halloween paintings and fishing trophies. Not being able to place items where we choose is a bit of a shame, as it removes the creative possibilities that have allowed decorators in EQ2 to build all manner of amazing rooms out of common household objects. In addition to furniture, you can also paint your walls, and even set a theme tune! Osgardh, Dwarven archaeologist, has knocked up some lovely pea-green paint, but the tune will have to wait.
A few housing hooks.
Nevertheless, in spite of its simplicity, it’s still quite a fun system. The best aspect of LOTRO housing is that instead of each home being individually instanced, like in EQ2, you’re part of a neighbourhood of about 20 houses. In the middle of the neighbourhood are a few useful facilities such as a vault, and a furniture vendor. It creates a sense of place, without bringing about the sort of urban sprawl we saw in Ultima Online and SWG, I hope it is copied and improved upon by the upcoming crop of MMOs.
I’ve settled in the human-styled area to the south-east of Bree, near the entrance to the Lonelands. I picked that one mostly for location, but I did not spend too much time exploring the different possibilities as I do not intend to be living there very long. I will be upgrading to a larger home as soon as I can afford the seven gold, mostly because it has double the chest storage lots.
Chest storage is incredibly useful. Because your house is shared between all the characters on your account, and they all gain the power to teleport home once an hour, it is a great way to transfer items between characters if you have not yet bought the shared banking (which costs a hefty 1295 points for 20 shared bank slots.). Player housing, and the housing chests, are bought purely with good old-fashioned in-game gold.
It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood!
Neighbourhoods are a great idea, though the implementation could be better. In particular, it is terribly difficult to end up in the same neighbourhood instance as your friends. As they have a finite amount of space they fill up quite quickly, and there is no way to move between neighbourhood instances without having to give up your current home and buy another one at full price. That the ratio of small, middle, and guild-houses is set in stone also makes things tricky logistically if you want to get everyone you know in the same instance. Even if you’re lucky enough to have everybody online when a fresh neighbourhood comes into being, if you have more than 9 friends, someone is going to be stuck with a starter house. Still, with the newly F2P-nourished pace of development, I expect that housing will be getting looked at and improved.
It’s good to have another fall-back game that I don’t have to worry about subscribing to. Turbine does F2P right, and manages to get money out of me as a result.
It has dropped a little off the radar, so let’s catch up with how the transfer of European DDO accounts from Codemasters to Turbine is going.
Essentially, it isn’t.
On August 19th, 2010, the European Dungeons and Dragons Online servers were shut down, meaning that the characters that European players have been playing since launch were lost to us. We are still waiting for our characters to be transferred, as promised, to the US servers.
What will happen to European characters?
Character data from the Codemasters European DDO service will be passed to Turbine after the Codemasters Online service is closed on August 19, 2010. We will be providing free character transfers to the new global service and players will be notified when the character transfer is available. As a welcome and thank you, Turbine is offering all current and former European players 5,000 free Turbine Points, worth nearly €50, when they transfer their character(s) to the global DDO service
We haven’t got those points yet either, seeing as we can’t get them until the accounts are transferred.
I have to ask “What the hell is going on over there?”. How hard can it be to convert/merge the character databases? Maybe it is really really hard, but if that is the case then they shouldn’t have shut down the European servers until it was ready! The players may have had minimal warning about the server shut-down, but Turbine certainly did not, and should have gotten the processes sorted.
I don’t know whether it is Turbine or Codemasters that is responsible for all this. They won’t tell us which it is, so I’m inclined to blame both.
The flow of information has been terrible, and any European player who dares ask about it on the US forums gets shouted down and told to reroll. Imagine, their characters have essentially been deleted, and wanting to know when they can have them back is considered to be unreasonable. I appreciate that going F2P has given DDO so many new players that keeping hold of old European players might not seem worth troubling over, but it has left a rather ashen taste in the mouths of many players. Turbine have not played fair with us. As European players we’re pretty used to getting the short end of the stick from US developers, but losing your characters for 9+ weeks is particularly special.
Unfortunately, Turbine has adopted a rather weird attitude towards us. This was a response to a European’s complaint that all Euro characters will end up on the Ghallanda server, and if we want them to end up somewhere else we have to pay $25 per character.
Originally Posted by Tarrant
We’re actually giving you your characters, and $50 worth of points, for free. If you don’t want to transfer your characters, you don’t have to. We’re not charging you anything, and are in fact making a kind gesture by bringing them here and giving you points.
Mr Tarrant. You obviously feel that we’re terribly ungrateful for the bounty you have bestowed upon us. Let us be clear here. YOU (that is, Turbine) chose to sell the rights to DDO in Europe to Codemasters, and YOU blocked Europeans from having a US DDO account even if we wanted to. (Until F2P began). Then someone , either you or Codemasters, decided to end that deal and shut down those European servers. I’m not privy to what went on within your companies, but I’ll tell you one thing I’m sure of: It was not the players who decided to go shutting the servers down. What you call a kind gesture, I call the bare minimum that I would expect, and that was when I thought the transfer would happen on the same day the servers were shut down. The eight week wait takes it far below what I would consider the bare minimum.
A kind gesture? What was the alternative? That you’d just shut the server down and not take the opportunity to gain all of Europe’s players, every one of them a fee-paying subscriber? That you’d make it known that you were happy to just shut down European servers at will, with no recourse for the players? That would have killed Euro-Lotro overnight. If you don’t actually want European players, just say so!
Please do not call how European DDO players have been treated “kind”. It just comes off as incredibly patronising. They’re paying customers who have been messed around on an epic scale.
We’re told that transfers will begin on the 25th of October. I truly hope it goes smoothly.
Yar Har Fiddely-Dee! Pirates of the Burning Sea is on course to join its fellows in Free-to-playness.
We’re preparing to change the business model of Pirates of the Burning Sea from subscription to free-to-play (hence forth to be known as F2P). This is the culmination of a decision that was made back at the end of last year, and I’m thrilled to finally be able to announce it. It’s not a decision we’ve taken lightly, and we’ve put in a lot of planning and work to make this a seamless transition. We’re very excited about this direction for a number of reasons – Rusty’s Devlog
The exact manner that this is going to happen has yet to be revealed. I assume that it’s going to involve some sort of item shop, and quite likely other perks.
How this is going to work in a Realm vs Realm game eludes me though. PvP MMOs try as hard as they can to enable a level playing field, and I don’t see how that can be compatible with having multiple tiers of membership, or useful items for sale. I’m sure this has been considered by FLS, and things will become clearer nearer the launch. I’ll be interested to see what game-balance sacrifices have to be made in order to assure PotBS’s financial future.
I’ve covered Everquest 2 Extended a little bit already in my previous post, in which I looked at the different sorts of EX2X subscriber level. Today I’ve got an account up and running, and I’m going to take a look through the EQ2X Marketplace to see the differences from Live.
One change that will be immediately obvious to older players logging in is that SOGA models have become the default. SOGA models were an alternative set of character appearances that were added in 2005, mostly for the Asian market. There’s a good Flickr album of them here. They have a very anime feel to them, and you tend to either love them, or hate them. A major complaint I have heard is that they are less customisable, and more prone to weird glitching with bits of the model sticking through solid objects during animations. You can choose whether to use the original or SOGA models on a per race basis. Ratonga don’t have a SOGA model, so I didn’t notice right away.
The main problem with having two sets of models is that you no longer get to decide what your character looks like to other people. If they’re set to use SOGA humans, you look like a SOGA human to them, even if you hate what that makes you look like. Most current players, though certainly not all, predominantly use the original models.
It’s not a massive deal to me, as I can still choose to set all my models to original flavour, and Ratonga are immune to SOGA anyway. Still, it is a bit of a weird change, until you consider that EQ2X is designed to break into the RMT-centric Asian market, then it starts making complete sense. I’m not sure yet as to whether SOGA will also be the default for EQ2 Live. I hope not.
To the Marketplace!
SOE have desperately wanted to be able to sell statted items to us for years, but have felt hemmed in by previous promises that that would never happen in EQ2. Creating EQ2X as a technically separate entity has allowed them to be able to claim the promise is being kept. The problem with that is, as the Live trial is being ended, and new players are being funnelled into EQ2X with no obvious path from there to EQ2 Live, the Live game is likely to dwindle as EQ2X grows.
So, what sort of things can we buy in EQ2X? Of course, EQ2X’s shop has everything that the original shop has, but with some important additions. The exchange rate is 100 Station Cash to 1 US dollar, so I’m going to use dollars going forward for clarity, as using points tends to obscure the fact that you’re spending real money.
It looks like all the rare crafted gear is in there. You can only see gear that is appropriate to your level and class, so on the Armor screen, Level 1 Maltheas sees this:
A full set of tier 1 bronze plate will cost $6. A weapon will cost another $2. Curiously, how much you’re charged for an item does not seem to have much to do with how many resources are used to make them. All these armor and weapon items all require a single rare ingredient, but the price ranges from 50 cents to $2. As we’ll see in a moment, the price of resources rises with tier, so it seems reasonable to suspect that the price of equipment will also be greater at higher levels.
While making all the crafted gear available in the shop might seem to be pretty awful for anyone who wants to be a crafter in EQ2X, fear not. Crafters too can skip all that pesky harvesting by purchasing their ingredients direct from Brell himself.
A stack of 200 common ore will set you back between $4 and $6, depending on tier. Curiously again, some common resources cost more than others. 200 loam, gems, or precious metal will only cost you $2 regardless of tier. Leather and wood cost from $2 to $4.
Rare ingredients are, unsurprisingly, more expensive. They are bought in packs of 5, and in this case a pack of 5 rare ore will cost between $6.50 and $10. Most other rare resource are a flat $6.50 across the tiers, apart from Kaborite and Ulteran Diamonds which are a whopping $15 for 5.
The oddest thing for me about all this is the realisation that I own thousands of dollars worth of crafting ingredients, if I were able to sell them for the same price as the Marketplace.
My concern with anything like this is how the tail ends up wagging the dog. If SOE find that people are willing to buy rare harvests, it will be natural for them to consider how many more they could sell if they tweaked the drop rate down a little bit. RMT becomes central to the design of the game, rather than being a little extra bit of income. Interestingly, even a lot of loyalists who have supported SOE on this journey down the slippery RMT slope are now raising their voices in opposition. Too late, I fear, as such realisations tend to be. “It’s a cookbook.”
There are also the race packs, each containing three races, for $7.50. I don’t have a problem with these in principle, as a F2P game does need things it can sell, were it not for it not being included for the gold/platinum subscribers.
There’s other bits and bobs. One surprise is that you will require a guild charter, costing $10, to form a guild. This would seem to be the case even for gold and platinum subscribers, making that one more additional expense on top of a $15 subscription that EQ2Xers will be expected to pay.
The big reveal has taken place. You’ve probably already read the details, but just in case, here’s Smokejumper’s announcement:
Hi there, Norrathians,
As they say, the one thing that’s always true about the world is that it changes. That’s true of the world in general, the game industry, and it’s always been true with “EverQuest IIâ€.
The very nature of an MMO is change. We listen, we adapt, and the game grows in features, content, and fun factor as the months and years pass. Now, the expectations of gamers and the industry itself are changing around us, and it’s time for “EverQuest II†to spring forward so it can continue to expand and be successful.
Many of you are aware of the free-to-play model that’s being embraced by many of the big game developers out there. We’re not the first folks to entertain the idea for an MMO, but we do have the biggest and best virtual world to offer in such a model and we firmly believe that we can expose thousands and thousands of new players to the world of Norrath if we embrace that concept.
However, before going any further, I’d like to stop and say that we’re tied into what you, the community of EQII players, have said about selling items with stats and how they affect a game where you traditionally earn your way forward. We completely understand there’s a solid core of you that want nothing at all to do with that. We respect your wishes and, as I’ve personally stated previously, we’re not planning any changes to the current subscription worlds at all. Those servers, that subscription service and that gameplay will continue as normal. We’ll continue to support the existing Live service with content, expansions, features, and events…just as we’ve always done. In fact, we’re upping the ante by providing subscription rewards packages for active users that buy multi-month subscriptions, giving them rewards like cool, unique, exclusive items and Station Cash.
But the free-to-play concept is a strong way to expose the world of Norrath to hordes of new players. Think of it as a huge new way to run a “free trial†like we’ve always done, but without the “14-day†limit, and with a lot more content available to try before you decide whether you want to commit to the game or not. We’ve had over eight years to grow this game, its content and its features, and there’s simply nothing else like it out there.
So, we’re about to launch a bold new service named “EverQuest II Extended†(EQ2X). This is a completely separate service from the standard EQII Live subscription service (EQII). It’s aims are simply to attract new players to the world of “EverQuest II†and let them try it out before deciding if and how they want to pay for it.
“EverQuest II Extended†shares all the content and features of Live EQII. It plays the same. It looks the same. It *is* the same, with two obvious exceptions: a) it’s free-to-play, and b) it has a more robust marketplace.
What does “free-to-play†mean? It means that you can download the game and play all of it (except the most recent expansion) all the way up to level 80. Your character is restricted in a bunch of different ways (limited class selection, limited races, limited coin, etc.) and to unlock those features fully, you’ll need to subscribe to Gold level membership. Which, coincidentally, is $15/month. Sound familiar?
What is a “robust marketplace� It’s exactly the same marketplace that you see on the EQII service, but it also adds lots of “convenience†items. Can’t find a good shield in-game? We sell one appropriate to your level and class. Want a healing potion to use in a pinch? Need an emergency buff? Want to shortcut your research time? Items like that are all available in the marketplace. Do we sell the very best items and equipment? Nope. Legendary and Fabled gear are better than what you can buy in the marketplace. Has the game been rebalanced so that you *need* to buy these “convenience†items? Nope. EQ2X is exactly the same game that you’re playing currently on the EQII servers. Those items are just there if you want them. They are true “convenience†items.
There’s lots more details about all of this (and you can find the FAQ at http://eq2players.station.sony.com/…ay/extended_faq), but remember…this only affects you if you want it to affect you. If you ignore EQ2X completely, then your existing subscription, game, and support are unchanged.
If you’re a current subscriber, and you’d like to take a peek at “EverQuest II Extended†on its new Test server, you can jump into the game at the Free membership level by clicking here and streaming down the game client you’ll need. (http://launch.soe.com/eq2x/) This is the Alpha version of the service and its currently only available to existing subscribers so you can see it for yourselves before the public sees it later. The beta launch of the EQ2X service will occur in mid-August.
Whether you check out the new stuff as a Live subscription player, or as an Extended player, you’ll see examples of how we upgrade the content simultaneously across both services. We’ve significantly improved the UI, skill progressions, new user quest content, tutorials, created the “Regions of Interest†system so you can see where your quests are located, and much more.
Enjoy.
It is not what I expected at all. It is going to be a completely separate game, with its own servers and forums. That’ll be good for some people, as it means we can pretty much ignore it going forward. Or we could if game design decisions made to benefit EQ2 Extended were not also going to affect EQ2 Live, which they blatantly will and probably have been for a while in the run up to this. I strongly suspect GU 57’s decision to make a bunch of classes neutral, and thus playable on both sides, has a lot to do with EQ2 Extended’s need to have it’s free classes available everywhere, but as it happens I think it’s a good change anyway.
By making this a separate service, the chance that it will bring life back to the EQ2 Live servers is limited. In many ways, it feels like a missed opportunity. I don’t see it repeating DDO’s success, for a variety of reasons.
If you want to play for free, you’re going to be restricted in a number of ways.
Free Races: Humans, Erudites, Barbarians, and Half-Elves.
That’s fine. Obviously a F2Per needs to have things to purchase, and additional classes and races are perfect for that. The classes available are ample, though I think including halflings or dwarves in the free races might have been a good thing.
Here is a chart of the different capabilities of the various membership levels for EQ2 extended. It’s ridiculously wide, so you’ll probably need to click on the image to expand it to make it readable:
Everquest 2 Extended Membership Levels.
There’s a lot to take in, and I’ll probably revisit this once I’ve had a chance to mull things over. I have one major problem with it as it stands though.
In DDO, a F2Per is restricted in class and race choice, and also in available content, but within those parameters they can be exactly as effective as a subscriber. EQ2 is taking a very different road, and Bronze members will be restricted to the Adept version of any spell or ability, putting them at a great disadvantage to subscribers. Silver members will be restricted to Expert. They are also prevented from using any Legendary or Fabled gear. This will lead to behaviour very similar to Gearscore causes in WoW, where people will be unwilling to take the less shiny sorts of members along on raids and the like.
To be utterly blunt, Bronze and Silver players are going to be gimped. With their inferior spells, and Treasured level gear you would have to be either masochistic, or of exceptionally generous spirit, to want to take them along on anything remotely strenuous. While I can see that SOE would want to put as much pressure on people to upgrade as they can, I think they’ve missed the lessons that DDO taught. People buy extra content in DDO because they’re having fun and want more, not because they have to do it to be able to be on a level playing field. May Rodcet have mercy on the souls of any Bronze members who try to take part in Battlegrounds or other PvP.
If you want to use Master Level spells, and legendary/fabled gear, you have to be at least a Gold Member, which costs as much as an EQ2 Live Subscription does anyway!
It’s also a little peculiar how a Platinum membership costs more than a regular EQ2 live subscription, and they’re still restricted to only 4 races! Who is this for? Surely almost everyone willing to pay subscription level prices would rather play on the EQ2 Live servers? The whole thing seems weird, and I’m uncomfortable with it. This is not an F2P system like DDO or LOTRO’s where you can just buy little bits and pieces here and there as you choose, on a living server that you share with all the different sorts of player, and where being a Premium player (Basically an F2Per who occasionally buys things) is a perfectly viable choice for the long-term. It’s a glorified trial, designed to push people into subscribing.
If you’re willing to put up with being that badly inferior, then you’re probably never going to pay SOE any money for anything anyway. Everybody else would be far better off on a regular server. So again, I ask, who is this for?
However, I dwell on a regular server, where the effects of EQ2 Extended will hopefully be minor, though I fear they may not be if EQ2 Extended proves to be more profitable. Maybe it’ll garner us a few more players, once they get tired of dwelling in the odd Norrathian ghetto that EQ2 Extended is promising to be.
Update. I just noticed this in the FAQ:
Once Extended launches, the 14-day trial will no longer be available to the general public. New players can try the Extended free adventure service instead. However, 14-day trial passes for the EQII subscription service will still be distributed by active players on the live subscription service via the Recruit-a-Friend program. This way, friends can play together on the same server and still enjoy free time. The RAF program will be updated at a later point in time to include Extended invitations and rewards.
This is terrible news for EQ2 Live servers. Our gentle stream of new players coming in from the trial is going to dry up, with them being shunted over to the probably more profitable EQ2 Extended instead. EQ2 Live is going to be cannibalised by its younger sibling. The long-term effect of this could be dire.
The product new players are sent into will cost them more, requiring them to subscribe AND buy races and classes. Sadly, I fear that’s what this is all about. Rather than Turbine’s idea of getting less money per player, but having vastly more players and so making more profit, this EQ2 Extended scheme seems designed to just charge more for the same content.
So, there’s the first big effect EQ2 Extended will have upon the original game.
GU 57 went up on to Test earlier, and there are some interesting reports coming out of it. EQ2Wire reports that anyone trying to use the Auction House receives a curious error message:
You must upgrade to at least a Gold membership in order to purchase items from the broker.
The assumption is that this is a sign that Everquest 2 is going Free to Play, in a similar fashion to DDO, with multiple tiers of membership. I can’t think of any other explanation that would be plausible for that message to be occurring.
I do not think that having both extreme RMT AND a mandatory subscription charge is sustainable. I’d be happy for the RMT to go away, but I think that is not the way the MMO winds are blowing these days.
Given the success of Free Realms, I have a feeling that EQ2 may be making the leap to being Free to Play, supported by RMT, with an optional subscription like Free Realms and DDO have. The streaming technology used by Free Realms has been adapted for use in EQ2 (and was responsible for the dreadful memory issues many people experienced after Live Update 53), and will be enabled at the time of the next expansion to make for a smoother new player experience. We have been promised that there will, at that time, be a great influx of new players, and I doubt that’s going to happen just because they get to start in Halas. My prediction is that Everquest 2 is going F2P. Feel free to poke fun at me if I turn out to be wrong.
I got the timing a bit wrong, but then Halas didn’t make it in time for the Expansion either!
There is, apparently, a big announcement coming from SOE later today. I’ll be watching like a hawk. Whether this is going to work or not depends very much on the exact capabilities of the F2P accounts. If they are too heavily restricted then F2P is just a glorified trial which leads to subscribing. DDO takes the other route, making F2P with the occasional purchase a viable long-term option. That some level of accounts are being barred from the AH entirely is not a particularly great signal, but it depends exactly what a gold account is. If it is equivalent to a DDO subscription then that’s terrible, but if it is equal to a DDO Premium account (One that has bought points or subscribed at any point in its history) then that’s not so bad. Even so, even DDO accounts that have never paid a penny are still allowed to buy from the AH and post a single item for sale on it.
I’ll be back later, once we know what the score is. If it is done right, then I’ll support this move
