Nineteen Years In

Well, it’s time to face facts. This blog is probably on its last legs.

It hasn’t seen a lot of updates in the last year. It’s not likely to see many more. Well, nineteen years is a long time, and I feel quite frequently that I really don’t have much more to say on MMOs.

But I still play. Again, not as frequently as I had in the day, but I play. So it’s worth taking a look at the previous year to see where things are at.

Guess I’ll start with Star Citizen. It’s easy to take shots at it, given its business model and the apparent lack of progress-except, it really wasn’t a big lack this year. The big one was the Persistent Entity Streaming patch, which allowed just about every object in the game to stick around for as long as the character did in a server-and potentially longer if the server managed to still be around when the player logged back in. This came in with a cargo refactor which allowed cargo boxes to actually be moved around. Then the long delayed salvage gameplay came in. Then ship-based tractor beams capable of hauling ships. The cargo refactor also made piracy a valid profession instead of the “I’ll kill ships and call myself a pirate hr hr hr.” Racetracks became a thing for racing ships. And the annual CitizenCon announced that the single player game of Squadron 42 is “feature complete”, leading to a polishing phase. (What that might mean or how long it may take is probably going to be longer than a lot of people are hoping.) Bigger still, the star system of Pyro, the second system that will be released for the game, was revealed and players were able to do some testing in that system; it’s not impossible to believe that Pyro may be ready for the general playerbase this year. (We’ve heard that before, of course.) It’ll be interesting to see if the goodwill gained during the presentations will still be there by next October. As for my own playing time, I’ve kept exploring a great deal of the various types of gameplay that currently exists. While I’m not a big miner, and I don’t really do the pirate/PvP thing, I indulged in cargo hauling, salvaging, and of course, shooting things in space and on the ground. I’m clearly not leaving SC anytime soon-unless my SSD finally finds itself unable to hold both Windows and SC. (This is a real concern of mine.)

Star Trek Online picks up the next spot. The biggest news was its sale from Perfect World Entertainment to Gearbox. Content-wise…there wasn’t a lot. I think there was maybe three episodes released through last year, and it felt like even the lockboxes weren’t being produced at the same rate. Rumors about that Cryptic-the developers who keep trekking along-are dealing with layoffs or preparing for them. Their fourteenth anniversary is upcoming in less than a week, along with a new episode, but one can’t help but wonder if the game is drifting into a pseudo maintenance mode. With PWE, that wouldn’t be that big a deal; they kept Champions Online afloat for years, after all. But Gearbox may be another story-and I keep hearing that they’re having issues, too. We could be looking at a rocky year for STO. Despite this, I keep playing primarily during my Twitch stream, having spent most of the year playing a Starfleet TOS Science captain.

The biggest news for my gameplaying came just a couple of weeks ago, when the Homecoming servers of City of Heroes announced that they had been given a license to run the venerable MMORPG by NCSoft. That news probably can’t be understated. This made the game legal again, and I’ve dabbled a bit in streaming it now that I don’t feel like I’m advertising an illegal server. (Playing on one didn’t bother me-I have the client software; my brain is weird sometimes.) With this announcement, it looks like the Homecoming devs are going to be putting out some delayed content. How much they’ll put out over the next year is an open question, but I’m not sure the players mind. In addition to my stream, I continue to run with villains on a weekly basis with a less than semi-competent group of bad guys. (I’d refer to them as semi-competent, but these days, they seem to be dropping half of that phrase-it’s not the “semi” part. :D)

The one thing that isn’t likely to see much development in the next year is this blog. It’s been getting pretty obvious that it’s not getting updated regularly, and I have a hard time seeing myself ramping up all that hard for it. I was all set to announce that I was going to close the blog down for good with this post, but I figure I should at least try to get it to twenty years. It’s a nice round number, after all. We’ll see how it shakes out.

Here’s to a good 2024.

It’s Not A Zombie

I wasn’t planning to put up a post for another week, maybe two-yeah, I’m planning another “annual” post, with more on that front when it happens. But the news today was a big enough bombshell that I felt compelled to comment.

About four years ago, back in the halcyon days before pandemics happened, I noted that the MMORPG City of Heroes had returned-in the form of rogue servers. I called the post “Phoenix? Or Zombie?”, because I figured either it would either rise like a phoenix from the ashes, or get smacked with a shovel and re-buried. And for several years, I waited to see if NCSoft, the owners of the IP, would do anything to the proliferation.

Well, today, the answer finally has come, and it’s a phoenix: NCSoft has officially licensed the game to the folks running the Homecoming servers. (At least, that’s the general impression from other more reputable sites; I haven’t actually *seen* anything from NCSoft, but I figure nothing will bring a hammer down harder than a false claim on their name, so I’m willing to accept it on faith here.)

What does this mean? Well, for the folks playing on Homecoming, probably nothing much (although they may have to swap launchers to the “official” Homecoming launcher). For the other rogue servers? Hard to say; it’d still be a game of whack-a-mole to take them all down, and if NCSoft wasn’t willing to bother before, I can’t imagine they’d be willing to bother now. And while it’s possible the Homecoming folks might do something, I have trouble seeing it; they run off of donations and goodwill, and legal fees might damage that goodwill-especially since the other servers aren’t doing anything that they hadn’t done prior to today, except obviously lobby for the license.

For folks who aren’t playing and wishing they could play on a legal, official server: well, today’s the day.

I’ll be honest: I never expected this to happen. At best, I figured we’d continue on as we have been, with the apparent indifference of NCSoft. Sure, I’d heard the folks at Homecoming claim they were pursuing a deal with NCSoft, but after years of Homecoming-on top of the years between the game closure and the revelation of the rogue servers-I figured it was just so much smoke. I’m not afraid to say that I misjudged the entire situation there, and was completely and totally wrong. And it’s good to be wrong, sometimes.

What this means for the future of Homecoming itself is a harder question to answer. Will it start getting paid, full time developers to build upon the game? Homecoming’s not exactly known for fast development, but it’s been an all-volunteer project to the best of my knowledge. I don’t know that this will change. But as an evil future Emperor once said, “I will watch your career with great interest.”

Dumpster Fires

(Obviously, anyone expecting weekly or even monthly updates on this blog was probably highly optimistic.)

So. Star Citizen released its 3.18 patch a couple of weeks ago. Everything worked perfectly and was widely acclaimed as the best patch any company has ever released.

And then I woke up.

If you’re reading this blog, then you probably have read other gaming sites that have described the patch as a complete and utter disaster. While that might be slightly overstating things, I have been heard to remark that, while in the past I would say the game has more bugs than a Starship Troopers movie, now I have to say it has more bugs than the entire Starship Troopers franchise.

For most of the time since its release, I wasn’t able to even log into the game. This was not a unique experience. Posts on the official forums lit up. Gaming sites sat back to watch and eat popcorn. Cats and dogs were living in sin together. Marshmallow men started to wander the streets. (The last two may have been made up. Maybe.)

In some ways, though, this wasn’t completely unexpected. 3.18 was pitched as one of the most significant ones since…maybe 3.0? It was so big a deal that it threw off the quarterly big patch cadence; we had exactly one major patch last year. (This year isn’t looking great either, although we might get three.) It was going to introduce Persistent Entity Streaming, which would allow ships and inventory items to be dropped anywhere…and stay at those dropped locations until someone else came along and acted upon it. I’m still dubious on how that will ultimately work out, given game population and the sheer volume of stuff they can be carrying with them. Not to mention the volume of medical gowns that shows up every time a character respawns after having been killed off.

But I can definitely say that it works. There was a limit previous to this that only allowed three vehicles for a player to be spawned in at once. I was able to spawn in six recently-and most of them I left at an outpost until I returned an hour later, to find them still there. (Two were in bad shape; I think some wind blew ship wreckage on top of them with predictable results.) This is a big deal-there are ship concepts still on the drawing board that will need to be able to carry heaps of vehicles, and while it’s silly to assume they’d all belong to the same player…well, some people go crazy in SC.

This change also allowed the game to do something that the developers have been promising for years, something that kept getting pushed back, and back, and back: the first iteration of salvaging gameplay. You can strip the hull off of wrecked ships now, where you generate recycled material to sell at the various trade kiosks around the star system. Anyone can do this with a hand tool-in fact, the small canisters can even be used to take that recycled material and do some spot repairs on your own damaged ship. (It won’t reattach a wing, but it can likely at least cover up the exposed metal framework.) But it really shines with the salvaging ships in the game, one of which has been actually in game for a few years at least, and the other just recently released with this patch. (I can’t speak to how effective they are-they aren’t ships I have.)

It’s still the first iteration, so the heavy duty salvaging is still on the horizon. But as the mining gameplay loop shows, the devs will likely iterate on it hard.

These are just a couple of the most significant changes in the patch. But…I did use the phrase “dumpster fire” in the title, right? Even though people are having better luck logging in, there are still plenty of challenges. Missions may not actually be accepted when you accept them in the contract manager; it lags like crazy sometimes. Speaking of lag, bounty targets aren’t having their “neutralize target’ marker on them right away all of the time, which means if you kill them off beforehand, you don’t get paid, and you fail the mission to boot. (Technically, it’s “incomplete”, but it’s likely to go away when you log off, which is effectively failing the mission anyway.) More problematic is the fact that hangars at various landing sites don’t acknowledge your requests for landing sites; there’s a workaround, but sometimes that workaround doesn’t work. This can be a problem if you need fuel badly, or worse yet, are about to dehydrate to death and NEED to get inside to buy a drink. Starship claims are a little tricky, as well as storage of those ships. And these are just the things I personally experienced in my limited amount of time I’ve had since being able to log in again.

The devs, fortunately, are aware of all of this, and have been working. The fact that I can log in now more or less consistently is proof of this. There’s a 3.18.1 patch on the immediate horizon that will (hopefully) address some of the more critical bugs. Maybe, maybe not, but we’ll find out. Once the more critical bugs are taken care of, we should be able to get back to the “film” instead of “franchise” comment about the bugs in the game. There are still things I really want to try out that came in the patch, like the starship race tracks (which I will undoubtedly wreck on more often than not, because I suck at racing) and the changes in how cargo hauling (where the cargo can be interacted with now-which makes piracy possible).

The devs are going to want to make sure things are running relatively smooth real soon; after all, May is when they do their big Invictis Launch Week sales and free-flights for people who haven’t backed the game; being unable to log in would be a very bad look for prospective customers….

Eighteen Years In

Well, the blog’s been irregular as…you know, I’m not actually going to complete that joke. That’s going to places I fear to tread.

Despite this irregularity-and despite that I didn’t make an entry for last year-I’m at least gonna take a look back at 2022 for the eighteenth anniversary of this blog. If the blog were a person, it’d be graduating high school now. Scary thought, that.

So, what did I spend my time in?

Slow Year, But Big Income

Star Citizen got the bulk of my time again, but it seems to be suffering from a slowdown in content release-which is not the best look when you’re in active development in an Alpha status. This isn’t to say nothing happened; a number of vehicles were released, ship refueling from other ships happened, more missions added, including another dynamic event. But it was all drip-drip-dripped from April onward. The rationale is that a lot of work is being done for two major bits of technology which-in theory-will dramatically move the chains forward. But the last patch is very overdue (to be fair, if they rushed it live now, it’d be a minor disaster), and one could be tempted to observe that this year’s work had better show some awesome stuff. I stream my gameplay a bit on Saturdays, so to toot my own horn a bit, if one is feeling masochistic to see just what one can do, I’m not hard to find.

Still Boldly Going

Star Trek Online tends to occupy my Wednesday nights, and I’ve been moving along playing the Klingon Warrior J’Dan, who’s nearing the end of his career to open up a slot for a new captain. That plan’s been in the works. As far as the releases for STO, well, it’s marginally better than Star Citizen; they’ve had three “seasons” released, each featuring the ongoing issues with the Mirror Universe and all the troubles that entails; mostly they seem to have one or two episodes and a task force operation. Not much new in the way of mechanics, which may be for the best. And of course, there are regular lockbox updates. I did take some time during the year to actually do that year’s event campaign, which will allow me to choose a ship usually only found in lockboxes-which one, I’ve yet to decide upon. I was going to use it for the next captain, but stuff happened, and I found that I didn’t actually need to do it anymore. Welp-not the first time I’ve out-clevered myself. This is the other game I do on streams, so again, not hard to find me.

It’s So Easy Being Evil…

At this point, despite the lack of any official reactions, I think it’s safe to call the assorted rogue servers in City of Heroes as phoenixes, and not zombies. We’re closing in on four years since the assorted servers were born again, so to speak, and they’re still going strong. I don’t talk much about the assorted servers these days, since I prefer not to be caught up in any drama between them-but if you look back at my posts, you know where I’ve been playing, and it hasn’t changed over time. Again, time constraints limit me to one day a week on this one, and on that day, I work on a villain called the Chronopolitan, a time/beam defender, and he’s in his mid-40’s range. I play him with a group of other villains, and odds are good that when he hits max level, I’ll keep developing him, as I view him as “what if the Doctor had absolutely no scruples?” In other words, he’s been fun to RP. As far as development goes…well, since the servers all go their own way, it’s hard to nail down the assorted changes they’ve gone through. Still, I was always of the opinion that if the game were at least in maintenance mode, I’d still be playing-and that hasn’t changed for me.

As far as other games? I’ve spent some time on Valheim, which took the gaming world by storm a while back, and while I didn’t get involved much with the multiplayer aspect, I did find it as a very fun game, and well worth the relatively cheap price to pick it up on Steam.

As far as this blog goes? It’s still on an irregular status, and who the heck knows when I’m moved to post something. Time’s a lot more limited for me these days, and sitting down to type something out is a bit more challenging than it used to be. But I’m still alive, still kicking, and still playing those MMOs, even eighteen years later. (I try not to dwell on how old that makes me feel sometimes.) If you’re reading this, I do still appreciate you taking a little bit of your time to read what I’m writing, and who knows? Maybe I’ll have more to say as this year goes on. At worse, I should be here this time next year for 19!

The Emperor Has Clothes

So, not so long ago, Star Trek Online released a new episode, and it features the revelation of the Emperor of the Terran Empire.

Ordinarily at this point, I might mention spoilers ahead, but honestly, the devs more or less spoiled things on the bloody loading screens, so anyone playing the game and loading into any map will know it, so my conscience is clear. Still, if you managed to dodge all of that, I’d stop reading now and come back after playing the episode.

I was certain I knew the answer. It’d been a mystery, and I boldly predicted that the Terran Emperor would be none other than Jiro Sugihara, the top diplomat in Starfleet. It made sense. Jiro was a fellow dedicated to peace, preferred words to actions (lots and lots and lots of words), and generally was a pacifist’s pacifist. So surely, his mirror counterpart had to be the most ruthless, maniacal, vicious psychopath you could ever ask for. The fix was in, I was dead certain!

Obviously, I was wrong. But I am glad to be wrong, because I couldn’t have seen this one coming-and it’s scarier than my prediction.

The Terran Emperor is notne other than…Wesley Crusher. Thaaaat’s right. Remember that kid on the Enterprise-D bridge? The walking Deus ex Machina? The guy who almost everyone watching the Next Generation wanted to throw out an airlock as if he was a Cylon skin-job? Yeah. It’s him.

But…think about it.

As a kid, he was regularly right up there in brains with the geniuses Data and LaForge. He was an acting Ensign long before he went to the Academy. And by the end of the series, he’d been revealed to have a power that put him on a whole new level-equal to an alien known as the Traveler. It’s reasonable to presume that his mirror counterpart is at least as smart, and has access to such power on his own. So he’s perfect for the role of Emperor, and it explains why the Terran Empire got back on its feet after the mess with the Klingon/Cardassian Alliance explored in the Deep Space Nine series.

And this is terrifying all on its own. An adult Wesley in all of his power and intellect, unshackled by that little thing we like to call “morality”? Scary. Given that he wants the power of the Mirror Universe version of V’Ger? Now we’re going to a whole new level of terrifying. If he succeeds (come on, I’m not gonna spoil everything…), there may be nothing that can stop him.

Unless, of course, it’s the Prime version of V’Ger; after all, Ilia from the Motion Picture has been here trying to establish communication with Mirror V’Ger (that’s not really its name-but I’ll leave that one as a surprise, too). But there could have been another possibility. After all, if the devs could get Wil Wheaton to reprise his role as a Mirror Universe variant…what stops them from having him show up as his Prime version?

Well, rumor has it, that may have been stopped by a force far more potent than V’Ger or even Q: the license holders of Star Trek. Sounds like they don’t want the devs potentially stepping on plans for the character on the show Picard. On the other hand, it’s getting harder and harder to see STO as being in line with the shows as they start to step around the region of time that STO operates in. It may not be long before STO is considered its own timeline. Let’s hope it fares better than the timeline from the Star Trek novels, which recently had heaps of writing more or less obliterated.

It’s hard to say how this current episode arc will end, but one thing is certain: no matter what heavyweights get involved, your character will most certainly be a big part of it-and possibly the deciding factor. Stay tuned.

Dynamics

One of the questions I see tossed off every so often about Star Citizen is, “It looks cool, but what is there to do?” And if the question is thrown in my direction, I mention the whole mining, cargo hauling, mission running, bounty hunting, criminal activity thing. Which is great, as far as it goes. Certainly there’s enough going on that you can change up your gameplay entirely for a while if you feel like it; if you get tired of shooting things in space, you can shoot them on the ground; if you get tired of shooting at all, you can haul cargo.

And there are occasional events that players may run with their organizations or to a wider group-I like to point at the annual Daymar Rally, a race that occurs on the surface of a moon. So really, there is stuff to do. But that isn’t all, these days. Nowadays, the developers have a few more fun things in the toy box.

They’re listed as “dynamic events”, which really aren’t, exactly-and yet, they kind of are. You see, every so often, the developers throw a switch, and one of four different events can kick off-and they’re more involved than the usual missions.

The first was called Xenothreat, after a gang from a neighboring star system (which might even be put into game next year-IT COULD HAPPEN!), who have intruded into the Stanton system (where all the players currently live), and it sets off a conflict that mixes dogfighting, first person shooter gameplay, and even cargo running. I kind of think of this as my favorite one, because it does allow almost all gameplay styles something to do-and it ends with a battle royale against Xenothreat and their capital ships.

After that one came the “Nine-Tails Lockdown”. This one involves a blockade against rapid travel around a space station, and again, it has a couple of ways to participate; you can engage the Nine-Tails pirate gang, or you can deliver medical relief supplies to the locked down station-if you can avoid being shot down! What made this event different was that you could also fight on the side of the Nine-Tails, if you had a criminal status rating. This meant that there was an incentive for PvP activity here, both for criminals getting paid to kill people, and bounty hunters to claim their bounties-as well as earn the money for fighting the Nine-Tails to begin with.

The third event was based on player lore. Once upon a time, there was a drug lab called Jumptown, and it sold highly valuable drugs. It was also a free-fire zone, which meant everyone fought over possession of Jumptown so they could buy the drugs and sell them off. Eventually, drug sales got nerfed hard, and that was that. But the devs created an event they called “Jumptown 2.0”, where a random drug lab would once again spit out highly valuable drugs, and you could either go to confiscate the drugs or distribute them. This was theoretically enabled to recreate the days of crazy PvP violence both in the air and on the ground-but you also had a possibility of winding up on a server where peace was declared, and people would just queue up for the drugs. Just goes to show, you can never predict this community.

The fourth and latest event is the most complicated one they’ve put together yet. The Siege of Orison takes place at the cloud city of Crusader, and those Nine-Tails guys have upped their game by taking over a few of the platforms there. Your job is to go on a ground assault and retake them by disabling the anti-aircraft defenses and kill off the leaders of the attack. Of course, there are heaps of other Nine-Tails guys that would be just as happy to add you to their kill count. This mission involves first person combat, capturing ships to travel between platforms, and hunting down the primary targets before the big boss comes out to play. This one’s mainly a PvE event, but in Star Citizen, if someone can shoot someone else, PvP can happen.

The events never run at the same time (yet), so you usually don’t have to worry about more than one of these kicking off at a time. There’s usually announcements as to when these events are going to happen well in advance, but honestly? Anytime you see a “Priority” style mission on your mission list, something is going on, and they usually pay pretty well. If you want to see and work with other players, these dynamic events are usually a good way to meet people. (And potentially get killed by them; as “Q” would tell you, “It’s not safe out there.”

Wipeout!

No, not THAT kind of wipout….

At the time of this post, Star Citizen will be engaging in that most dreaded of activities: wiping out their database. It’s something that happens every so often during a patch, and it’s not really unusual for a game in an alpha state-their database just has too much corrupted stuff. In theory, it’s something that becomes less necessary as development proceeds from alpha to beta, and from there to release. Certainly by release-the last thing you want to do is invalidate a player’s hard work by kicking them back to square one.

But in an alpha, it’s necessary-and Star Citizen’s isn’t an exception to that rule. What makes it unusual is, of course, the fact that backers can actually play the game as it is being developed. So the removal of nearly everything tends to sting a little more. It used to be more common, honestly-it used to happen with every patch. In the last few years, though, it’s been less frequent-there was even a near 18 month stretch where no wipes happened.

Not everything is lost in these wipes-at least, not now. Long term persistence has come a long way since the earlier days of the game. There’s three basic varieties to go through: inventory, which includes equipment, ship components, and vehicles of all types; wallet, which handles the in-game currency; and reputation, which measures how well you are liked by various in-game entities.

The wipe coming with the imminent patch-3.17.2-will affect two of these. The wallet is history-everyone will be reset to starting values. Likewise, the inventory is history. In some cases, this can be a good thing: after an extended period of time with the inventory system as it currently stands, a player may well have collected a heap of junk. The loss of vehicles-except for what was pledged on the RSI web site-stings a bit more. But reputation will be maintained, and that’s a good thing.

A high reputation means higher paying missions; higher paying missions means faster recovery time from a wipe, where you can get yourself back to a decent amount of currency and on the road to getting back the lost ships-or maybe try out other ones. A wipe can be looked at as an opportunity in this case. It’s a chance to try new vehicles that perhaps went under the radar before.

Of course, none of it means that there won’t be another wipeout in the future. With 4.0 on the horizon next year (we can only hope), a wipe is almost guaranteed; and of course, one can expect a wipe when the game enters beta (and I might be lucky and live long enough to see it happen). And of course, in that far off mythical future, a final wipe for launch.

This kind of thing can make one question, “What’s the point, then? If everything is getting wiped, why bother playing?” Well, that’s going to differ between individuals. For me, though, it’s more about the journey than the destination. Or to be a little less high-class about it: it’s the getting, not the having. It may seem repetitive, but there’s a lot of repetitive stuff in MMOs; why should Star Citizen be different?

Despite the wipe, I’m looking forward to seeing some of the new stuff in the pipe for the new patch, which could land as soon as this week.

Wasted Opportunities

Back in the days before the majority of MMORPGs were free-to-play (or similar), a game might tend to struggled to get new players. After all, you had to get them to buy the game in the first place, and then get hooked enough to pay the subscription fees. So one way they would attempt to get at the theoretical pool of new players would be to have free access for a period of time. Maybe it would be via trial accounts, or maybe it would just make everything open for a week. Didn’t matter-it was a tried and true method to get players to go into your game, and go, “Wow, this is awesome! I’m gonna purchase this so I can keep playing it!” Done correctly, it’s a solid strategy.

But come on. Look at the title of my post. I’m clearly not going to be talking about a success story here. And despite how much I like the game, I’m not going to just ignore problems like this.

The game under discussion here is Star Citizen. And man, does it have a lot of ill-will inertia to overcome to get people invested; the reputation of being a scam (it’s not), the nature of overinflated pricing on ships with real money (they are), and the fact that it’s still years and years away from reaching a completed state (also true). But in order to continue the development, they need that sweet new-player money as much as any subscriber based game did back in the day. So: tried and true method. Ever so often, they do free flight weeks, usually with a limited group of ships-some weeks more limited than others. You would think it would be in their best interest to put their best foot forward.

The best laid plans….

Last week, the game held an annual event referred to the “Invictus Launch Week”, which has a bunch of in-game lore I won’t bore anyone with, but it makes for a convenient time to do a free to play week so people can fly the military-oriented starships (although military ground vehicles are available as well, but let’s be honest-SC is all about the ships). This is something that is known to bring in an influx of people who want to check the game out-especially as the game expands its gameplay. Sounds like a winner, doesn’t it?

But there’s one more inconvenient fact that rears its ugly head-that the game is still in alpha development-which means it has more bugs than a Star-er, I’ve used that joke with my last post. I’d stop falling back on it if it stopped being true. Anyway. To say that the last week was probably a minor disaster would be one of the more accurate things I’ve written lately. Let’s take a look at some of the horrors ahead.

1. The Convention Hall Navigation. This was one of the weeks where you didn’t get the free ships in your hangar to access immediately-you have to go to the convention hall to see the ships to rent them. A good theory. And this was the first year they had the hall at the gas giant of Crusader, in the cloud city of Orison. It showed. Last year, conventions took place somewhere else, and it was an example of doing things right. Primarily by use of signage. Well, they blew it here. There were signs, but no arrows to direct people where to go to get to the hall. There are some maps, but I can tell you from observation that nine times out of ten, nobody bothers to look at the maps-and the maps are only kind-of helpful. So just finding the hall is rough, unless you’re already familiar with the layout of Orison. (Spoiler alert: new players aren’t likely to be familiar with the layout of Orison.)
2. The elevators. This is a bigger problem than just the convention hall, extending to elevators all over, but we’re talking new players right now. When you got to the hall, you had a lobby which had touristy sales stuff (in-game purchases with in-game credits, not real money; it’s sad I have to say that explicitly). To get to the floors with ships, you have to take the elevators. So you press the call button, and one of three things will happen.
   • The elevator will open to reveal the gaseous atmosphere of Crusader. It’s a door with nothing on the other side. You walk into it and you experience the joys of falling through the convention center to your death. Then you respawn at wherever your medical respawn point is.
   • The elevator will open to reveal a void as black as death. Which is convenient, because if you go into it, you get to have the same kind of fun as the previous option.
   • The elevator will open to reveal…and elevator! Congratulations! You’ve almost made it! The reason I say “almost”, however, is that there were periods of time where the only floor you can select in the elevator was the floor you were on-in other words, you couldn’t actually get to the floors with ships to rent. Which kind of makes the whole thing moot.
3. The wallet. Again, this is the in-game wallet with in-game credits in it, not real life wallets. (I have to keep hammering at this. There’s a perception that the only way you get stuff in the game is with real money, and it’s not true.) A bug hit that would, between logins, eliminate chunks of earned credits in the game. Not a huge deal for new players if they’re only here for the free flight-but it looks really bad when they’re deciding if they want to take the plunge on the game. The devs did manage during the week to restore lost credits, but it’s a real bad look.
4. And finally, the biggest (in my opinion) problem: the friends list. When you’re a new player, there’s a better-than-good chance that you’re checking it out on the word of a friend or two. So obviously, you’re going to want to get him on your friends list. It’s a big deal-it allows you to more easily party up with them, it makes it possible to join the same server that they’re playing on (Right now, servers are limited to 50 people. The magic 4.0 patch will change this dramatically, but I’ll believe it when I see it). It’s a big deal. But the backend servers that track this stuff apparently took multiple stretches of hours off, because the friends lists weren’t working. At all. Which made grouping with friends virtually impossible.

So, what does a new player conclude from this? “This game sucks. I’m out of here.” The prospective new player decides the game is a mess and stays away; if they’re kind, they may say they’ll be back when the game’s in a better state. (Don’t get the hopes up.) And the irony is, it actually is in a decent state under most circumstances, but the devs put this up not long after one of their quarterly patches-which had its own issues with bugs-and one can get the feeling that there were a lot more bugs that showed up with the patch that installed the convention center.

And that, in a nutshell, is a wasted opportunity. You don’t want to drive new people away-you want them to see how awesome the game is, which would give the impression that it’s going to get more awesome as time goes on. Not give them the impression that it’s a dumpster fire. If there’s one time you really want things to work right, it’s during your free play weeks, and last week, the developers failed hard.

One hopes that lessons were learned enough for the big November free play period; they really don’t need another experience like this one.

The Lost Year: Star Citizen

The last of my usual MMOs to remark upon is Star Citizen, that game that tends to bring out strong opinions. People will either love it or hate it, and I’m pretty much in the former with no apologies.

For a game that doesn’t (yet) have the depth of the other MMOs I play, I’ve spent a remarkably large amount of time in it-in fact, it’s probably got the majority share in my gaming time from the past year. And while it still has a long way to go to meet the goals that were set for that game years ago, progress is visible. In the last year alone, it got reputation systems in place, an inventory system that’s locked to players, locations, or vehicles, a medical system that’s more than just a sack of health points, widened mission variety, and of course, more ships released. (Of course, they’ve also listed up new concept ships too, so I’m thinking we might be at a net-zero as far as “how many more until the ships are all done”.)

While I haven’t managed to find my preference in gameplay loops-I’ve enjoyed many of them, and that’s a big deal to me; it helped keep me in Star Wars Galaxies back in the day-I have at least managed to nail down the loop that I’ll likely not spend a lot of time in. While I am a competent miner, both in ground vehicles and in space vehicles, I find that I just can’t bring myself to enjoy it. But that’s okay-when I can go onto a moon one day and defend a bunker against bad guys (or kill off the good guys-Hurston Security, I hate you forever), get into a dogfight in the skies above an outpost the next day, and the following day go hauling cargo from the inner moons to the outer planets, and use different ships for each of those days…well, it’s a nice realization that even more loops are coming, some of which I will do and some of which I won’t. (Refueling ships in space from space-tankers is coming VERY soon-may have already done so by the time this post gets released-isn’t in my list, as I have no tankers, but I may well need to refuel at one at somebody else’s at some point.)

The biggest difference between SC and the other MMOs, of course, is that progression is a very limited affair. You can earn credits for more ships in-game, and nowadays you can actually loot first-person shooter equipment at bunker locations, too, but you won’t find much in the way of levels here. Except maybe in the reputation system, which has grown from its initial implementation, and is likely to keep growing as more gameplay loops go in.

Game still has more bugs than a Starship Troopers movie-I’ll always say that if you can’t handle lots of bugs, stay away from SC until at least Beta (sometime in the distant future-I’m betting on 2952). But they aren’t as horrible as one might expect-usually-and there’s a lot of fun to be had playing. And hey-they have free flight events every so often, with one on the docket in a couple weeks. Of course, that tends to add to server loads like crazy as heaps of people come to take a look and discover it not at its best….

Can’t win sometimes, right?

Anyway, still flying, still enjoying myself, and isn’t that the only thing that should matter to me from a game?

The Lost Year: City of Heroes

Funny thing, life.

Exactly three years ago, I posted about the return of City of Heroes, called “Phoenix? Or Zombie?” My rationale was it could be a phoenix, rising from the ashes in a most glorious way-or it could be a zombie, risen from the grave to get smashed back down with a shovel and reburied. I figured that something would happen at some point in time to clarify the status of the proliferating rogue servers, one way or another.

Three years on, and it still hasn’t happened. The rogue servers don’t seem to be going anywhere, and no indications that the shovel is coming. But neither are they yet to the point where I can say they’re phoenixs. …Phoenixi? Phoenixes? What’s the plural for phoenix?

I digress. I’d set up shop on the Homecoming server, because it was the first to rise, had the population, and that was enough for me. But somewhere along the line, I spent less and less time in CoH. It’s probably because I had my fingers in a number of other games, which made it difficult for me to commit to any supergroups beyond one group of villains who also rose from the ashes that I’d been a part of in the Live days.

There…hasn’t been a whole lot of activity going on at Homecoming, as far as publishes go. Admittedly, they have a small team of devs, and it’s all volunteer-one does NOT want to make a profit off of CoH, or the owners will act. But there have only been two major patches in the last year; they were fairly crunchy patches, including two new mission chains and a new Strike Force. I can’t speak for the other rogue servers, so I don’t know their release cadence, but my impression is they tend to drop stuff a bit more often-but I’m not sure how many of them qualify as content patches. Then again, the biggest draw of CoH is that it IS CoH; even if it were maintenance mode, I suspect that would be satisfactory for a number of the players.

As for me: well, when last I looked at CoH on the blog, I was leveling up Professor Pyrotech. It’s somewhat tragic to mention that he…hasn’t budged much. Such is the tragedy of limited time. The once-a-week play I give to CoH tends to be oriented on the villain side of things. One such character was Sinister Shock, an Electric/Electric Controller. As he’s an RP character, he was basically a mutant hacker who manifested electrical powers and fell in with the worst villains you’ve never heard of. Thanks to the villain-group’s storylines, he tried to mastermind a theft from the group leader (who had gone missing), wound up possessed by an ancient Circle of Thorns wizard, got freed, had a teammate exaggerate his reputation to the point where just about every hero group and villain group was calling for his head, apparently transmuted into pure electricity, until it was revealed that he hadn’t actually transformed, but created the electrical form which had incinerated him but copied his brainwaves-and eventually faded out like a dead battery. (Of course, being as this is the superhero genre, it’s unlikely the world has seen the last of Sinister Shock!)

After that, I rolled up a new character, because that’s what avowed altoholics do! The current character is known as the Chronopolitan, and he’s a time traveler (or in specific, he’s a Time/Beam Defender). I modeled him hard on another famous time traveler: the Doctor. (No, he’s not a Time Lord…well, he is if you pay attention to the title he’s using from his badges.) I wanted to make a less moral time traveler, but not a psychopath-with a quirky outsider’s viewpoint, heavy on the quirk. He’s been great fun, although he’s had a serious side show up occasionally-he’s alluded to the collision of a pair of timelines, which I’m viewing as the Homecoming timeline and my personal branch of the Virtue timeline, and I’m working on a Mission Architect arc to wrap that up-my blast from the past.

I may not do as much these days in City of Heroes, but I’m still at least doing the weekly play, and who knows? Maybe one day, I might actually get around to working on Professor Pyrotech again….