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.

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!

Sixteen Years In

So.  2020 happened.

Despite this, it was another year of MMORPG playing, and as I often do roughly this time each year, I like to look back at what I played, babble a little, and look ahead.  Despite-or perhaps because of-the COVID-19, I spent a fair amount of time gaming.  And as usual, one game got the lion’s share of the treatment-and it wasn’t what I expected it would be.

The New Kid on the Block (well, on my block, anyway)

I put a toe into the universe of Star Citizen…and then jumped headlong into it.  I spent a lot of time learning how to fly, to fight, to trade, to rescue, to commit crimes and deal with being in prison (and failing to escape it multiple times).  Despite what many apparently believe, this was no scam, although one could argue their money management could use work.  The game saw more money raked in this year than any other-in part, I’m sure, due to the pandemic, and in part because it was certainly more playable than it had ever been in the past.  The day this goes Live still seems far away, but in my slightly-over-a-year time playing it has been enjoyable, and I’m still not slowing down.  The year saw a new world get populated, a system of crime and punishment added, and a number of new ships-a pair of which were highly anticipated by the backers.

As far as my own activity…well, I did a lot of stuff, honestly, looking to immerse myself in the game.  My posts over the last year looked at the worlds of the Stanton system, as well as a pair of starship types.  I looked at some of the missions-and that’s changed a bit since I’d posted, so I may do another at some point).  I looked at the crime and punishment systems, remarked on the bugs that are omnipresent, discussed briefly the question of pay-to-win or not (and did a prototype test on just how true or false that may be), and spoke of an organization that I joined.  So far, the future is bright, even if it’s a distant brightness-the game’s still in alpha, after all, and even the single-player version seems to still be far off.

Still trucking along, still wondering if it’s a zombie or a phoenix….

City of Heroes remains present, on an assortment of rogue servers, with Homecoming remaining the most populated one-and with the biggest ambition of trying to become the semi-official version.  It’s still complicated; they keep claiming to be in negotiations with the license holder, but the only results have been restrictions, including a ban on streaming on that server, which seems silly given the volume of other rogue servers who have no problem at all with the streamers-the cat is already out of the bag, after all.  At the moment, I’m still inclined to go with “zombie” in my “phoenix or zombie” question, because the license holder can still hit it with a shovel and bury it.  I’m certainly aware of the fact that there are people who might leave if it DOES get sanctioned.  It’s a crazy situation that continues, but the fact that we’re coming up on two years of operation seems to indicate that it’s still not going anywhere.

There haven’t been many detail posts on the CoH servers, although I did put up a few posts continuing the adventures of Professor Pyrotech’s character chronicle.  I really do need to get back to that at some point-but I have to be playing more often, too.  Most of my in-game time has been with a villain I’ve got with the RP group Entropy Legion, but it really does deserve a bit more of my time.

It didn’t show here, but it’s been making its appearance elsewhere in a new outlet of mine.

Star Trek Online was looking for a while to be the one game that faded into the limelight here.  With the Foundry gone, I’d not been highly motivated to sign in too much.  But it did hit that rare milestone:  10 years of operation.  Despite some of those years being singularly unimpressive, the fact that it keeps chugging along is a testament to its longevity, whether it’s because of the IP or because of its gameplay (I know which I’d bet on), and it still delivers a pretty decent Trek experience, even if it’s a Dominion War-type of experience.  It also brought us the Year of the Klingon (still ongoing, technically), where the whole mess with the Discovery-era Klingon J’Ula has made her play to take over the Klingon Empire and plunge it into civil war.

Despite this, STO was working its way out of my priority rotation, except for…well, it was 2020.  And I was deciding to try something new to help deal with the pandemic:  I began livestreaming STO on Wednesday nights on Twitch (conveniently linked on the top menu here).  While I haven’t gone into detail on it on the blog (and I really should do something about that at some point), I first ran a Jem’Hadar character through the main content for those characters (which wasn’t much), and then started an alien aligned with the Romulan Republic, and that character is presently deep into the Delta Quadrant missions.

It’s worth noting that I also decided to livestream Star Citizen on Saturday afternoons, because heck, why not?

Games that didn’t make the cut this year:  Champions Online and EVE Online kind of got short shrift.  The former because, well, if I want to play a game with superheroes, CoH has always been my preference.  I’ve noted that it’s had new content in the last year, but I haven’t actually done any of it.  Maybe if I get bored this year.  And EVE has always been sort of a thing that’s been “yeah, I like it, but I don’t LIKE like it”.  And let’s face it, for my space action, STO and Star Citizen are more than scratching the itch.

So.  2020 happened.  And looking ahead has never been trickier.  But I can make a few predictions.  I’ll still be livestreaming Star Citizen and STO; I’ll still be playing both games and I’ll conclude the Professor Pyrotech character chronicle for City of Heroes.  And I predict that I will be ending my hiatus on WordPress, because I’ve been able to access the “classic editor” and that makes posting sane again.  So semi-regular posts will be returning, and we’ll see what 2021 brings us.  After all, we still have multiple CoH successors that could conceivably go Live, or at least into Beta.  (We won’t even talk about Star Citizen entering Beta with its Squadron 42 game; that’s crazy talk.)

So that covers year 16 of the blog!  It’s a year that I think a lot of people would like to put in the rear-view mirror, and I’m one of them.  The world went ugly on everyone, and hopefully, next year’s post reflecting on ’21 will have a tone of renewal and hope, beyond just the gaming arena.  That feels like a good enough sentiment to close on for this post.

Fifteen Years In

It’s that time again-when I take a look back, and think “Holy spit, I’ve been doing this for FIFTEEN YEARS!?”

Yeah, that’s something, isn’t it?

Anyway, I like to reflect a little on the last year’s worth of posts, a few comments and/or insights I may have, and take a very tentative peek at the future.  However, I have to admit, those peeks are often obsolete in no time at all-for example, I didn’t see the events of this year coming at all, for both good and ill.

Phoenix or Zombie? The jury is still out….

The big shock for the year, as far as I was concerned, was the apparent rebirth of City of Heroes.  Of course, there’s a major caveat attached:  it’s not NCSoft, but rather, rogue servers in the same vein as the emulators that tend to hang around for certain other games-except this wasn’t reverse engineered, but was the actual game code.  Through circumstances I’m not going to get into, it was kept secret until this year, when someone spilled the beans, and the code was released into the wild.  And I found myself unable to resist returning to Paragon City and its counterpart in the Rogue Islands (and Nova Praetoria, of course).  I chose not to recreate old characters, but blaze trails with brand new ones, with new ideas.  And to their credit, the developers in charge of the Homecoming rogue servers have done a good job on implementing the old holiday events, adding a couple of new missions arcs in, and even a few patterns for costumes.

All that said:  it IS still a rogue server, and NCSoft has been making trademark moves lately.  Maybe it’s to prep for crushing the rogue servers; maybe it’s to prep for legitimizing one or all of them.  When all is said and done, the future of CoH is still in doubt.  While I think it’ll be impossible to stamp out the game at this point, the established servers can be driven back underground.  It’ll be an eternal game of whack-a-mole, which will be a pain for both the players and devs, and NCSoft.  Logic tells me that it’d be easier for them to license the game out, but logic’s failed me in regards to NCSoft before.  This coming year could make or break the rogue servers.

On the personal front, I made the slightly crazy decision to level up no less than six characters more or less simultaneously.  While I failed to tie them all together with a thematic storyline, I did manage to get them all to level 50 within about a week of each other (which is to say, the first and last to reach 50 was within that weekly period).  Learning from that, I went back to my Champions Online strategy:  one character at a time, please!

The Final Frontier got smaller.

Star Trek Online had the potential to be the major game to step into the void left by the next game on this list, but got hammered by the fact that CoH came back.  The game didn’t do itself any favors by continuing to focus laser-like on Star Trek: Discovery related stuff, which doesn’t resonate for me at all, and inflicted a major blow by removing the player generated content and the tool used to make it, the Foundry.  With such a linear progression left-one that’d I’ve done heaps of times before-I’ve found it difficult to bring myself to do new character chronicles, choosing only to start wrapping up chronicles in progress.  My Cardassian character got to his stopping point just as the Foundry went away, and I had my Discovery representative continue the new missions that were released this year (there weren’t many) since they were Discovery related.

Going forward, that character will still do missions related to the Discovery-era, although I’ll bet real money we start getting stuff related to the upcoming Picard TV series.  Which, of course, I won’t have any investment in because it’s being aired the same way Discovery was.  Call me cynical.  On the other hand, I am feeling a hankering to do a new character chronicle-I haven’t really done a Romulan-centric one, and I haven’t done those missions to death yet.  So, it’s possible that will be on my list.  Or maybe not.  Read on.

The saga ends-for me, anyway.

Star Wars: The Old Republic found itself a victim of Bioware/EA’s support folks.  Suffice it to say, I had an issue with my account early this year, and after leaving me hanging for about a month, told me “oh, we’re not fixing anything because nothing is wrong”.  Something was still very wrong, it wasn’t made right, so I chose not to favor them with my money anymore.  Too bad; looked like some decent stuff came rolling around, and it would’ve been nice to get the rest of the companions lost in the previous expansions, but I’ve better things to do with my time than supporting a game that didn’t support me back.

This was ALMOST a year for Champions….

Champions Online was almost in the mix.  I had a new character chronicle lined up and ready to go.  It just had the misfortune of being murdered by the return of CoH.  I’ve made no bones about the fact that I view CoH as a better game (that’s my opinion, remember-others view it the other way, and that’s okay), and with it back, well.  CO is back to collecting dust.  I will admit, though, that I will probably come back to it at some point-I hate leaving things completely undone.  If NCSoft kills the Homecoming servers, it wouldn’t be hard to guess that I’d be looking for my superheroic fix somewhere.

Other games:  I took a short return to Azeroth thanks to World of Warcraft throwing me a bone with a free weekend reactivation.  I also did a few log-ins to EVE Online.  I probably did about as much in one of those games as the other-and it wasn’t much.  CoH really did draw me back in.

So, what’s in store for 2020?  After fifteen years, what’s next?  Well, the race to be the spiritual successor to City of Heroes is still ongoing, no matter how the whole thing with the rogue servers turn out.  The devs at STO keep hinting at big stuff incoming, although usually that means they’re getting ready to remove something else from the game.  You can expect the continuation of the current character chronicle in CoH, with another pair in planning stages (meaning, I know what I want to do with them in a big-picture sense).  There may be a chronicle for that aforementioned Romulan character in STO.

And I will offer some thoughts on something I’ve never played before.  How’s that for a teaser?

Here’s to a rollicking 2020!

Fine. One hint.

Fourteen Years In

2018 was a rough year for me, which impacted my playing time in the MMO-sphere.  Still, I was hardly inactive, and it’s time to take a look back on 2018 to see what has come before-and try to guess where I’ll go with the incoming year.

It was a helluva year for the Final Frontier

This last year, Star Trek Online was the major monopolizer of my time.  The first part of the year featured the conclusion of Dathiro’s Ordeal, which pushed him to level 60, thanks to the strength of the Foundry, the Duty Officer system, and the Admiralty system.  By mid-year, we had a new expansion-“Victory is Life” which featured the Jem’Hadar and the Gamma Quadrant, which compelled me to create Jalot’iklar, one of the Jem’Hadar Vanguard.  That was sadly abbreviated due to the fact that the Jem’Hadar started at such a high level, and had a relatively small number of storylines to go through-which, naturally, related to wrapping up the story that had begun with the discovery of the Lukari species and the Tzenkethi protomatter attacks.  Then things got crazy as STO started pushing Star Trek: Discovery content, with a new sub-faction starting in that era, which got brought up to the “present” day much like the “Agents of Yesterday” characters-except they only had two missions before getting kicked to the future.  Despite this, I still kicked off a chronicle related to that content-using an alien character named Jhudsui, who will be dedicated to the Discovery related content.  He hasn’t gotten far with his levels, because of that; I’m sort of counting on the episodes being open to all levels at first, much like most of the new content is when it’s first released.  Finally, I created a Cardassian Starfleet character to take a look at the Foundry from a Federation point of view, with Captain Selak.

In that time, we’ve had a lot of stuff happen in STO that occur independent of my own play.  One of the more significant shifts was the removal of the monthly subscription model, which made things interesting as far as the prospect of vet rewards and the like.  How many people actually cared about that is an open question, as I suspected that most people were sticking with the free model-after all, you got to do pretty much everything for free in STO.  As a lifetime subscriber, this didn’t really impact me at all, as lifetimer benefits still exist.  The “Victory is Life” expansion brought us the Gamma Quadrant, Cardassian ships and species, Jem’Hadar ships and species, and a new level cap (fortunately, this did not include the creation of Tier-7 ships; I’m not ruling that out in the future, though.  The devs have set the precedent).  The “Age of Discovery” publish introduced the newest Star Trek series to the game, and it seems that this will be driving a good chunk of the content coming in 2019.

My personal expectations for 2019 are pretty straightforward.  First, push Selak to level 60-ish; that seems to be a good stopping point for the character-although I don’t rule out further based upon my next big plan.  Before that, though, I’d like to get my main Romulan character caught up to my Starfleet and Klingon mains.  Later on in the year, I hope to do my “Cast List Revival Party”, where I return to a number of my older characters to give them a push through to those 60+ levels.  I’ve got a pretty decent idea of how to tie that all together, too, but we’ll see what happens.  Of course, I plan to continue putting my main characters through new story arcs, and continue Jhudsui’s Journey as the “Age of Discovery” content continues to trickle out (which includes the upcoming pair of episodes being released later this month).  Finally, if I can fit it in, I’d sort of like to do a Romulan character chronicle.  Big plans?  Maybe.  We’ll see.

The war between Empire and Republic begins anew

Star Wars: The Old Republic didn’t get a lot of time from me this year.  A part of this can be attributed to the relatively light amount of new content released that I would actually play.  This isn’t to say there was nothing in SWTOR; but a good chunk of it involved PvP or raiding, both activities that I don’t really do in SWTOR.  We did, however, get a bit more story in the game; the Nathema Conspiracy flashpoint concluded the Alliance Traitor storyline, which also represented an end point to the Zakuul era of the game; and we got the Jedi Under Siege story, which brought back the war of the Sith Empire and the Galactic Republic, as well as the return of a number of familiar faces-including one long thought dead.  (I’d be more specific, but I’m still keeping it under my hat, even though the SWTOR website itself spoils it; I mean, sheesh…!)

My time in the game-aside from putting my two primary characters through the new content-was spent concluding the Epic of Anthrandos and Sorshan’s Story, which basically meant “run them through the Knights of the Eternal Throne storyline”.  As one might imagine, this didn’t take all that long.  I’m somewhat hopeful that 2019 will have more to come with the renewed conflict, but my plans in this game aside from that involve catching up my other six “main” characters to the current storyline.  Most of them haven’t even completed the Iokath story that kicks off the Alliance Traitor arc, and I’d sort of like to get them on the same-ish page.

One of the losers of 2018

2017 was a big year for my activity in Champions Online.  Thanks to STO and TOR, though, I more or less spent virtually no time in CO in 2018.  And given what I’ve written above, it sounds like there’s an excellent chance that CO will end up in the same boat for 2019.  All that said, I do sort of want to run a character chronicle there again; I just need the right concept to motivate myself to see it through, and some way of arranging so it doesn’t feel like a complete repeat of what I did with Willforge in 2017.  Maybe I’ll be inspired by the superhero movies of 2019 to get back into things here.  We’ll see.

Speaking of 2018’s losers

Of the games I still have installed on my system, EVE Online is the one that got the least time from me.  In fact, aside from logging in regularly and logging right back out for the end of the year for some freebie stuff, I didn’t really spend any time at all in the game.  I’ve a feeling that, as far as I’m concerned, this game may well be on the way out of my hard drive space.  It’d be a shame, but it’s hard enough juggling three games.  But I can also envision a time where I just don’t feel like the other games, and want to do something very different-and EVE is as different as they come from those games.

Some of the plans I’d set for myself for 2018 didn’t come to fruition at all; I had hoped to revive the “Images of the Ranger” site, and had kicked around returning to some serialized fiction on the games I play on another sub-site, but Real Life happened, and derailed all of that hard.  2019 might be The Year for it, but who knows?  We’ve wrapped up Year Fourteen of my MMORPG “career”, and almost as long writing in this blog.  You could say that this blog is now entering its High School years!  If we look at it in that way, then we can expect an interesting Freshman Year for the Faces of the Ranger blog!  Hope you’ve enjoyed the ride thus far, and stick around for what’s still to come.

Thirteen Years In

Another year has come and gone with my MMO gaming-and my MMO blogging!  And as is traditional for me, it’s time to look back at 2017 and the games I spent my time on-and perhaps take a peek into what is planned for the future.

So…many…alts….

I’d closed out ’16 with the beginnings of putting my characters through the Knights of the Eternal Throne expansion for Star Wars: The Old Republic, and 2017 continued that work.  I was aided a great deal in the fact that most of the publishes last year focused on class balance, raids, and the other sorts of stuff that I tend to have little interest in.  We did get a couple new strongholds, but I haven’t gone out of my way to get access to them-I’m still way under-decorated with a couple I have now!  Thanks to the lack of newer story content, though, I did manage to get all eight of my “class representatives” to finish the KotET expansion-and a couple have gone beyond that.

When I say “beyond that”, it’s because there were at least a few bits of story that sprinkled through the year.  Nothing to the scale of previous years, but hey, it’s an MMORPG; that means devs have to deal with other aspects of the game such as those little details I mentioned in the previous paragraph.  Still, we got a renewed flareup of the Sith-Republic War on the world of Iokath, treason against the Eternal Alliance on Umbara (and I still love that mission, even though I haven’t done it much), and a game of “catch the traitor” on the Chiss world of Copero.  Two of those missions features the return of three companions as well-although you can only get two of them, since that involves a decision as to who your Alliance will support on Iokath.  (Alas, I still regret that there wasn’t a choice of “how about I just conquer both of you?  I mean, Valkorion had no problem doing it….”)  It’s still slow going for folks waiting for the return of companions-pity the Jedi Consular!  It’d be nice to think that 2018 will finish the job-and as of this posting, three more are scheduled to return on the 23rd, two of which will make the Smuggler VERY happy, and some will be pleased by the return of an Inquisitor’s as well.  Maybe we’ll see the rest this year after all….  Due to my significant number of characters who had to get through content, I only did the Iokath and beyond missions with my two “primary” main characters.  My Trooper and Sith Warrior got to get a jump on Iokath, though, since it was their companions being offered as returns.  (For folks carrying a grudge against the Imperial one, it is possible to kill him.  I let him live, though-and I still have him using a bunch of cybernetic limbs to show that all is “forgiven”.  Heh heh….)

There was a short bit of entertaining activity with the United Forces update, which consolidated the servers dramatically, and included a bit of “encouraged grouping” in order to get the companion who didn’t win the Dark vs Light event in ’16.  I’d always suspected Darth Hexid would show up sooner or later.

What’s next for SWTOR for me this coming year?  Well, since I wrapped up the last of my original eight through the expansion, I think it’s time for me to bring the stories of the Jedi Anthrandos and the Inquisitor Sorshan to a conclusion-both of these characters were chronicled heavily in 2016, but left hanging since I wanted to get my other characters through the then-new expansion.  I’ve caught up, so expect somewhere between two to four posts featuring the conclusion of their saga.  I don’t plan to put either of those characters through the post-expansion content, as it’s already hard enough for me to push through the eight.  Speaking of those eight, I will probably also put them through the post-expansion content to get them all caught up; who knows what lies ahead for the game in 2018, after all?

There is no content but what we make for ourselves-okay, that’s a minor exaggeration.

Star Trek Online actually got a decent chunk of my time in 2017.  I chronicled the adventures of two major characters through the year.  The first month concluded the adventure of temporal agent Rick Masters, Agent of Yesterday.  Then, starting in September, I began to chronicle the Orion pirate-at-heart Dathiro, giving a look at the Klingon side of life, as well as exploring the usefulness of the Foundry missions out there.  In between all that, we got a couple of new missions.

Those missions featured the Lukari, encountered during the Future Proof series, and expanded upon their story-which also brought in the Tzenkethi on their mysterious sterilization crusade.  We reunited the Lukari with their cousins, so to speak, and discovered that the Tzenkethi might have a point with their campaign.  We got a new fleet holding-well, I sort of threw in the towel with that one.  Fleet holdings are a game for the larger fleets, and I’m not involved with any larger fleets to mess with it.  We also got a couple of missions more or less independent of that storyline-like recapturing Sela (AGAIN!) after some fallout from the Temporal Ambassador mission way back, and a return to the Nexus (of Star Trek: Generations fame) with the coming of a being who I’m not convinced we’ve seen the last of.  Oh-and we also get the return of a Klingon warrior long thought dead, which could make the political situation on Qo’noS very, very interesting indeed.

What does the future hold for my work in STO?  I expect to get Dathiro at least to level 50, and I’m very likely to try to push him to level 60-again, solely through non-episodic content, so expect more Foundry commentary, as well as comments on the PvE queues at that point.  Dathiro might get a bit derailed, though, because we got hints in the back half of ’17 that the Dominion of the Gamma Quadrant will be returning in a big way; I won’t say the word expansion, but-oh, wait, I just did, didn’t I?  I expect big things out of 2018, and I expect some good stuff to come down.  I won’t be surprised if we get yet another sub-faction related to this (I’m so cynical), and perhaps a new region of space to actually explore.  (Take what you can get, exploration fans; I’m still dubious we’ll ever see new “exploration content” like in the old days, much less better than the old days….)

Willforge’s Big Year

Unlike last year, Champions Online got a lot of love from me.  I’d noted that I hadn’t put any real time into that game in ’16, and I resolved to run a character through that game up to max level, and I chose to do it with the character Willforge.  Chronicling his adventure through the various content in the game was a blast, and while nothing really new came out for a solo sort of guy, it had been a long enough time since I did anything at all in the game that stuff felt at least a little fresh.  And best of all, since it isn’t as linear as STO or SWTOR (which isn’t to say it’s perfect, but it’s still a heap better), I was able to pick and choose a bit as to how I leveled the character.  The game did get some new content in, but it seemed to tend to the group oriented, and because I keep floating from game to game, it’s not really that simple for me to get that involved with them.  I do expect at some point in 2018 to return to CO and run a new character-I have a couple of concepts I’ve been kicking around-but with Dathiro’s story rolling in STO, along with its expected content, finishing Sorshan and Anthrandos in SWTOR, and whatever rolls up in that game, well…we’ll see what happens..

Didn’t see a lot of activity, but….

EVE Online, despite its transition to a freemium model, didn’t get all that much time from me.  I did get my character up to the point where he could fly a cruiser, but he’s still training up skills to actually survive flying one; and of course, gaining income enough to afford to fly one.  And that was before the big update that opened up battlecruisers and battleships to the character.  I’ve recently done some minor dabbling in it again, mostly consisting of resuming training skills, flying the occasional set of level 1 missions (and just recently upgraded to level 2s!), and messing with ammunition blueprints to reduce dependency on outside arms dealers.  Currently, I’m flying a destroyer, which is handy to deal with frigate sized opposition.  If I get to the point of purchasing and flying a cruiser, I may well start in on those level 2 missions.  No hurry, though-it’s not like I don’t have enough going on elsewhere, right?

That wraps up my look back on 2017!  Thirteen years, right?  Who would’ve thought I’d have been doing this that long?  I don’t have any great plans to continue writing up fiction for my assorted games-although one never knows; maybe I’ll do a serialized sort of thing on WordPress and link to it.  I also keep kicking around reviving the “Images of the Ranger” site, since I still have heaps of screenshots and heaps of related images (and that site still has heaps of upload space); I’d been considering doing a series there on player housing, and I think it might work better on that site than on this primary site.  So stay tuned-anything can happen.  Hopefully I can make 2018’s gaming as enjoyable as 2017’s!

Twelve Years In

It’s that time again!  It’s been another year of MMO gaming, MMO blogging, and now it’s time for me to look back at 2016 and throw out some thoughts on the past as I look to the future!  Specifically, let’s see what’s been going on with the games I play.

AKA A Game of Thrones

2016 was a pretty good one for Star Wars: The Old Republic-at least from my point of view.  Updates came regularly with new content, tied to the ongoing story of Knights of the Fallen Empire, and concluded the year with the conclusion as Knights of the Eternal Throne.  The story feels like it effectively concludes the stories of the assorted classes into one funneled end (maybe two-I still haven’t thrown a dark-sider through KotET, and things may be different there), which does lead one to wonder if we’re at the end of story content.  Certainly we are for most of 2017, as the developers are rededicating themselves to group content; just how that unfolds is something we’ll be learning early this year.

I’m a tad annoyed at the fact that a significant number of companions for the classes remain unaccounted for, and that aforementioned rededication makes it unlikely we’ll see any make a comeback in 2017; yes, they can be brought back in a game mechanics sense, but they’re still effectively gone in-story.  All that said:  the companions have mostly been irrelevant in-story at the end of the class stories (with perhaps a sop thrown in depending on your class in the Shadow of Revan expansion), so one has to wonder if it’s really a big deal at this point.  Something to think about.

From a personal point of view, this year saw the return of my tracking assorted characters through content.  Thanks primarily to the Dark vs Light event that kicked off in the summer, I began the journeys of Anthrandos the Jedi Knight and Sorshan the Sith Inquisitor, and brought them from humble beginnings on Tython and Korriban and through the KotFE expansion.  Neither have as yet gone through KotET, but they will-so expect at some point “final” posts for those characters that will encompass that expansion, once I’ve finished getting my primary class characters through.  Naturally, those primary characters have gone through the entirety of the KotFE expansion, one of which maxed out his alliance contact reps, one of which got them all to at least level 10.  My smuggler and agent win the prize for most total companions now, as they both have all the Star Fortress companions, and almost all of the companions available in alerts, excepting ones who were refused on moral grounds (or killed off) and the PvP related ones.

Sure seems quiet in the galaxy these days.

Coming in at a distant second in my time is Star Trek Online.  Last time I did one of these posts, we were just beginning the New Dawn, heralding the rebirth of exploration in the galaxy.  Guess that was mostly hyperbole, because what we actually got was the latest outbreak of the Temporal Cold War introduced in Star Trek: Enterprise.  Things started really rolling, though, with the year’s free expansion, Agents of Yesterday, which created a new sub-faction:  the 23rd century Starfleet.  This was tied in hard with the Temporal Cold War as well, but man, it was fun seeing missions and characters in the 23rd century look.  The New Dawn arc concluded and a new one is underway now, which returns a station from the past returning to the limelight.

At roughly the same time as developing the idea of characters in the Dark vs Light thing in SWTOR, I decided to chronicle the adventure of a character starting out from the 23rd century with Rick Masters, and while my time has been more limited than usual in STO, the character has finished his run through “New Dawn” (or “Future Proof” if you want to use the episodic arc name), and has caught up to the present time in the game.  Since the new arc seems like it’ll at least somewhat involve the space station the character saw go away back in the 23rd century, Masters will likely see at least some participation there, but I’m likely to look to focus on my Starfleet, KDF, and Romulan mains a bit.  That said, since the 23rd century guy is in his own sub-faction, I can easily justify promoting him to a “main” status.  Does anyone else out there have multiple main characters, or is it just me?  It’s hard being an altoholic.

Still not getting a lot of love from me.  I blame Father Time.

Champions Online, still technically in the stable of games, didn’t get a lot of joy from me this year.  I did finally manage to level up a character-Overload, my Reawakened Automaton-to max level, so that opened up a new character slot for me to work with.  Unlike previous years, this year saw a bit of content introduced, as well as some significant reworking of the “endgame” experience as far as gear grinding goes (which, apparently, is another way of saying “more grind”).  I’ve never been about the endgame, though, and the new content is highly group oriented-which is good, honestly, but for a guy who is as irregular as I am on the game, well, not the biggest attraction.

Here’s the other hand:  with things wrapping up with characters in SWTOR with the KotET expansion, and its focus on grouped content, it opens up some time for me to do a leveling experience in CO as I have with Anthrandos/Sorshan/Rick Masters.  It may be a little less structured, since CO is less structured, storywise, but that could work for the best in many ways.  I’ve already been laying the groundwork in my head on how that’ll work, so stay tuned.

Returning for a new engagement….

I’d be remiss if I didn’t remark upon the Freemium conversion for EVE Online, which has allowed me to return to New Eden to fly spaceships again.  I’m not anticipating much time in here, particularly given the Alpha Clone limitations on ships and skills, but hey, it’s good to fly out into the unknown for a bit.  My character being developed (independent of the original ones I had) is likely to stick with Minmatar Frigates, although I’m spending time on a Minmatar Destroyer to help clean out frigate annoyances in Level 1 missions.  I’m debating trying to hit some wormholes and see if I can find any data/hacking sites; the problem is that skills only go so high, which means even locating the sites are a challenge-and worse still, the hostile mobs in the area probably outmatch me in skill and equipment.  But seeing as I’m basically using cheap stuff, I may well decide “why the hell not?  Frigates are disposable.”

On the fictional front, I’ve restricted myself to reposting some open-RP posts rescued from the fall of GuildPortal last year, including “Injustice” from the Justiciars site, “Birth of the Union” and “The Darkening” from the Union Supreme site.  I’m planning to do a repost of “Invasion of the Gems” from the Hyperion Force site at some point in the coming year.  As far as new works, though, nothing really came to mind.  I am in the middle of writing what I anticipate will be my last MMO-related story, and hope to have something put up this coming year on the Outlaws’ site.  Fact is, my motivation on writing this stuff has been fading considerably, and in combination with finding time to actually do the writing, that just spelled a “time to put a bow on it” in my mind.  Of course, putting that bow on it will depend a lot on me actually finishing the one I’ve started; we’ll see how that goes.

That’s 2016 in a nutshell!  The latter half of the year helped reinvigorate some of my blogging, thanks to the decision to start chronicling the actions of my characters again as I had in the old days, and helped fill the empty spaces between game publishes.  It puts me in a positive frame of mind as we move forward in 2017 to start year thirteen of my MMO adventure!

Eleven Years In

When I looked back at 2014 in my MMO gaming, I had some concerns that I might be reaching a nadir in my enthusiasm for the genre. While it’s true that the number of games I played around in didn’t budge, the amount of time I spent in them did tend to vary. And in all the cases, it came down to “new stuff”.

So: eleven years. That’s a pretty lengthy amount of time to have put into MMOs. What did 2015 hold for me and my games?

There has been an awakening…have you felt it?

Star Wars: The Old Republic probably has a slight edge in the amount of time spent this last year. I’d completed all eight of the class stories in the year before, but I still had an ambition to also complete the stories on all the advanced classes. Since there are two advanced classes for each class, it would effectively mean doing the entire story again, all the planets again, all of it another eight times. Even with that, I was willing to slap some time into it. But Bioware/EA helped out a lot on that when they put in the 12X xp for subscribers on class stories, which cut down a lot of the time spent, and made it possible to achieve that goal: which I did, thankfully. Finances in-game have been better than ever, as well, as I’ve managed to purchase the opening area for the Yavin stronghold after making the “mistake” of looking at one in-game and deciding “I want one”. My Coruscant stronghold was shoved into the locker (and after unlocking all of its rooms, too. Good thing I didn’t spend cartel coins on that one).

The biggest news for the game, of course, was the Knights of the Fallen Empire expansion, which is still a work in progress: we’ve gotten nine chapters of the story, and more is slated to come in the coming months. With that came the addition of the release of Shadow of Revan for subscribers as well, and I finally got to play through that content. A lot of flashpoints and heroic missions also became doable solo, which meant some of these I was able to do for the first time. It wasn’t all fun and games, of course; companions have been buffed then nerfed, xp has been buffed considerably (too much? Hard to say), and the refocus on story has come at the price of operations and PvP. As I never did any of the ops and tend to avoid PvP, I’m obviously not too sorry, but I do recognize that raid-like stuff and PvP are pretty much an accepted part of any MMORPG these days, and there should be some content aimed in that direction. I’ve been looking to push through my “eight mains”, one of each class, and so far I’ve gotten five through to the end of the available content, one of whom even unlocked all his Star Fortress companions and rank 10 with the assorted supply contacts. It’s not unreasonable to think that by the time the next chapter is released in February, I’ll have gotten all eight in the same boat as far as story progression.

Not much to say about the guild(s) in game, as they’ve been mostly been quiet, although some folks appear here and there occasionally. The expansion may have helped a bit with that recently. Admittedly, I also haven’t really been looking to join any of the active guilds around, either-in part because I tend to muck with different games, which means my focus is constantly divided. That’s a theme going forward here. I did take advantage of a Cartel Market sale, though, to properly rename the Republic side guild to “Hyperspace Outlaws”. I’d been meaning to get around to that for a long time.

The transition from wartime to peacetime begins.

The next on the list is Star Trek Online, which has had a roaring comeback after last year’s Delta Rising debacle. The entire year just about was a grand finale of all the story content that had been released up to that point, culminating in the Iconian War, and while there were minor missteps, for the most part it delivered on wrapping up most of the loose ends hanging around as a result of Iconian meddling. (That said, there’s one prominent Iconinian still out there with one hell of a grudge…) There have been the usual number of queues released, but for a number of months, we could expect one feature episode per month for the duration of the War, and that was a relief-because unlike a good chunk of the Delta Rising missions, none of those missions were basic filler. Speaking of Delta Rising, it seems that there has been some adjusting of level requirements as well, which means it’s not as painful to actually get that content done now. The year closed out with the Admiralty system with the coming of a “New Dawn”, which so far has involved what could be a reopening of a temporal cold war-or perhaps its origins. (This is why time travel makes my head ache.)

Despite this flourishing of content, I found that I didn’t spend all that much time in the game. I seem to be mostly one for short periods, especially once KotFE for TOR was released. Earlier in the year, though, the Corps of Discovery performed a hard push between its few active players to get our starbase up to tier-3 status, and after blowing through a large amount of energy credits and dilithium, we succeeded. My own credit reserves are still recovering from that push. We also managed to get the dilithium mine up to tier-1, and we’re eyeballing the research facility as the next tier-1 target. There had been some thought that we’d benefit from being in one of the new fleet armadas (basically a tiered coalition of fleets), but that never really panned out. Activity levels matter, and that includes mine. I suspect time will balance again once I’ve managed to get through the KotFE content with my “eight mains”-which isn’t as far away as it sounds.

There had to be a loser here somewhere.

Champions Online, sadly, was the victim of all this content. I didn’t really work on any of my heroes there much at all, and haven’t had the craving to do so over the last year. Despite this, CO actually managed two bits of content worth noting. The first was a new tutorial, which I honestly still shake my head over. It wasn’t actually so much a “new” tutorial as a shell around the tutorial. The bigger deal was the Onslaught content, which basically allows you to transform into one of the big villains of the franchise and wreak havoc (and potentially have your havoc wreaked) on both the law and other heroes. It’s a PvP sort of thing, because heroes can attack you, and you can attack them if they attack you first-but in my brief bit doing it, it was sort of fun. Of course, since it is PvP, I didn’t spend much time with it-and ultimately, other games were calling, so that was that.

For most of the years I’ve been playing MMOs, I’ve always managed to find time to write my own bit of fan fiction based on my characters in assorted games. Last year was a milestone in that I didn’t write anything. I’d flirted with a concept I’d been nursing for a while for my spy character from SWG, and I keep wanting to find a reason to get back to my STO characters, but for the first time in ages, none of the characters in my head have been demanding my attention. We’ll see if the next year brings out any creativity to shake loose.  The year got punctuated with the passing of the long-running guild host, GuildPortal, which closed up its doors at the end of the year-I sincerely hope people managed to save the content they wanted to save from any guild sites there.

My fears of burning out last year seem to have been unfounded, and while I’ve yet to join up with any active guilds in any of these games, I’ve at least found enough going on that I haven’t felt the need to wrap things up in the genre. So the odds are high that I’ll be here again next year writing up something for “Twelve Years In”.

Ten Years In

I had to pause when I typed that title in.

Ten.

Years.

One decade of semi-regularly posting my thoughts on MMORPGs, from my early “gee-wow” phase of starting playing the games to my significantly more jaded self today. And the blog’s covered the bases. Some posts have been simple peeks at “here’s what I’m doing this week” (back when I was a lot more regular). Some posts have been about deeper thoughts on MMORPGs in general, and some in specific. Some have praised assorted developers, and some have…well, let’s go with the opposite of “praised”.

There have been bumps in the road, of course. A few times I’ve pondered just saying “Game Over” to the MMO scene, usually during times of big transition, but something always managed to keep me at least poking my nose in. And of course, RL has occasionally gotten in the way of playing, much less putting up posts about things. At one point, I even bit the bullet and made the big jump from the GuildPortal blogging host to WordPress.

I’ve played quite a few games over the years.  Star Wars Galaxies was the gateway drug, and when I started playing that I honestly felt I’d not need to play any other MMOs.  If the New Game Enhancements had any positive impact on me, it was that it kicked me out of the comfort zone and allowed me to look at other MMOs.  And the list goes on:  from games where I only dabbled such as Lord of the Rings Online, EVE Online, and DC Universe Online; to the games where I truly spent a significant amount of time with, such as World of Warcraft (hasn’t everybody?), Star Trek Online, Champions Online, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and of course, the one that took the top place in amount of time spent, City of Heroes.

Well, we’ve had a lot going on this year, so let’s set the wayback machine and take it for a spin.

A pair of stories reach their conclusions

In Star Wars: The Old Republic, I finally managed to complete my long-term goal of getting through the class stories for all eight classes.  I wrapped up my Bounty Hunter relatively early in the year.  My Jedi Counselor took a bit more time, thanks to the appearance of the Galactic Strongholds expansion, which brought player housing of a sort to the game.  Unfortunately, what they didn’t tell you was that in order to open up all those nice rooms, you’d have to shell out Cartel Coins (the real money equivalent) or lots and lots of credits.  I did eventually blow some of my accumulated coins to open up my Nar Shadda rooms (I got a fair amount of them for free, being a subscriber), and a whole lot of credits.  With all the rooms opened, I took a short break in order to recuperate from the grind burnout, before pushing onward with my Counselor and completing the last class story.

But of course, that turned out not to be the end of the story, because the Shadow of Revan expansion hit before year’s end, and as I understand it, there are mini-class stories in that.  Unfortunately, Bioware/EA decided to make it a paid expansion, which put me in mind of what happened with the Rise of the Hutt Cartel expansion-namely, the fact that it became free for subscribers less than six months after it was released.  I’m all for eventually releasing expansions for free, but the turnaround for that seemed like dirty pool to me-and so I’ve decided not to fall into that trap again, and will wait until the inevitable happens with Shadow of Revan.

Guildwise, not much goes on there.  I had originally hoped that I might be able to pull off a purchase of a fleet flagship there, but the price for the ship is so disgustingly high-and given that I’m more or less solo in that game these days-and the benefits are iffy in that case anyway, that I figured that it’s something we could live without.  A guild stronghold was established on Coruscant, but I don’t anticipate opening any rooms there for a long time; I have enough work to do opening up my own Coruscant and Dromund Kaas rooms as it is.

I’m reminded of being shaken down by a bully….

Star Trek Online has long been a source of…well, let’s call it discontent.  For me, at least.  I’m good with their story content, but their business practices continue to make me sick.  (Okay, that’s a bit too extreme-let’s say “extremely unhappy”.)  The first blow was the removal of the Exploration clusters, removing what could well be considered one of the primary pillars of Star Trek in general.  Then came the new tier-6 ships, rendering the tier-5 ships-virtually all of which were paid for with Zen, the real money equivalent for Perfect World games-obsolete.  Or, if you wanted to be really insulting, you could upgrade some of those tier-5 ships to be almost-but-not-quite as good as tier-6 ships for more Zen.  In fact, it seems that it’s now about fleecing customers; the crafting system is designed to take forever to max out in any branch, unless you spend a large chunk of dilithium-and given you can only refine 8000 dilithium per day, you’re looking at being forced to purchase dilithium off the exchange, which requires-you guessed it-Zen.  The announcement that bridge officer training is about to go down the same track is one that continues to bring me closer to abandoning the game entirely; as it is, I spend less and less time in the game.

Which is a pity, because the devs can do some good things.  The story advanced to bring an uneasy peace between the Klingons and the Federation at last, thanks to a bigger threat uniting them in the form of the Iconians.  This included a revamp of Earth Spacedock (again), which is an extremely beautiful bit of work.  Also of interest was the release of Delta Rising, the new expansion taking place in the Delta Quadrant; while what story is there is pretty good, it’s also somewhat lacking in comparison with the Legacy of Romulus expansion.  Comparing the two isn’t a real comparison:  Legacy beat the tar out of Delta in terms of sheer content.  Accordingly, while I enjoyed the Delta stories, it didn’t enthuse me as much as the Legacy expansion-and I’m not that big a fan of Romulans.

The Corps of Discovery fleet still continues to exist, although the active folks tend to be on when I’m not on (and there aren’t many of them as it is).  One of the members managed to get the fleet embassy up to tier-1 through sheer determination and will (not to mention dilithium and fleet marks), so the fleet’s now got a tier-1 embassy to go along with its tier-2 starbase.  I’ve entertained the thought of pushing a tier-1 dilithium mine, but at this stage, I think everyone’s burned enough out on that particular grind.

Low development effort never looked so good

Despite my exit from Champions Online last year, I went back again.  I guess I needed to get my superhero on, and it beat DC Universe Online in my book, so there it is.  (I do play Marvel Heroes as well, but honestly, they don’t let me make my own creations.  That’s painful for a creative sort.)  I spent some time getting a number of my stable of characters to the max level 40, and began a few new characters-one of whom also made it to level 40.

One of those characters came about because of something truly unusual for CO:  new content.  While lockboxes have been the primary push in patches in the game, some actual new missions were put in-and for a change, they weren’t limited time deals, but permanent additions to the game, featuring the crazed robot, Mechanon.  All things considered, I’d call that a successful bit of work for the devs there, given that the game continues to be barely above maintenance mode.  On the other hand, given the activities in STO, I’ve decided that this isn’t a bad thing for CO.  That means that there’s less chance of the game being poisoned by the devs to the point where this one makes me ill as well.

I spent some time playing EVE Online again this last year; I didn’t do a whole lot, but I did manage to get a couple of personal goals complete.  First, I managed to get my character standings high enough to install jump clones at a Sisters of Eve station, and second, I managed to finally delve a short bit into wormhole space-and nullsec space, which ended rather predictably.  (But I didn’t get pod-killed!)  Juggling a fourth game is asking a bit much, though, so I let the account go dormant again-but I’m reasonably sure that at some point, I’ll have the urge to go back; after all, I’ve still got my eye on one of the exploration ships that the Sisters sell….

My MMO fictional work was limited this year, for a couple of reasons.  The first is that in this year, I’ve not been really attached to any guilds that could be called active; I did make a short attempt to join an RP fleet in STO, but it didn’t really work out-mostly because I just didn’t feel it worked for me there.  So I’ve been doing the solo thing mostly, which has allowed me to spend relatively equal time in the assorted games, but it does tend to get boring without people.  We’ll see how things go next year.  The other reason is that the one story I did do, “Unending”, was another one of my overly-long works, which closed out my City of Heroes stories with a ribbon to tie up my remaining loose ends.  Where I go from here is still up in the air.

The year’s been a somewhat rough one, all told.  While the games I played continue to have their positive points, actions taken by their assorted developers have managed to put a big spike in the enthusiasm.  It could be that I’ve become jaded by my ten years now and have become more cynical in attitude towards the developers.  Or maybe it’s just short-term burnout.  But there’s still a couple of games on the horizon that could displace any one of my current games-so it’s a wait and see situation.  Until then, we’ll see what Year Eleven will hold.

Nine Years In

It’s kind of amusing that this is (if WordPress is counting right) my 100th post on WordPress for the blog.  I don’t recall how many there were on the original Faces site, so it’s iffy as far as landmarks go.

What isn’t iffy is that it’s been nine years since I started MMO gaming.  Almost a decade now.  It’s a combination of “my god what have I been doing with my life?” and “damn, that’s pretty cool!”  Ah, the contradictory feelings of gaming!

Let’s take a peek at the last year, hm?

First up:  there was no City of Heroes action.  Probably because NCSoft killed it.  Fortunately, some enterprising folks managed to put together an application that allows access to the costume creator, and even access to the maps in the game, which is great for screenshots and stuff, but not so good with things involving other people.  That’s all I’ve got to say about that, as Gump would put it.

Okay, into the actual games.

The Winner of the Most time Spent award this year

A significant chunk of my time has been in playing Star Wars: The Old Republic.  Thanks to the magic of paid server transfers, I consolidated my characters into one server-Jedi Covenant.  I’ve managed to complete the class stories on the Sith Inquisitor, the Sith Warrior, the Trooper, and the Jedi Knight-which means they join the rarefied air breathed by my Imperial Agent and Smuggler.  This leaves me working on the Bounty Hunter and Jedi Counselor as my final two class stories to finish.  My BH recently wrapped up Chapter One, while my Counselor is still hip deep in it.  The next step after those two will be the really insane idea of trying the other Advanced Classes; this would mean I’d have two of each basic class.  My sanity may or may not hold out that long.

As far as the game itself, the Rise of the Hutt Cartel has caused me both irritation and joy.  It was a nice enough planet-and a coherent story, and I liked the kind of sneaky end of the storyline on the Imperial side.  I did complete the Republic one, too, which led to the amusing conversation of “why is Makeb still here?  Wasn’t it falling apart last time I was here?”  It makes sense when you do both sides.  On the other hand, I hated the fade-to-black transitions when you take the speeders to each location on Makeb-I know some folks complain about time eaten up in travel, but I like the scenic views in flight!  More of an annoyance was the way Bioware/EA treated the expansion itself.  They charged for it, and made it free in less than a year.  I know it’s traditional for an expansion to become free eventually, but that tends to happen when another expansion hits-maybe-and after a period of time substantially longer than a year.  It’s a good thing that the latest expansion, Galactic Starfighter, was a free one, because after feeling burnt on RotHC when they gave it away after charging for it scant months before, I’m certain I wouldn’t have bought it-especially since it’s pretty much solely a PvP expansion.

A lot of the added content besides these two have centered on short maps and dailies.  The Czerka facility and the planet Oricon are fairly small, and most of their story seems to be tied up into flashpoints and operations.  Full disclosure-I’ve only really started doing some of the Oricon single player content, and am currently trying to figure out how to deal with a beast that can overwhelm my tank companions and then me in very little time.  I really need to do some serious gearing up again….  Also for fans of the grind, the game introduced a Reputation system, so if one can work to get some gear and other stuff if they get on the hamster wheel.  The good news is that it’s account-specific, not character specific, so it’s not like you have to really abuse yourself on multiple characters-all of your characters can help.  And that’s a good thing.

Who would’ve thought a year ago that this would’ve gotten an expansion?

Star Trek Online hit its own expansion with the Legacy of Romulus, bringing Romulans into the fold as a subfaction for Starfleet and the KDF.  In spite of this game-mechanic status, they had their own set of missions-at least early on.  By the time you get to the Beta Ursae sector block, you start sharing missions originally designed for Starfleet, but with a Romulan spin.  Even more importantly in my eyes, however, the expansion raised the level for the Klingons, allowing them to FINALLY have a full 1-50 leveling experience.  The situation isn’t perfect-the majority of stuff released is still Starfleet centric, with the Romulans being a distant second thanks to the fact that they were the focus of the expansion.  The Klingons did manage to get a new ship this year, though, so you know, improvement.  The addition of the Dyson Sphere prior to the end of the year brought us the dinosaurian Voth as new antagonists, and again, it seems that the hidden Big Bad of the game is involved.  Whether or not we actually see any movement on this during the year is iffy-but on the other hand, the developers have indicated that they’re working on a new expansion for later this year-although it will not include a new faction-which might give hope for major movement on the setting’s story.

Not too much on the character front going on, though.  The Corps of Discovery’s rush of activity faded, but not before we pulled up to a tier 2 starbase-which is really as good as can be asked for at this stage.  Technically, the fleet’s working on an Embassy to tier 1, but the upgrade project for it is a long haul, and if it gets done before year’s end, it’ll be impressive.  There’s two other fleet holdings available in the game, but there’s no chance they get upgraded.  Most of my characters in the game are at level 50-including a few new Romulan factioned characters-but I’ve found my time shrinking in STO.  With luck, I can work on ways to help keep my interest up there-either by going nuts in the PvE queues or learning how to use the Foundry to develop my own missions.  (Given how things ended with the Mission Architect and I in CoH, though, I’m iffy on how far I will go with that.)

Well, they can’t all be winners….

And then there’s Champions.

Well, I tried.  I got a few characters to max level, but the content drought continued, and the folks I played with faded out from it, and ultimately, I felt there wasn’t enough to keep me around playing on my own-and I more or less crash and burned myself out on putting together supergroups (or guilds, or whatever you want to call them), so with absolutely nothing holding me there, I let the sub lapse, and that’s been that.  I think I’ve logged in maybe twice since I hung up the cape there.  During my time there, they’d introduced vehicles, and a few events-one featuring the attack of Lemuria on Millennium City, one involving the Forum Malvarum (I know I spelled that wrong) on the moon, and one involving a hack down to the big supercomputer of the Champions (did they ever actually finish that arc?).  And put in auras for characters, but that was after I’d left.  Not sure what lies ahead for CO, but it’ll have to be something that happens without me.

With my written fiction stuff, I didn’t get much done as far as number of stories.  On the other hand, they also were longer than any of my previous efforts.  “Landwalker” was written to fill in a blank spot from my SWG stories back in the day, while “Storm” is my interpretation of the big Coming Storm event that City of Heroes should have gotten (that one’s still being posted-there were not short bits of writing like most of my previous stuff).

It would seem that year 10 could be slowly winding down my time in the MMO-sphere; I expect to finish the class stories in TOR this year, and STO may or may not manage to hold on depending on what else comes along there.  On the other hand, TOR is a freemium game, so if I decide I’m done, all is not lost there; and I’m a lifetimer in STO, which means even if I’m done, I’m never REALLY done (although there are actions being made by Perfect World Entertainment that could put a ticking timer on this-more on that in the future).  And if there’s one thing I’ve been astonishingly bad at, it’s been predicting the future.  Plus, hey, it’s possible I may simply spend some time at one of the other games I’d done in the past for short stints (EVE?  WoW?  DCUO-okay, now I’m getting crazy).