Will RMT make SOE’s Station Access a relic of the past?
Last year, Massively’s Michael Zenke interviewed SOE’s John Smedley about, among other things, the future of SOE’s all-inclusive Station Access plan:
John Smedley: Sure. I don’t mind this being public. We are having ongoing discussions inside the company about making station access an all-inclusive pass. Everything that we have, you get as a customer. Station Access subscribers would get every expansion pack for every game, as well as future expansions for every game as well. For the same price now, without raising the price. We have two problems, though. One: we have third parties involved in this. LucasArts, for example, will have to buy off on this, as would others. Second is the less obvious one: Promising future stuff is the meat of the problem. We haven’t found the right way to word things yet. To be honest other priorities have gotten in the way. That’s what we want to offer people.
In the past year, Flying Lab’s “Pirates of the Burning Sea” was added to Station Access, but none of the things mentioned were ever mentioned after this. We EQ and EQ2 players STILL have to sign up for the Station Players Advanced Character plan — at a buck per month per feature — to see detailed information about our own characters.
With RMT for sure being a big part of upcoming MMOs The Agency and Free Realms, and given that both those and DC Universe Online will also be released on the PS3, where monthly subscription plans are unknown, it really looks like the business model for SOE’s MMOs is moving away from the monthly subscription plan.
If having the Station Access won’t give you any sort of benefit to the newer MMOs, what is the reason to keep it, aside from currently actively playing three or more SOE subscription-based games?
Assuring Station Access subscribers that their monthly investment in SOE games will be valuable going forward should be a top priority. Otherwise, players in these cash-strapped times will be looking at their expenses, and wondering if they really are getting $30 worth of gaming from their subscription.
EQ2: You’ve Got Mail!
I don’t know why I missed this HUGE sculpture in the gnomish bit of the Moors of Ykesha before. So like, NOW you know where the mailbox is… from ORBIT.
I wish they did the same thing for the location of the druid ring. People kept trying to lead me to it. “It’s right next to the landing pad!” “From the cannon?” “No, just where you get off the boat!” I run around for about ten minutes. “Is it the wizard spires?” “No, but it’s near them.” “Yay! Okay!” Five minutes later. “Okay, this druid ring. Does it look like other druid rings, or is it like a pipe in the ground or something?” “No, it looks EXACTLY like all the other druid rings! It’s right next to where you get off the boat! Just go down a little and THERE IT IS!”
More running around. I load up the EQ2 Wiki. It has the locs of all the druid rings — EXCEPT this one! It’s a friggin’ CONSPIRACY!
So I start taking the “down” bit to heart, and start circling the landing pad. Cliff. Cliff. Cliff. Certain death. Cliff. Monster. Cliff. Oh look, here comes a ledge. Complete with druid ring.
Duh. I can’t imagine I could have possibly sounder thicker over guild chat.
I didn’t spend all night sounding like a trickster god had struck me blind and the only cure was at the druid ring. I had just gotten back from driving my son back to school in Rhode Island, and was poking around the City of Heroes holiday stuff while totally forgetting about the rice I had steaming in the cooker. “Why am I hungry?” I thought, as I sent my ninja army chasing down another group of angry snowmen in Cap du Diablo. “Didn’t I cook some rice?”
Cook, yes. Eat, no.
I got a tell on XFire inviting me along on tonight’s Daily Double, and nothing was going to stop me! I’d never been to this zone before. It went so fast that I’m not sure I’ve been there yet 
This was the bouncy one where someone bounces and catches balls of magical energy. I ran out of arrows halfway through that fight — those nights in Veeshan’s Peak go through arrows like anything, and I’d forgotten to restock.
The moment I got into game, the same guild that I’ve been raiding VP with asked me along again to clear further in. I declined, I had more important business, but it was nice to see I had a raid slot. Mythical is so close!
So that was fun. Afterward, I logged to do some housework and ended up watching movies on the PS3 as I copied some shows there from my computer. Next time someone visits, they will be ambushed by Blackpool 
It would be really nice if the PS3 preserved my folders, though. I did some virtual house cleaning as well. I cleaned up the mess in the Nostalgia guild hall basement. I’m a failure at decorating. I know what I want to do but I don’t know how to do it and it just comes out all wrong. I’ll try to figure out something in the privacy of my own apartment.
I was playing City of Heroes because I am about to cancel my account. Money is incredibly tight these days and I have to cut corners where I can. But I thought I would get a couple more play sessions in before I canceled and deleted all the files except the patcher. I’ll probably cancel EverQuest as well, and drop the Station Pass for my main account, leaving me with only EQ2. It seems SOE is bringing out their new MMOs under a non-subscription model, so the Station Pass will become less and less valuable. If The Agency and Free Realms and DC Universe Online move toward RMT business models, what good is Station Pass? It’s double dipping, and I’m not a fan of that.
I also organized those blog posts I’ve done comics for, as well as the old Crimson Eternity comics, and made them easier to get to, should you want to see them all for some reason. I was kinda surprised to see I’d been doing the CE comics, some of them, since I’d been blogging. I thought I finished doing those before the blog, but it turns out it wasn’t as long ago as I remember that I was raiding in CE. It seems like ages. Anyway, the “My Comics” link in the sidebar will have them all.
EQ2: The gladdest/saddest sight in Veeshan’s Peak
I’d worked so long on the Spellborn comic — way longer than I thought, it took forever to come up with the story and then I had to go back and make tedious reshoots to fill in the plot and a long time in Photoshop to make it look like Mercy and Erisa were in the same place at the same time — that I thought I would reward myself with some EverQuest II time. I don’t play enough of my favorite game and anyway, if Stargrace needed some help with her Templar epic, she says she won’t ask for help even if I have set Xfire to explicitly invite people to bug me, so I’d be on line anyway.
She was busy doing something; I grabbed the TSO Daily Double quest and went looking for group, but the same folks who brought me to Veeshan’s Peak a couple of weeks ago asked if I’d like to come along again.
Duh! I’d LOVE to!
Back on the menu were the Elder guy and Druushk. Last time, there were plenty of mages. This time, plenty of scouts, so we had to fiddle with the strategy a little bit, but he died, and I got a nice upgrade to my Shard of Hate sword out of it. I love the looks of the sword, but the only stat it has is a + to STR, a stat I have already capped. The new short spear has +INT and +WIS, so more damage and more resists… good stuff. It looks kinda like a unicorn horn. Or a knitting needle… if you make your knitting needles from unicorn horns. I’m just going to have to go with that last, because I am, after all, a tailor. A knitting needle made from a unicorn’s horn would be just the sort of thing an evil seamstress like myself might have. To get all stabby with.
After, we fought our way up to Druushk. He’s the gatekeeper and blocks further progress into the dungeon, and is also the final raid mob for many classes mythical epics — including mine.
Each time we pulled Druushk he’d get a little closer to dying. 15%. *1%*! That one was stupid. D. was just about to die, and we were all gratsing ourselves, when one person died, which boosted D.’s health. And then another. And then it was a wipe.
1%! And no Inquisitor in the raid! I bet if I wanted to go Inq again, I’d be raiding whenever i liked. Though her gear is cruddy. And she hasn’t even got her fabled epic (hasn’t even started on it).
Next pull, D. died. VERY happy. She dropped lots of loot, and people were excitedly getting their epic updates.
I ran into the back room for mine — and there it was! The mystical harp! If I looted that, I could hand it to that Ice Maiden I last met a year ago and walk away with a very glowy axe! Maybe the game would recognize that I’d killed the Leviathan a couple of times, but before they added the epics!
But… though I could see the harp, I couldn’t touch it or carry it away.
I’d killed Druushk, but my epic was as far away as ever.
Well, not really. If I can finagle my way into a Leviathan raid, I now know I can be raiding with people who can *kill Druushk!*.
The unicorn horn knitting needle, btw, may plainly be seen at my side. It doesn’t really look like much.
The raid force meets again Tuesday to take on Nexona. And they do raid Leviathan. So, goal for me: Keep on being available for raids and work toward my Mythical. It’s not something I really need, I’m not a raider, but it’s something I would enjoy having just for the having.
EverQuest II Game Update 52 preview includes revamp of Lavastorm
Filed under: Fantasy, EverQuest II, Patches
Brett Scheinert, game designer on the SOE flagship product EverQuest II, has dropped into the official forums with a sort of ‘New Year’s Resolution’. In point of fact, it’s a preview of new content coming to the game in Game Update 52! Posting with his forum name of timetraveling, Scheinert promised we’d see the following within the next few months:
- A new instance with 9 bosses geared for two groups at a time. Over half of the bosses will be slated to drop Void Shards, the new metacurrency introduced with the Shadow Odyssey expansion. This will be endgame content balanced for characters with only the very best gear.
- On top of that, players will also see a similar raid balanced for four groups at once.
- Tradeskillers will be seeing another trades instance, this time based in the epic dungeon ‘The Void’.
- The classic zone Lavastorm will be seeing numerous improvements, similar to changes made to Everfrost in GU 48.
- Among these changes, players will see brand new areas with level 80 solo content tied into an all-new Lavastorm-based faction.
- This faction will offer numerous pieces of gear to earn, including 12 new armor sets with brand-new appearances. timetraveling makes a point to note that one of these armor sets is going to be a brand-new robe model with helm, shoulders, and legs as seperate visible pieces from the chest-part!
Coming hard on the heels of an entire new expansion with multiple new dungeons, it’s interesting to see the tack the EQ2 designers are taking with this. All new endgame content to explore, with new loot/appearance rewards tying into their revamp of older content. It’s a great continuation of strides they took forward in 2008, and makes it sound like 2009 will be a great year to be an EverQuest II gamer. Stay tuned to Massively after the holidays for details on this new content!
EverQuest II Game Update 52 preview includes revamp of Lavastorm originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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A look back at 2008
2008 has been an absolutely amazing year for MMOs, and my personal progress through them.
Last year at this time, I’d just found the absolutely most perfect EQ2 guild — they were great raiders, loved grouping, and were fantastic people besides. With Clan of Shadows, I managed to do every flagging raid for Ruins of Kunark and was ready to step in and do my best to help the guild as they conquered Veeshan’s Peak. It wasn’t to be; I didn’t make the full membership vote. It wasn’t even close. That disappointment, along with other things to fill my evenings, eventually led to the end of raiding. Without raiding, though, I didn’t have much incentive to log in anymore. I tried to make things work with another guild, Delusions of Grandeur, but it just wasn’t CoS. I guess if I couldn’t make it in CoS, I didn’t want to settle for a lesser guild.
I started poking around back on EverQuest. I really missed my characters there. Not raiding, so much, but the friends, community and camaraderie that makes EQ unique. A lot of people commented that they’d love to play through EQ again, if they didn’t have to do it alone. So I thought we might do together what we’d never do alone, and along with ten or so fellow former EQ players, started Nostalgia the Guild on the Luclin server. NtG peaked in mid-summer when we got to dragon killing level and put the hurt on two of the three bosses of the original EQ, Lord Nagafen and Lady Vox. (We never killed the third, Phinegal Atropos, as a guild). SOE’s summer Living Legacy program had the unexpected side effect of boosting the power of our armor and weapons to raid levels, and a lot of things became possible with very few people. Although fairly diminished, NtG still meets Fridays to explore Old Norrath.
Stargrace took the Nostalgia idea and brought it forward 500 years to the devastated Norrath of EverQuest II. I eventually transferred half my characters from Befallen to Najena to join the guild there. I’m getting the urge to raid and group again, so I may be moving some of them back to Befallen… the loneliness of a server I have no history with dooms me to pickup groups with players I have never met and will never meet again. Nostalgia EQ2’s two active members aren’t enough to build a group or a raid… so there’s not much to do unless I want to do it alone. I hate playing by myself.
In February, I restarted my Neopets account with the sole goal of reaching and beating level 100 of their Shapeshifter mini-game. Shapeshifter starts out as the kind of brain twister that is fun to solve, but quickly goes well beyond the bounds of anything that can be solved by unaided humans in a normal lifetime. So this supposed kids game is really a test of your ability to develop an algorithm that can solve an enormous non-directed decision tree before the Sun goes nova. With help and encouragement from other solvers, I developed a Python program I called Shifter that could solve the hardest levels in no more than a day, and often far faster. On April 1st, 2008, I solved the last puzzle and was the Neopets Shapeshifter Champion for the entire month.
February also started my short-lived affair with Pirates of the Burning Sea. My son wanted to give it a try, so I bought a copy for him, intending to buy a copy for myself if I liked it. He grew bored with it. I liked it a lot, and made a character on his account, got up to a fairly decent level and was getting my free trading skills up, working through the storyline, and getting involved in some really exciting battles at sea.
It was on Station Pass, too! This was somewhat of a killer, actually. My son is not on the Station Pass, so I would have had to start paying for one or pay the PotBS subscription fee to keep playing, all the time I could be playing it for nothing extra if I just had my own account.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to start all over again, or pay to buy another copy of the game, so I just let it lapse. There were plenty of issues, but the game had amazing character and ship customization, absolutely gorgeous and tense battles, and I even liked the story. Sailing back and forth on the Caribbean though, not so much. Having to depend on a wide variety of people to make goods, definitely not so much. I wanted to play, but I just didn’t have the time or the money.
I felt sure that by the end of the year, I’d be totally engulfed in the one sure-fire hit MMO of the year, Flagship Studio’s Mythos. I’ve played a lot of Diablo clones, and even some, like Cronous, that try and take the action RPG into the MMO realm, but none had nailed it like Mythos. Even before they expanded the heavily instanced Overworld into a more world-like map with zoning only for cities and dungeons, I felt they had made perhaps the ultimate casual MMO… Rumors of money trouble inside Flagship turned out to be truth, and over a tumultuous weekend, Hellgate: London, their other title, was taken by their Asian publishing partner, and Mythos was dead.
I would like to be playing Mythos right now.
In March, a major new chapter of my life began when I was hired to blog about breaking MMO news for Massively.com. The pressure of writing so many articles, keeping a full time job, trying to keep Nostalgia rolling, and raiding in EQ2 eventually left me unable to do any of these things well. I put my full time job first, where it had to be, and focused on real life issues, like getting my son enrolled in college and figuring out how to pay for it (answer: I didn’t. I am broke all the time now 
). My Massively adventure ended after an ill-fated trip to the SOE Fan Faire put me in massive (sorry) debt, and my job was cut down to doing EQ2 guides, a task for which I was incredibly unsuited, since I was hardly playing EQ2 at all at that point (which continues to this day), and I’d never written a guide to anything in my life Massively and I parted ways in September.
I went back to writing just for West Karana, where I planned to change the direction of the blog from just chronicling my adventures in mainstream MMOs to seeking out, playing and being an advocate for lesser known MMOs.
It’s not that I don’t like the AAA, high budget, huge marketing department MMOs. I just find them too similar to each other. So many players look eagerly to a new MMO to banish the blahs they feel with the game they currently play. They play the new MMO for awhile, discover that it’s essentially the same as the game they already played, and pronounce the entire genre dead.
I was looking through MMORPG.com’s list of games, and some of them looked totally, wildly different from anything I had ever played. Somewhere in those hundreds of games would have to be dozens that went in a new direction.
Oh yeah, there were. BUNCHES!
In early July, I discovered Wizard 101, probably via Massively. This was an entire MMO built around a wildly kooky collectible card game. I was absolutely and utterly hooked. This was the sort of thing I’d been looking for — an MMO that was just entirely out of left field. It was superficially a kid’s game but quickly turned into a game requiring strategy and teamwork and great skill in deck building. I played until they turned out the beta lights, took a couple week’s break, then started right in on the live game.
If anyone wanted to dip their toes into MMO gaming, I wouldn’t give them a copy of EverQuest II or World of Warcraft. I’d sit them down in front of Wizard 101, right where the Headmaster of Ravenwood School of Wizardry is giving a test to see what sort of wizard you are. It’s not Hogwart’s by another name. It’s something new, unique and fun. Wizard 101 was one of the breakout hits of 2008, and I expect wonderful things from it in 2009.
My on-again, off-again relationship with City of Villains flipped “on” again for awhile in July and August. I love the idea of a super-hero, comic book game, and I like what NCsoft has done with the game since they acquired it from Cryptic, and the character creator is unparalleled, but… the repetitive gameplay just can’t keep me for long. I started to get into their crafting system, but after awhile I just stopped logging in. I’m still subscribed, for now, because I am waiting for the mission designer coming in Issue 14 or 15. I want to see what that is like.
Spore owned my gaming time for a few weeks in September. I really wanted to like the game and very much enjoyed building new creatures, vehicles and space ships. I just didn’t get into the space game that is the majority of the time spent playing — you breeze through the other portions in an hour or less. It still has a place on my hard drive.
Recently, I’ve chucked pretty much every game into the back seat in order to play Dream of Mirror Online. I played this game briefly earlier in the year, and it made a very good impression, but the huge number of games out at that time pushed it away before I’d gotten to level 10, where the jobs, and the game itself, open up. As I played it, I couldn’t help remembering the last game that made me feel this way — the original EverQuest. I began to notice a lot of similarities between the games — death penalties, slow leveling, an emphasis on community over leveling, wide open zones and dungeons — it was EverQuest! A Taiwanese game company had managed, somehow, to meld EQ’s gameplay and community with the Asian anime-flavored, cinematic games. Absolutely stunned me, and I am having a lot of fun playing it.
Honorable mentions: Guild Wars — I want to play this more. Why don’t I? I don’t know! Probably because I hate playing alone. Florensia — another Asian import. I loved the fact that it had a cool land game AND a pirate-themed sea game, but it reminded me of DOMO so much, I figured I’d just play DOMO (good call). Vanguard — even though it runs crappy on my machine, I still pick it up now and again, and it still has a spot on my hard drive. Spellborn — this was intended to be a major part of my fall gaming, but it has been pushed to next year. I still have high hopes for the game, if not for the publisher’s commitment to the title.
2008 was a very intense year for MMO gaming, full of tales of intrigue and adventure — and that’s just the marketing departments! Some of this year’s biggest releases — WoW’s expansion, Age of Conan, Warhammer Online — I just could not find time for. 2009 isn’t looking as intense as 2008, but it might well be SOE’s time to shine if they can get The Agency and Free Realms out the door. Champions Online is also scheduled for the year, and perhaps DC Universe Online as well, giving NCsoft’s City of Heroes a run for its money and market share. News of Star Trek Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic should keep people thirsting for more space-themed adventure in 2010. And, Spellborn!
Happy holidays, fellow gamers
EverQuest II Game Update 52 preview includes revamp of Lavastorm
Filed under: Fantasy, EverQuest II, Patches
Brett Scheinert, game designer on the SOE flagship product EverQuest II, has dropped into the official forums with a sort of ‘New Year’s Resolution’. In point of fact, it’s a preview of new content coming to the game in Game Update 52! Posting with his forum name of timetraveling, Scheinert promised we’d see the following within the next few months:
A new instance with 9 bosses geared for two groups at a time. Over half of the bosses will be slated to drop Void Shards, the new metacurrency introduced with the Shadow Odyssey expansion. This will be endgame content balanced for characters…
EverQuest II Game Update 52 preview includes revamp of Lavastorm originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 23 Dec 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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EQ2 guild Custodi della Luce to hold obstacle course event
Filed under: Fantasy, EverQuest II, Contests, Events, in-game, Races
If you’re in for a lazy Sunday at home, haven’t got visiting relatives demanding your attention, and happen to have an EverQuest II subscription, then we might have found something that can kill a couple of hours for you. The Custodi della Luce guild from the Splitpaw server are holding a massive event, one the likes of which are not often seen in an MMO, and particularly not when it’s organized entirely by players. They’ve built an elaborate obstacle course out of their guild hall, and are offering generous prizes for the fast and furious.
It may be too late to register as a runner in the official race (although 12-15 new racers will be accepted at the event, you’d need to get in quick), a large tower has been constructed in the center of the course for onlookers to watch. After the race is over and prizes are given out, a spectator free-for-all will take place on the course — expect this race to get dirty as stray elbows and shin-kicks get lost in the bustling crowd.
Even if you aren’t going to attend the event, the embedded video (seen better with the high quality option turned on at Youtube) shows the magnificent effort that Custodi della Luce has put into making the circuit — color us impressed. The actual race begins at 18:00GMT today, the 21st of December, and the full event details can be found at the EQII forums. Good luck to all that participate!
EQ2 guild Custodi della Luce to hold obstacle course event originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 21 Dec 2008 02:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Allakhazam editor rages at SOE Station Cash
Filed under: EverQuest, EverQuest II, Business models, Opinion
There has been much unpleasantness following last week’s announcement by SOE that they would be introducing Station Cash to Everquest and Everquest II. But few write-ups have been so frequented (or adamant) as that of Allakhazam editor Tamat. The main gist of the argument is that this change was forced upon all servers, rather than providing the option to choose switching to a server offering these transactions. There are also concerns over how the items, available only by microtransactions, change the dynamic of play in the games.
We invite all of you, readers, to tell us what your experience of the Station Cash items has been thus far. Have you used the system? Are you excited or annoyed by the gear available for money? In short, is it more fun or just funds?
Allakhazam editor rages at SOE Station Cash originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 20 Dec 2008 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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EQ2 guild Custodi della Luce to hold obstacle course event
Filed under: Fantasy, EverQuest II, Contests, Events, in-game, Races
If you’re in for a lazy Sunday at home, haven’t got visiting relatives demanding your attention, and happen to have an EverQuest II subscription, then we might have found something that can kill a couple of hours for you. The Custodi della Luce guild from the Splitpaw server are holding a massive event, one the likes of which are not often seen in an MMO, and particularly not when it’s organized entirely by players. They’ve built an elaborate obstacle course out of their guild hall, and are offering generous prizes for the fast and furious. It may be too late to register as a runner in the…
EQ2 guild Custodi della Luce to hold obstacle course event originally appeared on Massively on Sun, 21 Dec 2008 02:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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The Digital Continuum: Looking back while moving foward
Filed under: MMO industry, New titles, Opinion, The Digital Continuum
This last year has seen a lot of things happen in our beloved MMO-world. Things like the launch of Pirates of the Burning Sea and Age of Conan delays seem long lost in the fog of summer and winter. It was all buried underneath the revelations of DC Universe Online and Star Wars: The Old Republic. And the noise created by the build up to Warhammer Online’s launch seemed squelched by the silent wall that was the Wrath of the Lich King launch. It was all a gust of insanity that blew through our brains, creating ebbs and tides in our attention and interest faster than any of us probably thought…
Continue reading The Digital Continuum: Looking back while moving foward
The Digital Continuum: Looking back while moving foward originally appeared on Massively on Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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