A Short Rant About the State of the MMORPG Market

This started as a response to a post over at Massively OP about the worst MMO trend of 2018.  However, a few paragraphs in I realized I wasn’t really on topic, focusing as I was on MMORPGs, since MMO pretty much means “online multiplayer” in today’s market, and I wasn’t keen to dump this much text into their comment section where about a dozen people might see it before it scrolls off the front page into oblivion.  Better to bring it over here where I can regret it again later.

So we’ll call this another end of 2018 post and I’ll run with what I had.

The most disappointing trend for me isn’t really a trend, but more the realization that MMORPGs are a trap for most studios, a tar ball that they find they’re stuck with once they have one. An MMORPG can bring in money, sometimes lots of money, but they have expensive infrastructures to maintain and they need a continuing stream of content to hold enough of an audience to keep them viable. They can eat up all the focus of a smaller studio, so they neglect or never start other projects because you have to keep feeding the monster or it will stop crapping out money.

But the population peaks, often very early these days, and then every content update pisses somebody off and they go away like it is a game of musical chairs and each patch is another point where the music stops. Or it would be like that if people wouldn’t also leave if you don’t patch often enough.  You can’t sit still or you will lose players and you can’t change anything or you will lose players.

Meanwhile MMORPGs have only gotten more expensive to make, which makes innovation a risk that few can afford. And then there is the target player base which complains about every game being a WoW clone and yet will also complain even more bitterly about anything that strays from the WoW formula.

And don’t even get me started on the false hope that is PvP.  It seems like a great idea, and a true money save, to just get the players to be the content.  In reality, anything beyond a tiny, consequence free instance of PvP in an MMORPG will be shunned or ignored.  Few developers who follow that path and go in on PvP are rewarded with any success and trying to move PvP out of its tiny corner is almost always a waste of development time.  Add in a capture the flag arena game… or a battle royale game these days… and move on.

The customers are no better, myself included.  The loud demographics that haunt any developer’s forums should serve as a warning, but if that is the only feedback you’re getting then where are you going to go?  There is always somebody agitating loudly for their favorite thing.  Some want PvP everywhere, others think your game will die if it doesn’t have player housing, another group hates walking and wants to fly everywhere, and somebody in the back seems to believe in time travel and that everything would be great if you could just teleport everybody back to 1999 or 2004 or 2007 or whenever they felt they were having the most fun playing your game.

And none of them has a fucking clue about the level of effort their one “simple” request entails.  But if you’re not doing exactly what they want or it is taking too long then you are “lazy” or “stupid” or both.

If players could keep their focus on actual game play issues it might not be so bad.  But they are on about how you charge money for this or that, with “greedy” or “cash grab” being favored terms.  They complain about how they just want to play the game and not worry about real world politics, a sentiment that is usually the opening salvo about how they’re bent out of shape that the CEO or some dev or some rumor indicates that the company has somehow transgressed the whiners personal stance on the topic of the day is; gamer gate, gender politics, overtime, unions, campaign donations, boarder walls, or whatever.  And then there are the truly loopy who see conspiracies, collusion, and corruption in the machinations of a studio that is really just trying to keep the lights on and the customers happy.

Add into the mix the players who see the genre as a zero sum game, so feel they need to constantly crap on every game that competes with their favorite.  The worry is that they might be right.

So we see studios going under, the weight of their MMORPGs around their necks pulling them down.  The revenues are no longer enough to keep them afloat, much less fund anything new, but they cannot let go because what else do they have?

Even Blizzard, long addicted to the huge income stream from WoW, once past a billion dollars per year, is in trouble now that the game is stumbling again. They don’t want to depend on WoW, but they haven’t made another game that has come anywhere close to the money WoW was bringing in at its peak.  And even their best, Overwatch, could only sustain its peak for a few months at a stretch and is now reported in serious decline.  Companies, like people, size themselves to match their income, and when it drops tough choices loom.

Someone in Blizzard at least recognized a bit of the problem, so we don’t see the company making any more MMORPGs.  But WoW was enough to distort the company and change investor expectations.  They can’t go back to selling stand alone games.  They have to keep WoW going or die, because there is no replacing it.

Game development is a bad business to start with. But at least with a stand alone game you can walk away to work on the next thing. An MMORPG never goes away, unless you have several and you have to make Sophie’s choice. Studios tied to MMORPGs die and other studios with less ambition buy the remains, put the games on life support, and try to milk the remains for some more cash. But only the unbalanced jump into the MMORPG market to create a new game and expecting happiness and success.

And so it goes.  Expect more studios to shut down operations, more games to be closed or put in maintenance mode by some third party game aggregator like Gamigo, and more loud complaining from players that if the studio had only listened to their completely uniformed opinion, then everything would have been fine.

Oh, and expect the usual level of optimism for every new MMORPG title announced because we also apparently never learn.

There, with that out of my system, let’s move on… or not.

MER – Charts for All My Needs

CCP was a bit quicker here in December in getting out the monthly economic report November.  However, in their haste it looked like they had omitted almost all of the charts I usually write about.  Frustrated by that, I decided to just grab the raw data this time around and make my own damn charts, only to find that all the charts I expected were included in that .zip archive.

So I have already learned something new this month.   I’ll check that off my list.

And, unlike last month, the Fade region actually made the cut for inclusions again.  The Cache region however remains unaccounted for.

As usual, I will start off with the mining to see how peace in the south and small scale conflicts in the north are doing.

November 2018 – Mining Value by Region

In a completely expected turn of events, Delve continues to be the region seeing the most mining activity.  The bar chart shows just how far ahead Delve is when compared to other regions.

November 2018 – Mining Value by Region – Bar Graph

By this measure the mining output of Delve is greater than the next seven regions combined.  (The newly returned Fade region is at the bottom of that list as well as others, perhaps confirming the theory that it was missed last month due to not hitting some minimal activity threshold.)

And yet the Delve number is down.  In October the amount mined was measured in excess of 19 trillion ISK, but for November it is down to 15.5 trillion ISK.  Did people get tired of mining in Delve?

Maybe not.  As usual, there is another chart here to figure into things.

November 2018 – Economic Indices

As you can see, the price of minerals has continued its post-war slide, landing at a three year low in November.  Since the mining amount is measured by the value of the ore, falling prices can mean falling numbers even if the total cubic meters of ore mined remains the same.

November 2018 – Economic Indices over All Time

As for the price of minerals, while they are not at an all time low, they are headed there.  I think we are firmly in the zone where, if you have a researched Charon freighter blueprint, you can build the freighter, insure it, have somebody gank it, and still turn a profit.  That was a tale I was told at the bottom of the last mineral price dip and we’re now well below that.

So mineral prices seem like something CCP needs to address.  Maybe.  There is a production aspect to that.

November 2018 – Production Values by Region

In production, while The Forge region was up a bit (as was its feeder region The Citadel, while Lonetrek held steady), Delve continues to be the single region with the greatest production output.

November 2018 – Production Values by Region – Bar Graph

Production, of course, requires inputs, of which mined minerals are a significant portion.  Aryth said on a recent Meta Show that production in Delve enjoyed a certain advantage in that the ore and minerals were available at a discount when compared to the Jita market.

There is a not insignificant cost to ship compressed or and minerals all the way to Jita in order to sell.  That makes what I would call the effective parity price of minerals in Delve lower, and since Delve is producing all that ore for the engines of production to consume, Delve’s economic power might be causing a greater dip in the economic indices for minerals than one might see in Jita.

Anecdotally, tritanium seems to be cheaper in 1DQ1-A than in Jita, but I cannot tell how much weight to give that observation.

And since we’re here, I might as well through the sales charts up on the page.

November 2018 – Trade Value by Region

For all the pride of the Delve region, Jita and The Forge remain the economic center of New Eden.

November 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph

That chart is so lopsided that CCP has to exclude The Forge in order to get some insight into other regions.

November 2018 – Trade Value by Region – Bar Graph, Forge Excluded

Domain, home of Amarr, remains in second place with Delve not too far behind.  But you have to get down to seventh spot, which is Esoteria, the home of TEST, before another null sec region shows up.

NPC bounties are more straightforward.

November 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region

No we’re back to things Delve dominates and which do not depend on variations in market prices in order to measure.  NPC bounties are a direct faucet into the economy.  On that Delve was down by half a trillion ISK.

November 2018 – NPC Bounties by Region – Bar Graph

Following behind Delve are Esoteria (TEST), Detroid (Fraternity & Triumvirate), Querious (Imperium alliance training ground), Fountain (Imperium), and Period Basis (Red Alliance).

In the north of null sec, where infighting around Branch and Venal is keeping everyone busy while the Imperium’s Space Violence squad is active and the NGSA is trying to oppress the numbers in Geminate, Deklein is the highest earner for ratting, bringing in just over 2 trillion ISK in bounties.

Overall bounties continued to peak.

November 2018 – Top Sinks and Faucets

While mineral prices are at a recent low, NPC bounty payouts are now at an all time high.  The question remains as to what CCP will do, if anything, and if there is anything they can do that Malcanis won’t make a mockery of.

Overall, bounties are down slightly as a percentage of the income faucet total, ringing in at 63%.  The number was 65% in October.

November 2018 – Sinks and Faucets and the ISK supply

But that is because other faucets like incursion payouts and agent mission rewards and bonuses were also up for November.  The overall money supply was up another 37 trillion ISK for the month.

So there it is, another month and the economy of New Eden hasn’t fallen over yet.  Aspects of it look bad, but it keeps on chugging along.

Finally, the chart that I choose to end with most months, the overview and comparison of regions.

November 2018 – Regional Stats

And so it goes until next month.  You can find all of the raw data and charts over at the dev blog post for the November report.

Always Something to Clean Up in Space

After having caught the first move op back to Delve last week I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with myself in New Eden.  I haven’t ratted in over a year, and I haven’t mined in much longer than that, and have no desire to do either.  When you see those Delve numbers on the monthly economic report, I contribute nothing to those two categories.

Meanwhile the peace in the north has meant few strategic operation opportunities.  I like strat ops because the have a goal and I am a very goal oriented person.  Roaming just to roam, unless it is with Reaver, isn’t something I enjoy.

Fortunately it appears that NCDot was looking out for me.  It must be because I am friends with Matterall.  They left a couple of Astrahus citadels in Aridia set for US time zone timers, so when a fleet went up to go shoot them I was awake and ready to go.  It was going to be Hammerfleet doctrine, which is built around the Ferox battlecruiser, which meant that I would get to show off the Cordite Blossom SKIN that CCP briefly offered as a fundraiser back with the September update.

Cordite Blossom Ferox at a jump bridge

The fleet was under Dave Archer and, of course, he didn’t tell us what we were up to, just that it was a strat op.  The presence of spies and the requirements of operation security means we rarely get told much until something is already happening.  But that it was a strat op in a doctrine that is often used to shoot structures, and because there was a small carrier op under Zed Starshine going with us, it seemed like a good bet that there was a citadel out there that needed bashing.

And that we took the jump bridge to 1-SMEB pretty much guaranteed it was in Aridia.  So off we went, shepherding the slower carriers that would be used as the firepower for the shoot.  Getting there went smoothly, except for the point when somebody in the fleet set off they cyno by accident.

That wasn’t what he meant to do

That sort of thing doesn’t happen as often as it could.  But it was quiet enough in the area that we left him behind and he was able to catch up.

The Astrahus itself was being gunned, so as we orbited the structure it threw various things at us.  For the most part that kept logi awake with something to do.

Paints and webs on somebody

The unaware and incautious were in trouble however.  Small stuff had to warp off to stay safe and the few people who did dumb things, like lighting their microwarp drive when a bomb was coming in, paid the price.  But losses were minimal.  When the heard had been culled of the incompetent the gunner started in on our drones and we had to pull those and pick up with guns.  However the fighters from the carriers carried on without issue.

Unfortunately, this shoot was just for the armor timer.  There was no kill mail to be had.  The kill was set for three days down the road.

Timer counting down

Then we moved to another system and did it all again, shooting another gunned Astrahus to take care of another armor timer.

The Ferox line and a planetary atmosphere

That set up another timer for a kill next week.

After that it was a quick run back to 1-SMEB where the carriers could jump and we could take the jump bridge back home.   So I managed to get in on at least one fleet this month and helped clean up some hostile structures.  We’ll see if I remember to check for the fleet that will go get the final timers and the kills.

September in Review

The Site

The site turned twelve, something about which I went on at length in a post mid-way through the month.

The official notification

It was also the month that saw the most likes in a single day on the site.

Such an achievement

I don’t know why.  I never know why.

It was also a month for some big news, acquisitions, closures, and new expansions.  All of that, plus the usual residual interest in the site after Blaugust, drove things to a pretty decent month when it came to page views.  It still isn’t 2012, but it was a very respectable month by 2018 standards.

Finally, for the third month running, the most viewed posts does not include a single post written during the month.  It isn’t unusual for older posts to become search engine favorites, but I have yet to figure out why some of those posts, making their third appearance on the list, are popular.

One Year Ago

The blog turned eleven and so I brought out an elf.

I was talking about a typewriter.  The first typewriter I used.  I still have it.

Raptr announced that they would be shutting down at the end of the month.

GuildWars 2 launched their Path of Fire expansion.

Pokemon Gold & Silver were made available via the 3DS Virtual Console.

Crimson Leaf Games announced MegaWars – Dawn of the Third Age.

I took a look at Daybreak 30 months into is existence.  And, as I did that, we got the bad news that EQ2 Wire was shutting down after covering the game for nine years.  Then Daybreak announced that the Fippy Darkpaw server would be merged with the Vulak server… probably a few years too late to make any difference.

In EVE Online CCP gave us a heads up as to the coming Lifeblood expansion, complete with trailer.  Last I checked the site was still up, but running pretty much unattended.

I was running on about meaningful PvE progression in New Eden and going on about return on time invested and content on demand.

In space I was doing the Alpha Strikes event while the August MER showed that deploying to Hakonen cost the Imperium in mining and ratting revenue.

Then came the Warzone Extraction event to celebrate the non-VR version of the soon to be in maintenance mode EVE: Valkyrie.  It was a tough event by EVE Online PvE standards and I am sure it killed some newbies.

But the big EVE Online news of the month was The Judge betraying Circle of Two, selling their Keepstar to the Imperium (who later sold it to TEST) and the camp in 68FT-6 as alliance members tried to escape from their former home.  GigX was banned and CO2 seemed doomed.  It was one of those “Only in EVE” sort of events.

Andrew Groen was planning some EVE Online history lectures via a new podcast.  That only lasted five episodes before he went back to writing books on EVE Online history.

In a bullet points post I noted the passing of the EVE Gate site, that CCP cancelled their deal with Nexon for Japanese EVE Online support, that Ultima Online was talking about free to play, and that Daybreak wasn’t going to be handing out any more free content in Norrath for the foreseeable future.

And finally Chris Roberts was unironically talking about developer optimism in an interview.

Five Years Ago

We heard that Warhammer Online was slated to shut down in December.

We also got the official word that Blizzard would be killing the auction house in Diablo III.

SOE was getting over some of their Station Cash screw ups.

In general I wasn’t too excited about the expansion outlook on the MMO scene.

In EVE Online the Rubicon expansion went live.  Our corp had a little drama as Gaff plotted to overthrow our CEO and created a new corp, Black Sheep Down.  As is usual, he was good for the intrigue, but once he became El Supremo, he got bored and stopped playing.  Happens after every coup… and there have been a few.  We went from being literally the worst corp in TNT to… erm… well, that didn’t change I guess.  We did run out to low sec for a fight and I put my alt in the corp to bolster our numbers because there was a minimum height requirement or something.

In general we were finishing up our deployment in Delve cleaning up after the TEST collapse and I hit 110 million skill points.  Also, there was the war between evebloggers.com and evebloggers.net.

The instance group, in a hint as to where we were headed, ran a series of WoW dungeon knock-offs in Neverwinter.

And it was time for the usual bout of autumnal nostalgia.  This time I returned to Azeroth, which made me ask the question, when is it nostalgia anyway?  My daughter and I and a friend had a plan to roll up some new characters on a new server.  Whatever it was, it felt like home.

And, finally, I covered the great resurrection exploit in TorilMUD.

Ten Years Ago

Warhammer Online went live, first with the head start and then for everybody.

As we saw with other MMOs, there were issues coordinating with friends about which server to choose, leading to yet another gripe post about the whole sharded existence we have had to put up with in MMOS.  I did wonder if the EverQuest II mechanism of multiple versions of a given zone might be worth it to get everybody on a single server.

The instance group was into WAR (after escaping from Durnhold Keep), though as a group we have some parameters that we had to work within.  And the battlegrounds in WAR were not playing out well.  And the type of quests that were in PvE led to some talk about which goal was worse.

In Warhammer itself, war were declared on gold sellers and Mythic was being very demonstrative about it.  Of course, it did not appear to stem tells from gold seller bots that seemed to sit active for days.

I went on about those tips you see on the loading screen of many MMOs, spurred by a couple less than helpful tips in WAR.

In EVE Online I hit a major ISK milestone.  But I was building up ISK because I had my eye on a freighter.

The Empyrean Age 1.1 update was upon us, which included 2 changes designed to reduce the scourge of suicide ganking.  And nobody ever complained about that again.

Meanwhile CCP was offering up battleships for sale… model battleship for real cash, not ISK.

But the most important EVE Online event was probably Yahtzee Croshaw’s Zero Punctuation review of EVE Online.  Much shoe-on-head wearing and talk about tactical logistics reconfiguration ensued.

In EverQuest II, the Living Legacy promotion was ending.

I was wondering why there wasn’t a World of Warcraft animated series yet.  I think that might have been better than the movie we got.

LEGO Batman showed up.

And, finally, the site hit the two year mark.

Fifteen Years Ago

Valve released the first version of Steam, mostly to replace the World Opponent Network they bought from Sierra.

SOE released the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion for EverQuest, bringing instanced small group content to the game.  Their ads specifically mentioned the new “dungeon crawl” experience.

Twenty Years Ago

Pokemon Red & Blue for the Nintendo GameBoy and GameBoy Color launched in North America.

Delta Force launched in the US.  I have written about it and voxels and the coming of 3D accelerated video cards in the past.

Most Viewed Posts in September

1. Rumors of Future Daybreak Projects and the End of EverQuest
2. Extra Credits – Picking at the Lockbox Thing Some More
3. Do You Wear the Mask or does the Mask Wear You?
4. Burn Jita 2018 Aftermath
5. Winter Movie League – Denouement
6. SuperData and the Rise of Fortnite
7. Burn Jita Back for 2018
8. Rift Prime Time
9. Spring Movie League – Wrinkle in the Mix
10. Honest Game Trailers – Animal Crossing
11. The Road to CSM13
12. February in Review

Search Terms of the Month

are there any games as good as everquest
[No]

everquest franchise dead?
[Also no]

minecraft complaints
[It is so blocky to start with…]

minecraft how to make warm ocean
[Declare it the toddler pool]

how to hand in madness within wow
[I think most of the madness is outside of WoW]

Spam Comment of the Month

Yes! Finally something about facebook advertising.
[I nearly approved this just for irony’s sake]

Black Desert Online

Since Pearl Abyss was set to buy CCP I thought I would take a look at the game that people keep putting forth as a cash shop pay-to-win horror show.  I haven’t done much past the tutorial so far, but it does have its own look and feel.  It ain’t WoW, which isn’t a bad thing.  We’ll see if I end up playing enough of it to be able to make a post.

EVE Online

The war in the north has come to and end with a peace agreement signed earlier this month that came into effect yesterday.  We will be packing up and leaving the north for a month and won’t pester GotG for at least six months.  That will make for a quiet October as people get home and pick up mining and ratting again to make some money.  That will make some time for other things, since I haven’t ratted or mined or done PI in a year at this point.  Maybe I’ll watch some TV.

EverQuest II

This came out of nowhere… or out of the thin yet cooling air of autumn.  Anyway, suddenly I was keen to go and play in Norrath towards the end of the month.  And I did.  And I continue to do so.  We shall see.

Pokemon Go

I finally caught a Lapras, so I can take that off the list finally.  In two years I only ran into one once, and it ran away after the first throw.  This month Niantic changed the Pokemon mix back to favor first generation and now I’ve caught five.  Still, it was an exciting moment when I caught that first one.

It was also the month of many friends.  One of the special research tasks required you to add three new friends.  After struggling for a bit and only finding one, I posted my friend code on Twitter and got more than a dozen in a short time.  I deleted the tweet after a while as it was a bit too successful.  Now I have 19 friends to find gifts for, most of whom are from Japan.  That is probably more friends than I have in real life.  But it is kind of neat as each gift has a picture that goes with it, so I’ve seen some new places… and the 7-11 logo.  There must be a Pokestop at every 7-11 in Japan or something.

Level: 33 (+0)
Pokedex status: 339 (+4) caught, 357 (+3) seen
Pokemon I want: Dragonite… Dratini are so rare where I live
Current buddy: Wailmer

World of Warcraft

My efforts in Azeroth sort of petered out over the course of the month.  I went from daily logins during Darkmoon Faire to basically logging in for a bit each weekend to get a little further along with my main on Kul Tiras, who is still just level 117 at this point.  This is sort of how non-addicts play video games I hear.  Admittedly, this slackening of attention might not have been entirely out of boredom with the game as during this period of time my wife and I also binge-watched the first three seasons of Better Call Saul and the first season of Castle Rock and most of the first season of Handmaid’s Tale, and some of that show on Hulu with Hugh Laurie, as well as knocking out season five of Bojack Horseman with my daughter and getting through season three of Archer and the first few episodes of season 2 of Ozark on my own.

That is actually a lot of television.

So perhaps WoW isn’t wholly to blame.  I just spent a lot of time on the couch rather than in front of my computer.

Coming Up

BlizzCon is actually on November 2nd which, while not next month, is close enough that I am sure we’ll be hearing more news and speculation as to what Blizzard might be showing.

I expect some more news from Daybreak.  We got the title of the coming EverQuest II expansion, but no details.  In addition, there is still an EverQuest expansion that they ought to be talking about.

In EVE Online things will probably be somewhat quiet.  The war in the north is over for now and we have committed to taking a month off.

There is also EVE Vegas coming up mid-month.  I will be attending again.  I will actually be speaking.  But don’t worry, I am only talking about blogging, so you won’t be missing anything if you’re not there.

Runes of Magic Arrives on Steam at Last

The summer’s here! As well as basking in the beautiful weather in Taborea, we’re celebrating the dawn of a new era: Runes of Magic is now available on the world’s most popular gaming platform Steam!
-Runes of Magic news page

When I say “at last” it isn’t as though I was anxious for it to be there, it is just that they have been talking about this for some time and the target was June and then July.  Now, in the final week of August it has arrived on Steam.  Summer is indeed here, but we’re on the far side of it and autumn is on its way.

I’ve written a bit now and then about the game.  It was kind of a big deal back in 2009 when it launched, when it was both a built-from-scratch free to play MMORPG and an attempt for an attempt by an Asian studio to build a western style, quest drive game.
But, as it turns out, this move to Steam is also a moment of opportunity if you have ever wanted to try the game.  As part of the Steam launch they are also putting up a couple of new servers, one in the US and one in the EU, so you can start on a fresh new server rather than joining one where the years have clumped most of the user base at max level and the economy has been distorted by past problems.

Your favorite game is now available on Steam!
In addition, we’re also launching new servers for the USA and Europe to coincide with the game’s Steam debut – the perfect opportunity for newcomers and returning players to discover Taborea afresh.
Runes of Magic, news page

This is probably as close to a retro or progression server as you are going to get for Runes of Magic.  The devs haven’t changed much of the content over the years, so it is mostly still the 2009 experience.  And you can still use your same old account.  In fact, you have to create an account for the game in the same old way, with Steam basically acting like a launcher for the launcher in that way that makes Steam feel a pointless part of the process.
I do wonder what this move to Steam will really do, if anything. The “at last” in the title is also a question about why it has taken so long to get to Steam, why it is happening now, and what they hope to get out of this jump onto the Steam platform.  I hope they aren’t planning on this saving the game.
Steam has gone from a service with a fairly select range of games to a garbage heap over the years.  It is the last refuge for the greedy or incompetent who seem to think they getting on a distribution platform is the main point of the exercise.  And Steam’s premature policy change (we’ll let even more crap in now and give you filtering tools at some point in the distant future) doesn’t promise to make anything better.  It is a mess, with the company still pretty much running by the old guidelines while people debate over what “trolling” really means.
(I’ll tell you what “trolling” means in that context.  It means whatever the person making the decision at the moment wants it to mean, so the games that got rejected before the new policy will probably all still be rejected after the new policy.)
Anyway, there is Runes of Magic hidden in that mess, one of dozens of “new releases” on the Steam store this week (so it is already on page four, in 98th place, on the Windows new releases list in less than two days), with a 2009 launch date in its description, and already being pummeled by a series of negative reviews declaring it old (it is), unstable (it does leak memory), and pay to win (it does sell power), leading it to an overall “mixed” rating, which is as good as a “do not buy” label in big red letters across the page.

And only 31 reviews so far

If the developers were hoping for a bonanza of new players I suspect they may be disappointed.  But it is hard to tell what the real plan is from the outside.  Is this a last gasp effort to keep the ball rolling?
Certainly the new server thing was contrary to my prediction about the game at the start of the year, when I suspected that it would lose at least one of its two remaining servers, with the very quiet US server either disappearing or being merged into the EU.  Instead they have doubled the number of servers they are running.
We shall see if this keeps Runes of Magic alive or if it was just a last, unfortunate roll of the dice.

Lost Dungeons of New Eden

This past Saturday I wrote about the EverQuest Agnarr server, one of Daybreak’s progression servers, and passed over at one point one of the expansions slated for it, Lost Dungeons of Norrath.

The main focus of that expansion was instanced content, a brand new concept for EverQuest at the time.  They were dungeons that came in a few basic flavors that had some variations between them, allowed the players running them to choose a difficulty level, and ended up rewarding players with “augmentations” that they could use to upgrade their current gear.

It was a moment of change for EverQuest and MMORPGs in general.

Saturday evening I decided to log onto the EVE Online test server, Sisi, where early cuts at the upcoming abyssal deadspace content had been made available for people to try.

The “How to” aspect of this new feature wasn’t obvious to me, but I found the thread about trying it out in the forums, which at least got me pointed in the right direction.

I wasn’t sure what ship or fitting I ought to try, so I just used my ratting Ishtar fit and figured I would adjust from there.  Everything on Sisi is 100 ISK and the market is stocked with all the non-faction non-officer hulls and modules, so you can grab what you want.  When grabbing some ammo I accidentally bought 2,000 Ishtar hulls, but what the hell right?  It is all 100 ISK.

I then grabbed a “calm” filament, the level 1 flavor and headed out to give it a try.

Ishtar in an Abyssal pocket

The tiers run like this:

1. Calm
2. Agitated
3. Fierce
4. Raging
5. Chaotic

And each comes in variations, the difference between which I have yet to see.

Tiers and types of filaments

I spent most of the first run fiddling with my drones to figure out what would work and what I ought to skip.  All the NPCs had placeholder names, but they were either ships or drones.  I seemed to be running into just Sleepers, but that might be related to which filaments I picked.

It seemed that 5x Acolyte IIs would eat up anything small and be able to dodge incoming fire.  Mediums and heavies were too easy to hit and I had to pull them right away.  So I plowed through a room, went through the gate, which opens up once you’ve cleared, then did another room, and then another, and then was back in normal space again wondering when I would get my prize.

I knew that ships did not drop loot, so skipped past them, but I didn’t notice the part about blowing up the structure in each room.  That is the loot pinata.  So I grabbed another calm filament and gave it another try.  This time I broke all the pinatas and came out the other side unscathed.

That run dumped a bunch of loot on me, though the loot payout is cranked up at the moment, well beyond what it will be when it goes live, to let people experiment with drops.  I got a mutaplasmid for a large shield extender so bought one off the market to mutate it.  The result was okay.

Mutated shield extender II

CPU usage went down but power grid went up.  Sig radius got a little bit worse, but the shield hit points were boosted quite a bit.  Not a bad mutation I guess.  And the newly created module shows you what was initially mutated and what got better or worse.

The after module

It also has a button to find that sort of thing in contracts, since these items won’t be on the normal market.  I am going to guess that contract usage will jump sharply when these are introduced and that we might get a pass on the contract UI after a lot of people are suddenly using them more than ever before.

I also had a mutaplasmid for a medium shield booster, so I grabbed a tech II version and ran it through the process… and ended up wrecked.

Worse for the tinkering

I also got a tier 4 filament drop so decided to give that a try.  That went less well.  I managed to blow up small stuff in the usual way… a pack of cruisers in this case… with acolyte IIs, leaving me with a Sleep battleship once they were out of the way.

Sleek Sleeper Seeking Me

And even that seemed to be going well.  I pulled in the acolytes and sent heavy drones after the battleship.  Not problems at all…. right up until my ship suddenly exploded and I was dead.

And that was that

I am not sure what did me in really.  I may have flown into a pocket of toxic space.  The timer may have run out.  Nothing in the feedback (or in the logs) indicated what happened.  Something just turned my ship into mush, ripping through armor and hull in a flash before I could react and do anything.  Surprise!

That threw me to where my death clone was set.  From there I had to move to a station that had stuff up on the market then set about fitting another ship.  I decided to go with an Eagle this time.  It could hold the five acolyte IIs I’d need and I thought the guns might speed things up.

Eagle on a run

As it turned out, nothing I could do would make medium rails track the small drones once they closed range, but my own drones took care of them as expected.  Being able to reach out and shoot larger targets seemed to work okay.  And I could pop the structure right away.

Structure going up as the gate opens

I ran some tier 1 and 2 versions just to get a feel for it.  It sure looks pretty.

Eagle waiting for the gate to open

My tour ended when I had another insta-pop event.  This time I didn’t even see things change, I was flying one moment and dead the next.  The logs don’t show anything, just my drones popping away at the small stuff… and it was all small stuff.  Maybe I hit a mine.  I don’t think the timer ran down… but there is no visible timer, so I am not sure.

Just before my sudden demise

Anyway, that was enough for me to get at least some flavor of what is in store.  I might try it again as we get closer to the Into the Abyss expansion release and things have settled down some.

But as I tinkered around with all of this my brain kept making the link with the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion for EverQuest.  Here we have players being given instanced content, able to choose the style and challenge up front while the actual layout comes from a set group of possibilities, and offering up items that augment current equipment as a possible reward.

Nothing new in the world I guess.

Unfortunately my impression so far is that abyssal deadspace has all the drawbacks of of PvE in EVE Online; It is fun and interesting the first couple of times, but it becomes tiresome on repetition.  And there is the insta-death timer thing.  I don’t know enough to know if that is avoidable or if we’re going to get a visible timer, but it will rile people up when it happens on the live server.  People do not like to get their shit blown up.

In the end some people will optimize and do abyssal deadspace for the rewards, and then complain about having to grind and the lack of predictability in getting what they wanted.

And that leaves aside the whole RNG module upgrade element, which already has people annoyed, as well as the strange new contract marketplace that will spring up where you’ll have to be very careful to inspect whatever you buy because every mutated module could be different.

That it doesn’t appeal to me doesn’t mean much in the larger scheme of things.  Somebody will love it.  There is a niche fan base out there for every feature.  But will it be a draw for enough people to have been worth the effort?  Will it change the game in a good way?