![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cmdr_zoomI'm not sure I have another MMO in me.
I was a latecomer to MMORPGs, and online games in general; somewhat ironic, having been an avid (video) gamer all the way back to 1980 (arcade, Atari 2600, Apple, and finally PC). Part of it was that until 2000 or so, I lagged behind in hardware and a fast connection, necessary to play the early online shooting games. Another part of it was that I'd gotten my fill of MUDs in college (of the lp and diku variety, mostly) and saw little reason to play more of the same, even if they now came with graphics. (Generic Extruded Fantasy Product, now with low-res polygonal eye candy!) I was always more interested in the "Tiny" side of the hobby, MUCK and MUSH and so on. Finally, I clung to the notion of buying a game once and owning it. I hadn't subscribed to an online service since a brief venture onto Sierra's ImagiNation Network in the mid-90s. Even when Star Wars Galaxies came along, I resisted, because I knew it wouldn't, couldn't be as cool as the movies - mostly because it would inevitably be populated by the sort of people who played MMOs.
So what finally got me out of the chatrooms - IRC and MUSH - and into these virtual worlds? Friends (mostly in Eyrie Productions, whom I later had a falling out with because I said the wrong thing(s) at the wrong time, but that is another very unhappy story) and two games that broke the mold: Puzzle Pirates and City of Heroes. I got into the free beta of the first in summer 2003 and loved it, and decided to go ahead and subscribe as soon as it went live. With the second, having followed its troubled development from a distance, I held out for most of 2004 until the praise from people I trusted finally got to be too much and I had to try it for myself.
The story of how I loved PP and how it broke my heart, how I came back a few times and reinvented myself and found new mates to sail with for a while, only to have them drift away (or I did), while the game itself grew and changed and then fell on hard times and began, inevitably, to shrink, is a long one and not really relevant to this post. Suffice to say that while I remember those early days fondly, everyone I once knew there is long gone and I haven't logged in for more than a few minutes in years. When it finally goes under for the last time, I think I will be sad but also relieved.
COH, though... as 2f (who I met, along with the rest of DFB, through the game; before that, he was just a name I recognized from a few fanfics) commented on my last post, that was my home. And like him, I wandered, but always came back. Even when I was playing other games, even when I was unemployed for two years (years that CoH made less dismal), I've been subscribed continuously since August 10, 2004. And I'll be playing, if I'm able, until the very end.
At first I wasn't even sure I'd be able to; my video card was minimum-spec, and a friend's borrowed account was a slideshow or wouldn't run at all. Then someone told me to update the drivers. I didn't think it would make that much difference, but now it worked. And so I logged in and made my very first test characters, who eventually became Miss Megajoule and V-Max. The first of many, though not nearly as many as some; I was initially limited by a mere 8, then 12 slots on Virtue, the unofficial RP server and the only one I cared to play on. Not only were the players (IMO) a cut above, but that's where my friends were.
The game's changed so much since then, mostly for the better, and held the promise of getting better still... a promise that, it now seems, will never be realized. That's a hard thing to take. Even harder is the thought that this wonderful game, that let my virtual self take flight, isn't just stopping in place, but going away entirely. Forever. And not only am I sure that nothing will ever take its place in my heart and my memories of those eight good years, I'm starting to wonder if I'll find anything to replace it, period.
Through NCsoft I learned of, and briefly beta-tested, another non-fantasy game: Auto Assault. The driving was a blast, and the graphics were nice, even on my weak rig that couldn't even display the trademark glow of Human shield-bars properly; but the in-town/on-foot animations were clunky and the character customization almost non-existent after the bounty of CoH, and lots of other aspects of the game seemed to be trying to copy the new 800-lb gorilla of the hobby, WoW. And, well, the gorilla wasn't moving off that spot. People who wanted to play that sort of game were already playing it. I was later invited back for another free trial, and then again when AA was finally shut down. I drove my cyborg's armored truck back to the starting gate and waited until the screen froze and dropped me to login. An omen of the future, maybe.
I eventually got around to trying the gorilla itself. This was years after it launched, during the Burning Crusade and Lich King eras. I still had no interest in endgame raiding and gear grinding and all the other things that everyone in the industry insisted Any Real MMO Has To Have, and which "my" game (to my perverse pride) did not. Yet. I was there to play tourist, do (and read) the quests, see the world, learn the lore. It was sometimes relaxing to get away from my friends in DFB and go somewhere where no one knew me, where I could just run around solo and lose myself in the intricate mindlessness of gathering and crafting. I had my own little stable of alts on both sides, Alliance and Horde, both so that I could see and do everything and so that I could self-supply myself with anything I needed. Trade and guild chat (I drifted in and out of a few casual ones) provided a nice background hum, so I wasn't completely alone, but could participate (or not) on my terms. I enjoyed it, for a couple of years, and collected quite the album of screenshots and achievements and memories... but as WotLK was winding up, all of my alts were at the level cap and I'd seen and done everything I could solo, everything that interested me. And CoH was getting interesting again. So that was that.
When DC Universe Online went free to play, I decided to check it out and see how the other half (or third) lives. (I guess I could have done the same with Champions Online, and still might, but... right now, the hurt is too fresh and the stories I'm hearing are not encouraging. Too limiting, and just familiar enough to be wrong, in that uncanny valley way.) Leveling a couple of characters there to the cap, which took about a month, was another fun diversion. But though Gotham and Metropolis were beautifully rendered and detailed, the voice acting was fair to excellent, and the chance to interact with iconic characters exciting... the concessions made to the console port are everywhere, and once you get your action figure to the cap there's nothing to do but raid, raid and raid some more, to acquire pieces of your favorite super's power armor. I'll probably go back after November and pick up my Lightning villain again, play through whatever new story/PvE content has been added, but then it's going on the shelf again. :p
And now at last we come to the one other game that I am currently actively playing - or was until last Friday, when CoH suddenly bumped it to standby: Star Trek Online. I've been a Trekkie since grade school, starting with TAS and TOS reruns, then the classic movies (many of which I saw in theaters, and have the whole set on VHS). TNG's run started at the same time I went to college, and I eagerly watched DS9 and even VOY. It was B&B's horrible mistreatment of ENT that broke the spell, but I was still loyal to the dream (while recognizing all the flaws and goofiness and contradictions of the franchise). So in January 2011, a year after launch, when the client was on sale and I heard it was much better than it had been, I decided to "engage."
And it's been fun. It's not remotely hard canon; there's an official date, which hasn't advanced in over two real-world years, but that's just lip service. The devs (wisely, IMO) chose to go with a wide-open amusement-park approach, All Treks for All People, rather than enforce any one era or concept of fun. These means that the social areas are an utter mess, more like a SF convention's Masquerade than a real starbase, but the other great part about STO is that most of the time, you're off doing your own thing anyway - boldly going, all by yourself. As you may have guessed from my write-up of my time in WoW, I am just fine with STO being, effectively, a single-player game with chat channels and other people's ships flying by in sector space. I'm here to live the voyages of my captain and crew.
It's not all great, though. There was a long gap in the latter half of 2011 with no new content, enough that I ended up dropping my subscription for a few months, intending to pick it up again in the fall when the second half of the new season dropped. Instead, it turned into a buy-out (by Perfect World Entertainment), a conversion to F2P, and that second half eventually being promoted to a full season number without actually getting anything added to it. But hey, it was free, and as a former subscriber I had access to almost everything I was really interested in...
And then thelotteries lockboxes showed up. And good devs started "leaving". And promises of more story content dried up. And it became clear that the new owners intended to milk the fans for everything they could, both by leaning even more heavily on the cash shop than Atari ever did and by introducing Asian-MMO-style gambling, keeping the game on a bare-minimum budget while plowing their profits into other projects and/or their own pockets.
But I'm still, amazingly, having fun. Before he "left", Heretic gave us the awesome, addictive, and very Trek-feeling Duty Officer System. Okay, so I gather it's basically Farmville, but it's still fun. So I've been logging in each day to do that, and grind out some fleet marks when I feel like it, and fly around in my starships. Everything else, I can just close my eyes and pretend it's not there. Until last week, which brought me suddenly crashing back to Earth.
If by some goddamn miracle you're still reading and wondering when I'm ever going to get to the point, it's this: I think I've been spoiled for other MMOs, inasmuch as I was ever really into them, as a genre, to begin with. It shows up again and again in the above chronicle: I like having other people around, to chat with or wave to as I go about my own business, and occasionally team up with in small groups (say, 5-10) of friends or (hopefully) competent, good-natured strangers. But raiding? Grouping up with 15 or 20+ other people to square-dance around a big bag of hit points that you can barely see through all the power/spell FX? I did it in CoH and it was okay, but let's be honest - I did it to equip my characters (and not all of them, just those whose concepts fit that level of power) with the abilities they should have to match my idea of them. It was equal parts fun and frustration, and I probably wouldn't do it for its own sake.
Having lots of people around is a mixed blessing too. On the one hand, it's nice to not be the only one in a plaza or a spacedock - to see other people running around on their own errands, take note of their appearance and gear, maybe throw out a compliment. On the other, let's be honest: a lot of these people are idiots, children, or both. Sturgeon's Law is in full force, and "hell is other people." That's what kept me out of SWG (and later, TOR), that's what I put up with in CoH and STO... and I hear it's even worse elsewhere. There's a reason I solo a lot, team with friends, and stay out of the most notorious spots (lookin' at you, Pocket D and Drozana).
And not only am I historically kind of "meh" on the "Massive" part of the label (and the "RPG" part has been all but forgotten, outside of the aforementioned groups of friends and the occasional lucky find in the wild), it seems that the industry is heading away from it too, as well as just plain contracting. Most of the "traditional" MMOs out now, or coming out soon, started development in the previous decade - living relics of an older paradigm. Gaming in general seems to be shifting toward more mobile, more casual, less commitment, no subscriptions. The Asian MMO companies are focusing even more than before on making the kinds of games their people like, which don't get much traction here and vice-versa; the western market is down to the gorilla and a few stubborn hangers-on nosing around its feet for scraps, and even the gorilla's not looking so good. What, if anything, will replace it when it finally succumbs to its own age and weight? Mobile devices are now even more ubiquitous than consoles, desktop machines get squeezed between both... and no one's gonna raid on an iPad or Android phone.
None of the above really appeals to me. I am looking for a new long-term commitment, an island of stability, a community... and I'm not finding one. Not in anything that's out now or on the horizon. (I was really looking forward to WildStar, but honestly, how long before NCsoft pulls the plug on that? Will it even make it out of the gate?)
I can imagine a not so distant future (next Sunday A.D.) where the only "MMOs" are played by Chinese, Koreans, etc, sitting in cybercafes and competing to see who can feed the most time and/or currency into the all-consuming maw of the slot machine; where everyone on this side of the Pacific is constantly connected, socially networked, floating through the cloud of their friends and contacts and circles, able to manage their virtual farms or football leagues or toss boisterous avians around wherever they are, to the point it becomes almost automatic... but flinch at the notion of anything "fun" that requires more than ten or fifteen minutes of their undivided attention, or more than a month before they move on to the next shiny thing. Because really, who has time for that?
And while everyone else is doing those things, what am I going to do?
You defeated the Journal Post!
You receive [Sackcloth of Self-Pity].
Badge earned: the Disillusioned.
I was a latecomer to MMORPGs, and online games in general; somewhat ironic, having been an avid (video) gamer all the way back to 1980 (arcade, Atari 2600, Apple, and finally PC). Part of it was that until 2000 or so, I lagged behind in hardware and a fast connection, necessary to play the early online shooting games. Another part of it was that I'd gotten my fill of MUDs in college (of the lp and diku variety, mostly) and saw little reason to play more of the same, even if they now came with graphics. (Generic Extruded Fantasy Product, now with low-res polygonal eye candy!) I was always more interested in the "Tiny" side of the hobby, MUCK and MUSH and so on. Finally, I clung to the notion of buying a game once and owning it. I hadn't subscribed to an online service since a brief venture onto Sierra's ImagiNation Network in the mid-90s. Even when Star Wars Galaxies came along, I resisted, because I knew it wouldn't, couldn't be as cool as the movies - mostly because it would inevitably be populated by the sort of people who played MMOs.
So what finally got me out of the chatrooms - IRC and MUSH - and into these virtual worlds? Friends (mostly in Eyrie Productions, whom I later had a falling out with because I said the wrong thing(s) at the wrong time, but that is another very unhappy story) and two games that broke the mold: Puzzle Pirates and City of Heroes. I got into the free beta of the first in summer 2003 and loved it, and decided to go ahead and subscribe as soon as it went live. With the second, having followed its troubled development from a distance, I held out for most of 2004 until the praise from people I trusted finally got to be too much and I had to try it for myself.
The story of how I loved PP and how it broke my heart, how I came back a few times and reinvented myself and found new mates to sail with for a while, only to have them drift away (or I did), while the game itself grew and changed and then fell on hard times and began, inevitably, to shrink, is a long one and not really relevant to this post. Suffice to say that while I remember those early days fondly, everyone I once knew there is long gone and I haven't logged in for more than a few minutes in years. When it finally goes under for the last time, I think I will be sad but also relieved.
COH, though... as 2f (who I met, along with the rest of DFB, through the game; before that, he was just a name I recognized from a few fanfics) commented on my last post, that was my home. And like him, I wandered, but always came back. Even when I was playing other games, even when I was unemployed for two years (years that CoH made less dismal), I've been subscribed continuously since August 10, 2004. And I'll be playing, if I'm able, until the very end.
At first I wasn't even sure I'd be able to; my video card was minimum-spec, and a friend's borrowed account was a slideshow or wouldn't run at all. Then someone told me to update the drivers. I didn't think it would make that much difference, but now it worked. And so I logged in and made my very first test characters, who eventually became Miss Megajoule and V-Max. The first of many, though not nearly as many as some; I was initially limited by a mere 8, then 12 slots on Virtue, the unofficial RP server and the only one I cared to play on. Not only were the players (IMO) a cut above, but that's where my friends were.
The game's changed so much since then, mostly for the better, and held the promise of getting better still... a promise that, it now seems, will never be realized. That's a hard thing to take. Even harder is the thought that this wonderful game, that let my virtual self take flight, isn't just stopping in place, but going away entirely. Forever. And not only am I sure that nothing will ever take its place in my heart and my memories of those eight good years, I'm starting to wonder if I'll find anything to replace it, period.
Through NCsoft I learned of, and briefly beta-tested, another non-fantasy game: Auto Assault. The driving was a blast, and the graphics were nice, even on my weak rig that couldn't even display the trademark glow of Human shield-bars properly; but the in-town/on-foot animations were clunky and the character customization almost non-existent after the bounty of CoH, and lots of other aspects of the game seemed to be trying to copy the new 800-lb gorilla of the hobby, WoW. And, well, the gorilla wasn't moving off that spot. People who wanted to play that sort of game were already playing it. I was later invited back for another free trial, and then again when AA was finally shut down. I drove my cyborg's armored truck back to the starting gate and waited until the screen froze and dropped me to login. An omen of the future, maybe.
I eventually got around to trying the gorilla itself. This was years after it launched, during the Burning Crusade and Lich King eras. I still had no interest in endgame raiding and gear grinding and all the other things that everyone in the industry insisted Any Real MMO Has To Have, and which "my" game (to my perverse pride) did not. Yet. I was there to play tourist, do (and read) the quests, see the world, learn the lore. It was sometimes relaxing to get away from my friends in DFB and go somewhere where no one knew me, where I could just run around solo and lose myself in the intricate mindlessness of gathering and crafting. I had my own little stable of alts on both sides, Alliance and Horde, both so that I could see and do everything and so that I could self-supply myself with anything I needed. Trade and guild chat (I drifted in and out of a few casual ones) provided a nice background hum, so I wasn't completely alone, but could participate (or not) on my terms. I enjoyed it, for a couple of years, and collected quite the album of screenshots and achievements and memories... but as WotLK was winding up, all of my alts were at the level cap and I'd seen and done everything I could solo, everything that interested me. And CoH was getting interesting again. So that was that.
When DC Universe Online went free to play, I decided to check it out and see how the other half (or third) lives. (I guess I could have done the same with Champions Online, and still might, but... right now, the hurt is too fresh and the stories I'm hearing are not encouraging. Too limiting, and just familiar enough to be wrong, in that uncanny valley way.) Leveling a couple of characters there to the cap, which took about a month, was another fun diversion. But though Gotham and Metropolis were beautifully rendered and detailed, the voice acting was fair to excellent, and the chance to interact with iconic characters exciting... the concessions made to the console port are everywhere, and once you get your action figure to the cap there's nothing to do but raid, raid and raid some more, to acquire pieces of your favorite super's power armor. I'll probably go back after November and pick up my Lightning villain again, play through whatever new story/PvE content has been added, but then it's going on the shelf again. :p
And now at last we come to the one other game that I am currently actively playing - or was until last Friday, when CoH suddenly bumped it to standby: Star Trek Online. I've been a Trekkie since grade school, starting with TAS and TOS reruns, then the classic movies (many of which I saw in theaters, and have the whole set on VHS). TNG's run started at the same time I went to college, and I eagerly watched DS9 and even VOY. It was B&B's horrible mistreatment of ENT that broke the spell, but I was still loyal to the dream (while recognizing all the flaws and goofiness and contradictions of the franchise). So in January 2011, a year after launch, when the client was on sale and I heard it was much better than it had been, I decided to "engage."
And it's been fun. It's not remotely hard canon; there's an official date, which hasn't advanced in over two real-world years, but that's just lip service. The devs (wisely, IMO) chose to go with a wide-open amusement-park approach, All Treks for All People, rather than enforce any one era or concept of fun. These means that the social areas are an utter mess, more like a SF convention's Masquerade than a real starbase, but the other great part about STO is that most of the time, you're off doing your own thing anyway - boldly going, all by yourself. As you may have guessed from my write-up of my time in WoW, I am just fine with STO being, effectively, a single-player game with chat channels and other people's ships flying by in sector space. I'm here to live the voyages of my captain and crew.
It's not all great, though. There was a long gap in the latter half of 2011 with no new content, enough that I ended up dropping my subscription for a few months, intending to pick it up again in the fall when the second half of the new season dropped. Instead, it turned into a buy-out (by Perfect World Entertainment), a conversion to F2P, and that second half eventually being promoted to a full season number without actually getting anything added to it. But hey, it was free, and as a former subscriber I had access to almost everything I was really interested in...
And then the
But I'm still, amazingly, having fun. Before he "left", Heretic gave us the awesome, addictive, and very Trek-feeling Duty Officer System. Okay, so I gather it's basically Farmville, but it's still fun. So I've been logging in each day to do that, and grind out some fleet marks when I feel like it, and fly around in my starships. Everything else, I can just close my eyes and pretend it's not there. Until last week, which brought me suddenly crashing back to Earth.
If by some goddamn miracle you're still reading and wondering when I'm ever going to get to the point, it's this: I think I've been spoiled for other MMOs, inasmuch as I was ever really into them, as a genre, to begin with. It shows up again and again in the above chronicle: I like having other people around, to chat with or wave to as I go about my own business, and occasionally team up with in small groups (say, 5-10) of friends or (hopefully) competent, good-natured strangers. But raiding? Grouping up with 15 or 20+ other people to square-dance around a big bag of hit points that you can barely see through all the power/spell FX? I did it in CoH and it was okay, but let's be honest - I did it to equip my characters (and not all of them, just those whose concepts fit that level of power) with the abilities they should have to match my idea of them. It was equal parts fun and frustration, and I probably wouldn't do it for its own sake.
Having lots of people around is a mixed blessing too. On the one hand, it's nice to not be the only one in a plaza or a spacedock - to see other people running around on their own errands, take note of their appearance and gear, maybe throw out a compliment. On the other, let's be honest: a lot of these people are idiots, children, or both. Sturgeon's Law is in full force, and "hell is other people." That's what kept me out of SWG (and later, TOR), that's what I put up with in CoH and STO... and I hear it's even worse elsewhere. There's a reason I solo a lot, team with friends, and stay out of the most notorious spots (lookin' at you, Pocket D and Drozana).
And not only am I historically kind of "meh" on the "Massive" part of the label (and the "RPG" part has been all but forgotten, outside of the aforementioned groups of friends and the occasional lucky find in the wild), it seems that the industry is heading away from it too, as well as just plain contracting. Most of the "traditional" MMOs out now, or coming out soon, started development in the previous decade - living relics of an older paradigm. Gaming in general seems to be shifting toward more mobile, more casual, less commitment, no subscriptions. The Asian MMO companies are focusing even more than before on making the kinds of games their people like, which don't get much traction here and vice-versa; the western market is down to the gorilla and a few stubborn hangers-on nosing around its feet for scraps, and even the gorilla's not looking so good. What, if anything, will replace it when it finally succumbs to its own age and weight? Mobile devices are now even more ubiquitous than consoles, desktop machines get squeezed between both... and no one's gonna raid on an iPad or Android phone.
None of the above really appeals to me. I am looking for a new long-term commitment, an island of stability, a community... and I'm not finding one. Not in anything that's out now or on the horizon. (I was really looking forward to WildStar, but honestly, how long before NCsoft pulls the plug on that? Will it even make it out of the gate?)
I can imagine a not so distant future (next Sunday A.D.) where the only "MMOs" are played by Chinese, Koreans, etc, sitting in cybercafes and competing to see who can feed the most time and/or currency into the all-consuming maw of the slot machine; where everyone on this side of the Pacific is constantly connected, socially networked, floating through the cloud of their friends and contacts and circles, able to manage their virtual farms or football leagues or toss boisterous avians around wherever they are, to the point it becomes almost automatic... but flinch at the notion of anything "fun" that requires more than ten or fifteen minutes of their undivided attention, or more than a month before they move on to the next shiny thing. Because really, who has time for that?
And while everyone else is doing those things, what am I going to do?
You defeated the Journal Post!
You receive [Sackcloth of Self-Pity].
Badge earned: the Disillusioned.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-06 10:07 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-06 11:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-06 04:48 pm (UTC)EDIT: Also, you're going to have to convince me that NCsoft gives a #$@% about anyone whose email doesn't end in .kr. After this past week, I'm having rather serious doubts.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 11:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 03:47 pm (UTC)You may say that nothing lasts forever, and that I should enjoy it while it lasts. This is true; but with so much loss and uncertainty in my life right now, I'm looking for stability. I need to at least be able to pretend, before I invest time and money in something, that it's not going to vanish out from under my feet a few months or a year later and leave me gasping and treading water. Again.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 11:52 pm (UTC)I know it's hard to think about adopting a new pet when you're in mourning. GW2 is a little puppy right now, still stumbling in its first few weeks - and where most of us see an adorable new doggy to hold and cuddle, you can only see the potential heartbreak. It's okay - take all the time you need and let your heart heal. But I do hope you never get to the point where you let the possibility of heartbreak deter you from getting emotionally invested in a new pet or game.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-08 01:18 am (UTC)[citation needed] :p
Also, you have managed to guess one of the reasons I haven't had a pet since I was a child. (Though the responsibility / commitment / burden / expense of feeding, grooming, cleaning up after, exercising, general maintenance and health care, etc etc is at least as important.)
However, your point is taken, and I admit I'm not able to be objective about this right now. If ever.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-06 07:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-07 02:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-06 03:16 pm (UTC)I don't think it's self pity, I think it's grief, which a lot of us are going through right now.
I'm not very hopeful for the future of the game, but I'll do what I can to save it. And if worse comes to worse, there's Plan Z; City of Phoenix. Maybe there aren't millions of people willing to sign up for a player owned version of CoH, but I'm pretty sure there are thousands, and between us, we can keep it alive.
(no subject)
Date: 2012-09-06 04:48 pm (UTC)Definitely grief, yeah. Said as much in my previous post(s). Maybe it's keeping me from seeing options.
Not very hopeful either. I'm more into preserving what I can to help me remember later. Like the logs from 2005 I was reading last night - my first time through the 30s, peppered with artifacts like "My mentor is assisting me again." *sad smile*