Sony & Microtransactions!

The recent announcement of Sony to offer triple the conversion rate for Sony Cash only all to well shows their real ambition and intention with the player base. To loyal players, they have shown their willingness to extend a hand of genuine concern and a valid peace offering.

If Sony is truly interested in re-building their fractured relationship with their paying customers, they are offering gifts that are truly worth a second look. Take the money and run, is my motto.  I encourage you to take a death breath, step back and see what they are offering as a way to amend the situation. It is bad, but it is worth a second or third look.

To be honest, I am not a big fan of microtransactions.  I never was, nor will I ever be. I would rather have had you just give me more free time to play — perhaps even allow me to take this free time whenever I wanted, so that if I did want to take a break from the game, I could come back at a later date and use it.

Goodbye Sony, For Now!

I logged into my Sony accounts last night and blankly looked at my characters within EQ and EQ II. I had actually no reaction — it was like how you would watch a commercial on TV, almost complete disconnect and indifference. It was then that I decided to end my relationship with the game. I just didn’t care any more.

Will I ever want to play again? Perhaps. Each time I left, I came back and played some. But each time I came back, the need and desire became less palatable and my exit was quicker and longer.

So how long will I be gone this time? Who knows?

For me, Sony just seems to have lost its way in the world of MMOs. It is no longer the top dog, something it enjoyed for several years in 2001. It is not the most graphical any longer,either,  as it was for a time with EQ II and Vanguard — perhaps even SWG for the day. It seems to have fallen into this need to whore itself out for every possible penny, as if somehow the more money they can earn, will make the feel better.

They need to return to their roots. Get rid of the microtransactions in their games. They need to get back to making great games with great visions.

Not this year, and perhaps not next year. They need to do something that just blows open the MMO market. What it is, is everyone’s guess — but taking the dimes from kids selling them imaginary glitzy mounts isn’t it.

For now, I will say: “See you later…maybe much later, Sony!”

Five things I Love and Hate about Rifts

I have not played Rifts for very long, as a matter of fact less than a week total from buying the game and from a very limited beta experience. In that time, however, I feel I have come to grasp some of the great Loves and Hatreds of the game. I have spelled them out below, in no particular order other than my likes first and my despair being last.

Terrific Things About Rifts
1. Models: Rich and luscious, the models exude color and detail
2. Atmosphere: the terrain and flora, the sky and the ocean all seem vibrant
3. Character progression: four classes, each with 8 subclasses, each with dozens of skills translates into hours of fiddling and fine-turning a class.
4. Ease of play — within a couple of hours you are completely up to speed and playing like a “big boy”.
5. Solo friendly: Along with ease of play, the game seems very Solo friendly and also offers fast grouping methods, which means no more sitting around waiting for groups if that is your thing.

Fears, Hatreds, and Troubling signs
1. Extremely Linear: There are but two paths to follow in the game, basically the opposing sides to the game. Once you create one for each, the quest progression is dreadfully the same with no alternate paths. Making the process of creating another character boring, repetitive, and just unfun!
2. Feels like all the other MMOs: Taking the best from the rest is great way of making a fun game, but it also causes everyone to compare it to the big rivals. “This is a new WoW!?!” Good to hook new players, but bad for those wanting a new experience.
3. Crafting is too basic: For those that like to craft, Rifts is not it — crafting and harvesting has been reduced to the most infantile level of complexity and is just not fun.
4. Death: They have tried to make dying unpleasant and penalizing, but their choice is too much like WoW and one that I just do not like. I hate running back to a corpse — Waste of time and dumb. Certainly once per hour you can just be reborn, but often (see below) your death has nothing to do with being a smart player or not. Horrible death system.
5. Rift Mobs: Unless you have played this, it is hard to explain. Basically rifts open up and spew out mobs, but sometimes these mobs (which are usually higher level than the local area) come bashing on your guy even though you have nothing to do with Rift. So you die, and that is not cool or fun.

Sony is still down

Ten days and counting. When I say Sony, I mean SOE — the division that maintains and develops the IPs: Everquest, Everquest II, Vanguard, Star Wars Galaxies, and their other assortment of MMOs.

I am hearing so little out of them, it is almost as if they do not exist any longer.

I fear my days playing their games are over.

Starting a 7 day free trial of Rifts

I just got a seven day free trial for Rifts, and on top of that I got a 50% off the collector’s edition price for the digital download. I am waiting to actually buy the game, which the collector’s edition sells for 60 but I can get for 30 until the last day — Sunday.

I played Rifts a bit in the late beta of the game and seemed fun, but at the time I was playing Everquest II and Everquest I. If you don’t know about the fiasco there, just to recap the company behind the games, SOE, has been down for almost two weeks because of several attacks that yielded a large portion of their database (i.e. credit card numbers and account names). This has prompted me to give up the games, and to seek my entertainment elsewhere.  Rifts has been receiving glowing reviews on most websites and gaming magazines.

I have the next five days to try and play Rifts and see if I want to play for 30 days — I am assuming for the game I get a month free.

Tonight, sadly I am booked, playing another game with my friend. But afterwards, I am going to try very hard to play as much as possible until my free time runs out.

A jazzy fun song in homage to playing D&D

New Civilization IV Mod: Extreme2

Extreme2 Version 2.0

Extreme2 V2.0 with dozens of new units, technologies, buildings, tweaks, enhancements.

Download Site #1: http://www.atomicgamer.com/file.php?id=91585

Not be be confused with my earlier project ExtremeMod, which at one point had a version 2 delineation. This mod is based on the last known update of the Thomas War Mod with animated leaders and bug fixes. From that point I went through and added more than a dozen techs and dozens of new units, mostly Unique Units and Unique Buildings. I also added more than fifteen new Bonus Resources and recompiled the way improvements are made. I added two new pathing systems: Paths and Sealanes (both brought over from ExtremeMod) with the latter ocean transit system having a new graphic.

At this point the mod is just so huge I cannot test all the different cultures with all the different UUs and UBs – It seems very stable, but I have not played all variations possible.

Death of Everquest

I have not posted of late because I had been playing Everquest, an MMO developed by Sony Corporation.  My life was also a bit busy with school, which ended only a week ago with a couple of B+s (not bad for a guy who had not been in a classroom in over twenty-five years).  The emphasis on this article, however, is my somewhat sad decision to walk away from both Everquest and Everquest II (a sequel MMO made also by Sony).  The reasons are a bit shocking, mostly for those who do not have their ear to the online gaming community.

Up until a week ago I was having a rather fun time playing Everquest.  I had decided early on to drop one of my accounts and simply play solo.  This was a herald to a feeling that I was already getting a bit tired of the ten year old game.   It is amazing how quickly graphics can be dated.  Ten years leaves a game such as Everquest completely out of synch with modern MMOs such as Rifts. I returned because Everquest had opened a server that rolled back time to 1999 and allowed players to replay the game before all of the expansions and years of gloated gold and magic items had entered the game.  It was very fun in the first few weeks, but as I played many of the reasons why I left years ago began to arise like a fetid zombie.  Although fun, it was a huge drain on time.  To do anything in the game just took hours upon hours of sitting in front of the computer.  To me, however, I began to realize that I already had done this years ago, wasting the countless hours playing once was really enough. Thus, I quit my one account and let that one go offline.  I had another account that will be active for the next several weeks and it too will be gone.

In recent years Sony has also took up the unsavory practice of charging both a monthly fee but also charging microtranscations for items in game.  I fear this practice will only grow worse and has already destroyed many titles.  Making money is what business is about, but simple greed is another.  I cannot get over how they can honestly charge someone 14 dollars a month, on top of $50 box costs, and then still think kids will pay more for shiny swords or glitzy looking armor. Well of course kids are an easy sell — just like the pimp on the playground handing out free samples of acid, knowing that once hooked it will be easy to push more drugs on to them.  It is a distasteful practice which is somewhat tolerated on free games that make their money via microtransactions — it is another to simply gouge more money because you have no morals or conscious.

The real clincher for me was the shocking news of last week that Sony’s security had been breached and most if not all credit card information was stolen from their database.  How this could be accomplished is even beyond me; did they actually store all the information in one database?  Could someone ferret through multiple servers without being detected?  I am sure the answer lies in thick layers of stories that will never be revealed.  What it was for me was a wake up call. I am not saying any other company could not have it happen to them, but I have not been calmed down at all by the sheer lack of silence coming from Sony.  Is that arrogance or fear, I don’t know.

For me, though I am a bit shocked they have not tried to contact more of their user base to warn them to watch out for fraudulent activity on their credit cards.  If I did not have my ear pressed up to such sites as Twitter and Facebook, with friends in the industry, I would be completely oblivious to this invasion.  There is just nothing coming to me via email, phone, or other forms of communication warning me of what is going on.

For days now the entire Sony network has been down, each day must be a nail in their coffin.  How many other players are thinking that perhaps this will be a good time to leave the game, with such an easy excuse.   Adding to the security debacle and realizing that all this time I have wasted in the game tells me I need to look elsewhere for a more productive past time.  Does this mean I will forgo all MMOs in the future?  The answer will be no, but I will be far more selective of my games.

I am not going to say that the security breach was why I left Sony, but it does make it easier to do so.  It is always easy to pick on someone when they are down — I will not lower myself  to do so, but am confident that there are enough other reasons why to me Everquest is dead.