Part Four: Free to Play Redux

I decided to start here with DDO, for reasons to follow.

I kinda like DDO, it was familiar, thanks to my childhood. That made the bits I didn't like all the more jarring. I still hate how the voice option works. Some people I can hear very well, and I can barely hear, and there's little in between. Having played City of Heroes, I can attest that the voice option really isn't as important just yet when the bandwidth doesn't allow viable communication.

The "Looking For Group" options, or LFG, still suck. They're clumsy, and still feel slapped together.

When DDO was in open Beta, I knew what I was getting into, but I just simply didn't enjoy it. The voice thing combined with a clumsy interface never really appealed to me. There was limited solo ability. I worked third shift at the time, and there just wasn't anybody to play with, and it was very party centric. That's changed over time, but it's still overly rewarding of grouping at the expense of people who aren't veterans.

Over the years as DDO's subscription numbers have declined, I've noticed that they've increasingly improved the single player experience. It's still my biggest gripe with the game, and I'll go back when they go Free to Play, but I'm still grumpy they didn't focus on this sooner. And they should have just dumped the voice thing right off the bat, in my opinion. I later discovered a lot of people that quit the game because of other's reliance on this feature, when it was inherently prejudiced against common aural setups. I'm sure it's still what I consider broken, but hopefully the only people I'll be playing with on a regular basis will be on Skype so I can over look this.

World of Warcraft

In late 2007, I ran into a work related situation where I was frustratingly left with a great deal of time on my hands. (There was a union grievance eventually filed, and much frustration resulted.) It left me with enough time to try out World of Warcraft.

It's, sadly, my second favorite graphical MMO after City of Heroes that's currently available. I wish it wasn't sad, but I'm a very casual gamer, by my definition, and WoW does not reward casual gaming as much as I would like.

I can, while working, invest about 25 hours a week to an MMO, at most. Otherwise, I give up all my television time, and writing time, and socialization time. I tried to continue playing WoW after I got back to work, and I felt left behind, and the quests started loosing their appeal.

There's only so many times you can fight a wolf and harvest livers before you lose interest. They're predators, so they're toxic anyway.

Repetitive quests and lack of time to keep up with maintenance made me quit my subscription.

Mark that, please. This is still part of why I think FFXI sucks.

A secondary aspect of why I decided to try WoW was the .hack series of Playstation games, both the original and the G.U. variation. The idea of a multi-million subscriber base as a future impetus to a scifi catastrophe is simply a matter of time, equipment, and a programming or network person making a mistake.

(What's interesting to note here is that between the original .hack and the G.U. PS2 iteration, there was an Asian MMO effort. It flopped. It had a random dynamic to leveling that's sort of got to be experienced to be appreciated, or hated, depending. Without a solid story base, which I understand was reserved for "special" people, it flopped before it hit Western audiences.)

To this day, WoW, CoX and the Iron Realms family of MUDs have been the only games I have played where I felt like there was something worthwhile in experiencing PvP. For WoW it was that there was virtually no loss for trying it, and eventually you'd get something even if you continually lost, it just took three times as long to get something.

For Iron Realms, it was story. There were more visceral, story oriented, reasons to want to kill somebody.

For CoX, it's just bloody fun. If you're of the right mindset, it's just bloody fun. I long for WoW-like rewards, but I'm not going to hold my breath. Those PvPers can bite my ass.

(For the record, Arathi Basin is a place I know like the back of my hand, and I enjoyed using mages or rogues to attack people for the sole purpose of distracting them from somebody else targeting a resource point. PvP as a F2P option? Yeah, I'd go back to Arathi in a heartbeat. Now THERE's a business model.)