It's Still Summer! Have Some More Free Stuff!

It has only just occurred to me that late summer seems to be freebie season in the video game industry. Okay, the free stuff trundles out, month on month, all year round, but it has been feeling lately like this is peak giveaway season. If only I had something like a diary of things that happen in video games that I'd been keeping for a few years, eh? Then I could just flip back through the Augusts of yesteryear and see if my theory holds true.

Ah, but that's the stuff of fantasies, isn't it? No-one keeps notes on what hapens in the video games they play. That would be crazy. And anyway, what would you even call it? Some kind of gaming log? A glog, maybe? Well, that sounds dumb! No wonder no-one's doing it.

Evidence from the past notwithstanding, there certainly seems to be a glut of giveaways in the games I'm "playing". I just did a whole post on the massive hand-outs in EverQuest II and this morning I logged into two other MMORPGs to pick up my rightful dues. (Also, that little ironic meta-conceit about the non-existence of game blogging does kind of fall apart when I link to a post right afterwards, doesn't it? If I had a decent editor they'd just put a blue line through the whole of paras 1&2 and tell me to start over. Lucky I'm self-editing this thing...)

I am now in a position to add some detail to the aforementioned post, although not as much as you might expect. I claimed the one-per-account crate plus the one everyone gets on my Berserker but now I'm wishing I'd read up on it a bit more first because it turns out that not everything in the one-time crate is Heirloom. That is made clear in the announcement but looking at the forum thread I'm not the only one who didn't bother to read it carefully.

Luckily, I did at least claim it my "main" so none of it is going to go to waste. Had I been paying better attention, though, I'd have claimed it on the character I'm working so hard to turn into my new main, my Necromancer. 

On the bright side, EQII's ceaseless vertical progression escalator moves so ludicrously fast, anything with stats is going to be replaced in a matter of weeks anyway. We've got Pandas soon and then it's the expansion, so even though the gear in this crate is a huge upgrade (It is stat gear after all, not appearance as I wrongly suspected.) I don't imagine I'll be wearing it come Halloween, let alone Christmas.

As for the rest of it, I haven't sorted through it all yet but it sure looks impressive. But there's no time to sit around admiring my unearned goodies, not when there are more to be grabbed.

Game #2 on my loot list, quite unexpectedly, is Lord of the Rings Online. I have MassivelyOP to thank for this one. They PSA'd the offer yesterday and I logged in and claimed it this morning. Well, after I'd waited half an hour for the game to patch, naturally. Is there any other online game that takes this much time to get back up to speed after only a few weeks absence? 

I last logged in on 16 June, when I moved my characters off their old 32-bit servers and onto the shiny new lag-free 64-bit upgrades. (Golf clap...) I hope you've done the same because if you haven't it's too late now. 

No! Wait! No it's not! You still have a couple of days! Go! Go! Go!!!

Out-of-place illo.
The one I took of the LotRO store
somehow vanished. Thanks SSG!

Possibly because their entire year has been such a roiling, heaving mess, Standing Stone decided to throw some bones our way and they're pretty big bones, too. Oliphaunt bones, maybe. (Oh, look! I know what an oliphaunt is and I didn't even have to look it up. I guess I must be right-wing now. They do say it happens as you get older.)

Not as far to the right as all that, though. I have no clue where Gundabad is, although I suppose it's worrying that I even know it's a place not a person. Or a weapon. These people name their weapons, don't they?  Have you ever done that? Can't say I have. I might start but first I'd have to have some weapons. I suppose I could name my garden spade. Digger. That's be a good name for a spade.

I seem to have whimsied myself into a hole here. Hang on while I dig myself out. Now, where did I put Digger?

(See? If I had an editor you wouldn't have to put up with any of this. Not that I imagine there are many of you left by now...)

The code for the giveaway is EXPLOREOURWORLD, all in caps, which presumably is some kind of GenZ thing, judging by half the bands I listen to these days, who all seem to think all capitilization is nothing more than a style choice. You wouldn't have thought the devs at SSG would be so cutting edge... 

It gets you a huge swathe of content, all the quests and expansion content up to about three years ago. There's no particular rush. The code, which you have to redeem in the in-game store, is valid through to November. Why they do it this way, rather than just make all content before a certain date free automatically, the way every other game does, I have no idea but that's Standing Stone for you.

Thirdly and finally, at least until the next game announces a summer gift bonanza, comes DCUO. This one's slightly different in that you actually have to play the game to get most of it. It's not a straight log-in event so much as a holiday, the holiday in question being possibly a regularly recurring event albeit not one I remember doing before.

Specifically, it's Teen Titans Homecoming, a big party the Titans throw for Starfire to try and cheer her up after her sister Blackfire confirms her exile from Tamaran for another year. I don't know what it says about my politics but I could explain all the italicized words in that last sentence, in more detail than you'd want to hear, without having to look anything up, just like a Tolkein fan could tell you all about elves. (That's the remake of the old Bette Davis movie, starring Orlando Bloom and Liv Tyler, with Sydney Sweeney in the Marilyn Monroe part, by the way.)

Focus, dammit! Focus!

Since it's a seasonal event not a giveaway as such, you do need to do some missions to get the currency to buy the rewards off the special vendor and I wouldn't normally have bothered only one of the items you can get is so weird... 

It's Starfire. You can buy Starfire and she'll come live at your base and talk to you about her life. You can ask her about her Homecoming party, her team the Titans, her adopted planet Earth, her home planet Tamaran and who knows what-all else. I'd like to know what she thinks about her sister for a start.

I'd also like to know if she thinks it's appropriate for a Princess of Tamaran to be sold like... well, I guess we'd have to say like a slave because if she was a servant she's have working hours and I'd have to pay her, like I pay my mercenaries. I've played plenty of games where NPCs come to stay in my character's houses and work for them but it's always assumed to be on some kind of contractual or apprenticeship basis. (In EQII there's literally a contract involved that you have to hand over for some of them.)

There's a kind of precedent for it in DCUO in that I have Krypto flying about my base but although technically he isn't my character's pet he is a dog. People do buy dogs. That's how Mrs Bhagpuss got Beryl. 

When I read about it (Again on MOP although I'll most likely get an email from DI about it at some point.) my first thought was "I'm having one of those!" Me and the Teen Titans go back a long way. As I've mentioned before (More than once, most likely.), I once interviewed Marv Wolfman about the New Teen Titans comic he was writing at the time and for me Starfire will always be that golden-skinned alien with the wild hair he and George Perez created but I've also watched all seasons of the Titans TV show, so I'm very comfortable with the current version, which is of course the one you get in DCUO.

It's going to take a little while before I can install her. It costs 75 tokens for the "Base Invite" (Ah, wait! Now I get it! She's my guest! That's a lot less weird. Although still a bit weird...). You can pick up a dozen tokens each day just for doing the two daily missions and the event runs for almost a month, so it should be easy enough.

I did the very easy mission Raven hands out first. That gives four tokens and takes about a couple of minutes. Then I did the Miss Martian one, which is an On Duty, meaning you have to grab a group from the group finder and let them carry you play your role to earn eight more tokens.  

Doing daily group missions in DCUO is about as painless as it gets. Mine popped in seconds and lasted maybe five minutes. I do have some idea how to play my character but certainly not after months away so I just button-mashed through the whole thing. No-one died, not even me, and at the end, when you get a scorecard, while I definitely did the least DPS (As a DPS character, too.) I didn't do none.  No-one complained, anyway. No-one even spoke. So that should be fine.

You can also pay some currency to reset the dailies and re-do them on the same day. Don't ask me which currency. There are sooo many. Whatever it is, I had plenty of it, so I did Raven's easy one again. If I did that each time it would only take me five days to get Starfire but there are quite a lot of other things on the vendor that look interesting so we'll see.  (You can also just buy the tokens in the cash shop, which seems like a great idea to me, espcially given how much DBC I have lying around doing nothing.) 

I will make the effort to get Koriand'r at least. (That's her real name. Didn't have to look that up, either. Not even the spelling.)

The Homecoming event itself has some kind of progress bar you can complete to get other rewards as well but I just want Starfire. When I get her, if she has anything interesting to say, I'll let you know. 

Until then, where's my next freebie, game devs? Don't you know it's Giveaway Season?

Notice Served: Three Months To Quit

It wasn't like I had plans to move anywhere. I was quite happy where I was. Then one day, out of the blue, the eviction notice comes through the door...

That's what it felt like, when Standing Stone decided they couldn't afford the upkeep on the old 32-bit servers and told everyone still hanging around there they had three months to pack up and leave. And for once, I didn't waste any time doing as I was told. I was gone in less than ten minutes.

That was the biggest surprise of the lot, really, the speed of it. And the efficiency. Two words rarely seen in any sentence that also contains the name Standing Stone Games, unless that sentence also includes the phrase "lack of".

I had been vaguely following the long-running saga of Lord of the Rings Online's transition from 32 to 64 so I was aware the worst of it was over but I still wasn't prepared for the swiftness of the operation. For a start, it only took me a couple of minutes to log in, which has to be some kind of record. I had patched up quite recently but in the past that's not always made a huge difference. This time it only took about twice as long to get to character select as it would in any other game.

Once I was there I was expecting to have to go look up how the whole move-to-another server thing works but no, it was all there in front of me in easy-to-read form. I just had to click a button and the launcher walked me through the whole thing.

I didn't think I had any other characters than the five on the EU-RP server Laurelin but it turned out I had one other - a Level 7 Hobbit Hunter named Juniperry on another EU server by the name of Withywindle. I didn't remember much (Or anything.) about her. Not surprising, considering I last saw her fifteen years ago!

The tool tip handily tells you when all your characters last logged in and Juniperry hasn't been played since November 2010. LotRO, very annoyingly, doesn't have a command to tell you the date a character was created. The best it can offer is how many hours you've played them for and when you last logged them in. 

The game launched in 2007 and I think it was at least a couple of years before Mrs Bhagpuss and I got around to playing it, so Juniperry is one of my older characters for sure. I wish I knew why I created her on a different server. I suspect it might have been back when being on the RP server was getting on my nerves but just before it became so infuriating I couldn't stick it any more. 

Back then, servers in almost all MMORPGs really were siloed, not like later when megaservers, phasing, clusters, instances and similar gimmicks made the separation mostly notional. I'd long been in the habit of creating a new character on different server, whenever I wanted to get away from some annoying person or just be assured of some peace and quiet, so I imagine that's how Juniperry got her start.

Just to add a further element of confusion, the confirmation emails I received from SSG aren't identical. I got separate emails for the two outgoing servers. The one for Laurelin lists the five characters on that server by name and includes the line "Account data transferred successfully for subscription EU subscription 06/20/2011", which would seem to suggest all my regular characters are actually newer than Juniperry, something I'm sure isn't true. 

The email for Withywindle doesn't mention an account date at all. Instead it just refers to the date of transfer: "Your World Transfer is complete! Below is the information for your transfer on 2025-06-13 12:52:14". What that all means is anyone's guess. 

For the big move, I did think about keeping Juniperry separated from the rest of my characters and moving her to a non-RP 64-bit server but in the end I decided it was so unlikely I'd play LotRO often enough in the furure for it to matter, so she might as well go live with all the others. I also decided that, for all its past faults, I probably would rather stay on the RP realm, which is at least slightly better-mannered these days. No-one's called me out for not roleplaying in a long while and I note the official SSG description of the server strongly warns that RP is neither enforced nor enforceable, the clear implication being that the roleplayers need to suck it up and play nice when they don't get their own way, just as much as the rest of us.

With that decided, I moved all of them to the new 64-bit RP world, Meriadoc. I have to say that, had I been choosing a server without all the other baggage, I wouldn't have picked one named after a really annoying Hobbit but what can you do? At least it wasn't Samwise.

The move operation itself only took a few moments but then the confirmation screen came up to warn me that my account would be temporarily uavalable while the data was being processed. I knew the move wasn't likely to take days as it had done at the beginning of the operation but I assumed it would mean I'd at least have to wait until the next day to log in and check out my new home.

Nope. The notice also said they'd email me when it was all done and it felt as though that email arrived almost immediately. It was that quick. 

It seemed like I probably should log in and see that everything had worked and naturally I picked Juniperry to be the scout. She is a Hunter, after all. 

She was standing on the road in Michel Delving in the pouring rain. Honestly, Hobbits have no sense. I went through her bags to see what she'd got and found that at Level Seven she'd already managed to fill four of them. She did have one empty bag, so I thought I might claim all the stuff she'd been gifted over the last decade and a half...

... only there wasn't any. Or hardly any. I spent about twenty minutes trying to find the mailbox in Michel Delving (Seriously, could they make the things any harder to spot?) in case her presents were in the mail but she didn't have any there either. I guess being on a different server didn't entitle her to her own anniversary presents, which I guess is fair enough, although with no cross-server trade and shared storage having so many limitations, it does seem a bit mean.

I suppose I should be grateful in a way. All those things do is clutter up your bags anyway. I mean, who actually uses all those fireworks?

With everyone safely moved, it's goodbye to the 32-bit servers but not good riddance. As I said at the top, I had no intention of moving. I was planning on staying on Laurelin as long as it was there for a couple of very good reasons. For one thing, on the rare occasions when I play LotRO, I play entirely solo, so the fewer people around to get in my way the better I like it. And for another, I never really experienced the infamous lag and even if I had it would have been a safe bet it would have improved with all those other players having left.

Still, you have to move with the times, I guess. So long as the new server wasn't overcrowded and everything there carried on as smoothly as before, there couldn't be much to complain about, right? 

Well, as far as the overcrowding goes, Michel Delving was pretty quiet although there's not much you can read into that. Logic suggests, though, that if everyone has to move and there are fewer servers in total, those servers had better be able to handle a considerably higher population. And logic also suggest that, while 64 bits may give the back-end more room, it's not going to increase the size of Middle Earth itself by one square millimeter, so all those characters are going to be standing closer together every time they go to the bank or the auction house.

Still, I spend most of my time out in the countryside when I play so maybe I won't see them. And of course, it'll be all smooth and lag-free with the new technology, won't it? 

Anyone sensing irony here? Hard to put it across without the sarcastic tone of voice.

I was in Michel Delving, pretty much on my own, and the whole time I was there it was like pushing into a strong wind. I didn't see the full rubber-banding effect but there was plenty of  stuttering and glitching and poor old Juniperry did keep flicking back a few paces as she ran all around the town looking for the mailbox. I hardly ever saw anything like that on Laurelin, not at all in recent years, so Meriadoc is certainly not feeling much like an upgrade to me right now.

As Wilhem points out, with supporting evidence, Standing Stone did more than suggest they were going to keep the 32-bit servers open as long as enough people wanted to stay on them. Either almost everyone left immediately or that plan got changed pretty fast. Possibly when they realised how many people didn't want to go. Or maybe, as a couple of people suggested in the comments, SSG is throwing out the ballast in the hope of keeping the ship afloat for a little while longer. Can things really be that bad?

As a very occasional, casual player, I can't say I feel incensed by the bait&switch tactics but it certainly doesn't give me any more confidnce in any promises SSG might make in future. And now I see they're doing the same thing with their other game, Dungeons and Dragons Online, only this time they're not making the mistake of letting anyone think they have a choice.

I do have a couple of characters over there, too, although it must be a decade since I last played the game. At the moment I feel like I'd be fine with letting them slip away into the darkness but I guess I have a while to decide for sure. The final cut-off there is also 31 August. 

I bet in the end I crack and have to move them even though it's odds-on I'll never play them. Just like I'll probably have to do something about Mrs Bhagpuss's characters in LotRO before it's too late. And don't I have another account on the NA server cluster, too?

It's like having children. The feeling of responsibility never goes away. 

Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses Coming In In All Directions

At about half-past one this afternoon I decided to log in to Lord of the Rings Online to claim my free horse and whatever else Standing Stone was giving away out of embarassment after the 64-bit server debacle. As I type this, I still have no horse. It's ten past four and the damn thing hasn't patched yet.

It's not even as though I haven't updated recently. I did it when they announced the compensation package a couple of weeks ago, or at least I think I did. I can't remember if I actually logged in. Even if I didn't get that far, though, you wouldn't think it would take another two or three hours to get everything up to date.

What I'd been thinking of doing after I chose my horse was to ride around on it for a while, take a few screenshots and cobble some kind of post together from that. Now I don't imagine I'll have time. Even if the thing is done patching in, say, half an hour, which frankly I wouldn't bet on, by then it'll be time for tea and we have to go out after that to vote in the stupid election for the ridiculous regional mayor, that fantasy position one of the delusional administrations of recent times decided would make life in 21st Century Britain feel more like living in the Ruritania of their dreams. Or more likely their old nanny's dreams.

Okay, I suppose we don't have to vote. When the polling cards (Which no longer even do anything since they mandated photo-identitifcation at time of voting, so why they still print and post them is beyond me...) dropped through the letter-box, I said I had no intention of wasting my time on it. But Beryl needs a walk and she likes to go to the polling station because it means going somewhere she's been often enough to remember it but not so often it's well-known to her and that sort of thing gets her very excited, so I guess we may as well. Not to mention that, when you're of a certain age, voting becomes just something you do because it's time to do it, not because you want to or because you care about the result

That said, even though I have neither respect for nor interest in the office, know nothing about any of the candidates and feel confident whoever is elected will make no material difference to anything, I still have my tribal loyalties to enact. It's been quite a while since I was in the happy position of being able to cast a vote expectantly and excitedly in favor of a candidate or a party but I sure have cast plenty as spoilers against people and policies I wanted no part of, so why stop now?

That's five dense paragraphs about something completely irrelevant, not to say inappropriate, given the normal scope and range of this blog, and LotRO is still patching. I think it's past three hours now. I wonder if it stopped when I went to have a lie down after lunch?

I don't usually nap in the afternoons. I'm not that old. It's just that I've had really bad hay-fever this week and it's left me feeling unusually tired and sleepy in the day, mostly because it's made it hard to sleep at night when I'm supposed to.

I lay down and fell asleep for half an hour and then, when I woke up, I stayed there because there was a very good adaptation of H. G. Wells' Ann-Veronica on the radio, with Bill Nighy as Wells and I like both Wells' social histories and Nighy's soothing radio voice, so I stayed to listen to the whole thing. Akso because Beryl came in half way through and asked to get up on the bed and then went straight to sleep and I didn't want to disturb her.

Anyway, following our example, the PC had also gone to sleep when I came back in to check how the update was going (Actually it never occured to me it wouldn't have finished.) so I suppose patching might have been suspended when that happened. I'm not sure how it works. I'd lay odds no other game's patcher would give up so easily, though. The LotRO patcher seems happy to take any excuse not to let anyone into the game.

How do they get away with it? It has to be one of those situations where most people who play regularly are so inured to the iniquities of the software by now they don't even notice them. It's only people like me, who come and go, that complain about it. It's just as well they have a good game and a great IP or they'd have closed down years ago. And then someone would have put up an emulator, which I bet would have patched a damn sight faster, so maybe that's a mixed blessing.

I think I'm going to have to abandon any notion of posting about that horse for now. Or about the game, either. Maybe another day. Not tomorrow, though. I'm going to do a music post tomorrow, or that's the plan. You've been warned.

 

Since this was going to be a horse-related post, though, I might as well throw in something about that extremely odd horse-mystery MMORPG we heard about not so long ago, Equinox: Homecoming. When I posted about I said it was "in production" but it seems it was a lot further along than anyone knew. According to MassivelyOP it'll be playable to all in exactly a week from now, on 8 May.

It isn't exactly "launching" in the accepted meaning of the word. It's going into Early Access with a $25 buy-in. That upfront payment gets you just "eight to twelve hours gameplay" according to the article, which includes "the first act of its greater grim plot as well as multiplayer activities like races, riding clubs, and more".

It doesn't sound like a lot and I wouldn't have considered it but then it goes on to say the game, when it officially launches, will have a monthly subscription, but EA players can avoid it because the $25 pack comes with a lifetime subscription. The MassivelyOP piece is a bit confusing on that point but the game's Steam page makes it entirely clear: "Anyone who purchases the game during Early Access will get a lifetime subscription with no additional, future subscription costs."

I'm not crazy about virtual horses, either racing them or breeding them, but I do like the mystery element and the setting and twenty-five dollars isn't much of a risk. I very much doubt the game will have a sub, or if it does it won't have one for long, but it most probably will always have some sort of subscription-like perks that Lifetimers will get for free, so if anyone has any interest at all in playing, this seems like the time to pony up. (Can't believe I went there...)

If nothing else, since it's on Steam you'll at least be able to patch the blasted thing and log in in less than an entire afternoon, which is very much not the case with LotRO. It's been at it for about four hours now and it's still going...

Long Story Short(ish)

I'm always saying I'd like to do shorter posts. Turns out all I needed to do was not play any games and it happens naturally.

EverQuest II

Okay, it's not strictly true to say I haven't played any games. I have played a little EverQuest II. 

I logged in yesterday and finished another of Qho's supremely irritating gathering quests. That leaves just one more in the first set. Then it all starts up again, although from what I remember the second questline follows a different format and can be quite entertaining at times. Well, by comparison to the first, that is. But then it would pretty much have to be.

There's a lot going on in Norrath just now. Even though the Chronoportal event still has a few days to run, Brewday has already started. This is one of the busiest times of the year for holiday events. There are so many they start to overlap. 

I might do some more time-traveling with my Necromancer. I ought at least to take her to visit the vendors so she can spend her Ancient Coins. Not much point earnig them if you don't buy anything with them. 

Brewday, which I suppose comes in March to co-incide with St. Patrick's Day, although I can't recall ever seeing that connection made explicit, has never been a favorite of mine but there's a new tradeskill quest this year, so I'll definitely take a look at that.

It is interesting that the two quests I've seen added so far this year have both been crafting ones. I missed Erollisi Day completely, though. I wonder if there was a new tradeskill quest for that as well. Hold on and I'll check... no, there wasn't. 

I'm guessing the reason for the focus on crafting is either that these events were light on tradeskill content (Other than the inevitable new items that get added to the recipe list year on year.) or that Niami Denmother just really likes writing crafting quests. Both, probably.

The Chronoportal one is super-easy and very enjoyable, if you like very easy quests, which I do. All you have to do is go through a bunch of portals (Eight, I think it was. Might have been nine...) and pick up an item somewhere very near the entrance. All of them are in safe locations with no aggressive mobs nearby, so even crafters with a total aversion to combat can do it easily.

Then you just have to combine some of them to make sub-combines and combine those to make the final result, Grobb Liquidized Meat. It's a disgusting drink, enjoyed by trolls in the original EverQuest, which gives the quest its holiday-appropriate theme. You then trade the drink to a troll in exchange for Sir Fluffykins, the kidnapped cat. The troll hasn't been able to eat Sir Fluffykins because he has toothache and can't manage solids. The troll, that is. Not the cat.

Par for the course with tradeskill quests, really. Most of them are very light-hearted and generally very easy. They can be long and fiddly but they're rarely what you'd call challenging other than to your patience. 

Or they haven't been for a long time, anyway. There was that period when crafting "raids" were a thing and those were quite a performance, what with all the timers and the organization and a serious chance you'd fail. But that was a loooong time ago. I wonder if anyone still does those? I know you can easily solo them now because I've done it but does anyone actually get a team together and do them as they were intended? I bet someone does.

Another thing I hadn't particularly considered until I was summarizing the plot of the Chronoportal
quest just now is how very twee a lot of the crafting quests are. I don't think that was so much the case back in Domino's day, although even then many of them were far from serious. 

Raffik's quests, for example, which I tend to think of now as a jolly romp, are quite sad, what with him having been orphaned and shipwrecked and being close to starving to death when you first meet him. 

He's a great character, always cheerful, even though nothing ever seems to go quite right for him. Over the years, he changes from a lost adolescent to a confident, successful adult but even in the latest expansion, where he plays a small but significant role as the captain of the ship that takes you to Western Wastes, his ship gets destroyed, leaving him once again having to start over from scratch.

That, though, is part of an adventure questline and in adventures things do sometimes go badly wrong. In crafting quests they pretty much never do. You get asked to make something, you go get the materials, you put them together, you give the thing you've made to the person who asked for it and there you are. Sometimes you have to repair something but the experience is much the same.

Now that I think about it, EQII is a very twee game all round. The pure adventure side isn't, so much, although it does tend very much towards the Gods, Dragons and Faerie Queens end of the fantasy spectrum, rather than the blood, gore and bits of goblin flying everywhere kind. Everything else, though, crafting, housing, familiars, vanity pets, mounts, holiday events and most especially all the fancy dressing-up, does often have something of the six-year old girl's birthday party about it.

That suits my sensibilities fairly well but I've also been boiled in the EQII water for so long I barely notice how pink I'm getting. I'm wondering now if the high tweeness quotient might be a contributory factor to so many people bouncing off the game when they try it.

By contrast, there's that huge part of the game I never see (And neither do those new players who give up quite quickly.). Heroic/Heroic II dungeons and Raiding, from everything I read, are really serious business, to the point that most of the commentary I've been seeing for years on that end of the game is about how it's 100% Pay-to-Win because of how impossible it is to keep up with the required gearing needed to handle the difficulty if you don't get your wallet out.

For me, that might just as well be a different game entirely. My EQII has no Pay-to-Win features at all. The opposite, really. I find it hard to spend the Daybreak Cash I already have before more comes in.

Like most older MMORPGs, EQII isn't just two games any more. The old Casual/Serious Player split is there still and so is the Leveling/Endgame divide but the game fractures into many more pieces than that these days. It's entirely possible to play full time in any one of a variety of playstyles and hardly come into contact with the others at all.

Lord of the Rings Online

The really odd thing about all these older MMORPGs is how hard it is to get away from them. EverQuest is twenty-six years old this year and tens of thousands of people still play it. Lord of the Rings Online turns eighteen next month and the MMO news sites have been full of stories this week about how Standing Stone Games radically underestimated the demand for the new 64-bit servers. 

More than a million characters have been transferred apparently. Or, rather, have requested transfers. The actual number moved is presumably far smaller since the whole thing has been quite a debacle. I was going to log in this morning and see if I could at least press the Transfer button, just so I'd have a screenshot of me doing it for this post. 

What I'd forgotten was that I took one of my hard drives out last week, when I was trying to fix some issue with Mrs Bhagpuss's PC and I haven't gotten around to putting it back in yet. I don't feel like doing it right now, either, so my characters will have to wait a little longer. Probably a good idea, all things considered.

That does suggest the question "Why even bother transferring if you're not going to play the game?" and there, right there, that's the nub of it. I didn't have any desire to play LotRO again but then everyone started going on about it and Wilhelm revealed his plan to create a new character and take them all the way to Mordor and that started me thinking about how I've never gotten past the end of the original game - or even to the end for that matter - and suddenly the thought of playing again began to seem oddly appealing.

Would that it were so simple

And that's how they get you, every time. All these older games. It's not FOMO so much as familiarity. They sunk their claws in years ago and they hang on. You think you're free of them but they can always come back. Like malaria or relatives.

I had another thought, too, while I was considering whether I really wanted to give the game another chance. If so many people are fleeing the existing servers for the sunlit uplands of 64-bit Middle Earth, doesn't that mean the old 32-bit servers will be under a great deal less strain? Will that reduce or even remove all the lag problems and so on that everyone has long been complaining about?

Maybe the smart move would be to stay put. The FAQ says 

"At this time we do not intend to close our 32-bit game worlds. Eventually, we would like players to experience the game on our 64-bit game worlds, but as long as the populations of our 32-bit game worlds remain healthy we intend to keep these worlds open." 

I'm sure the last thing they'll want to do after this round of self-inflicted chaos is to rush headlong into another potential disaster so I'd guess it'll be later rather than sooner before any forced migration of the stay-at-homes kicks off.

As for low population levels, one of the given reasons why people wanted to move in the first place, I've always had a liking for low-pop servers. If you mostly solo, the fewer people around the better, generally speaking. 

Maybe I'll leave my existing characters where they are and re-roll on one of the shiny, new servers. That might be fun. And that way I could have my choice of quiet or busy, depending on my mood.

Of course, that's exactly what I used to do, back in the old days, when I had characters on multiple servers in several MMORPGs and somehow managed to find time to play most of them. These days I struggle to play even one character in one game with any consistency so all this is probably idle speculation. Fun, though.

Erenshor

And finally, in this short round up of things I might do in games I might play, there was yesterday's announcement that Erenshor is going into Early Access on Steam next month. 

Erenshor, you may remember, is the single-player MMORPG. Or, as the Steam Store description puts it "A fully simulated MMORPG". I played the demo during a Next Fest in 2023 and wrote about it here, when I found it very odd indeed. I concluded by saying "Whether Erenshor turns out to be no more than a novelty or a harbinger of things to come, I guess we won't know for a year or two."

We know now! Or we don't, because what I was really referring to there wasn't whether the game would get anywhere but the potential it suggested for the use of generative AI in MMORPG game design. 

As it happens, though, Erenshor doesn't even use that kind of AI. When it says the NPCs are "AI-driven" it means the old-school AI we've always had, just a more up-to-date, sophisticated version:

"Note that SimPlayers do not use LLM or any other emerging AI model. They are run by a mixture of state machines and decision trees."

If you want to know more about it, Tipa has been part of the testing program for a while and she's posted about the game several times. (I applied but I never heard back. It's too late now!)  She found it both very enjoyable and extremely redolent of the traditional EverQuest experience. If anyone knows how that feels, it's Tipa so you can take her word for it.

Erenshor has been on my wishlist since I played the demo and I will definitely be buying it as soon as hits Early Access. As always, the question is what I'll do about it after I've bought it. I suspect I might actually play it, in which case you'll hear about it here, whether you like it or not!

And that's all for now. Was that even a shorter post? I'm not sure it was. It was shorter to write, though, and that's what I wanted. 

Op success, then, I guess. I obviously should spend less time playing games.

Free To A Good Home - Or Any Home, Really...

Since I mentioned it yesterday, I suppose I ought to do something about it. Collecting all those freebies, I mean. There comes a time, though, when logging into multiple games you have no real intention of playing, to collect items you don't particularly want and are never likely to use, starts to feel a bit... crazy?

Not that any of that applies to the giveaways in EverQuest II, of course. They're all either practical or pretty and I'm sure I'll get some very good use out of each and every one of them. Definitely.

They come in two sizes - the one-size-fits-all Milestone Celebration Crate currently being handed out for free to every character under all payment plans and the deluxe Milestone Celebration Subscriber Crate that's reserved for paying customers only and which comes one per account.

I won't go through the contents in detail - there's a comprehensive breakdown on the official website complete with all items and applicable restrictions - but I will mention a couple of things. 

The per-character crate is auto-gifted to each character as you log them in but the Subscriber crate has to be claimed. All the contents of the latter are Heirloom, though, so it doesn't matter much which character on the account grabs it. All the contents can be handed around as appropriate later.

The giveaway runs until September 23rd so you have a while. I'm not entirely sure I'd say it was worth logging in if you aren't subbed and aren't playing at the moment because the freebies for F2P are far from essential... although the Toyger vanity pet is very cute and probably does count as essential for cat-lovers. 

The bow isn't particularly special and I don't care for the illusion much but there is an advisory to that last. I actually don't like illusions at all and have them switched off but I always forget that when the game gives me a new one, which is why I clicked this one on to take a screenshot and of course nothing happened... except something actually did.

I got smaller. A lot smaller. It seems that even with illusions toggled off, the Milestone Guardian Illusion shrinks you to the size you would be if you could see it. Since being really small is something of an obsession with some players, this might be a very welcome side-effect. I don't know if it's intended - I'd bet it isn't - so it might get nerfed but for now it's a handy way to shrink your character while keeping your original appearance.

As for the Subscriber pack, I would strongly recommend anyone who's paying for All Access at least logs in once to claim it. It's a good one. 

There's a very nice set of fancy wings that also act as a flying mount. They come in a choice of light and dark but you can only have one or the other. The dark ones look a lot better in my opinion but I guess if your one of those people who have to make your character light up like a magnesium flare you might disagree.

There's a set of cosmetic armor which I didn't have the space to open (Oh, don't. Just...don't.) without shifting it through the shared bank to someone whose bags aren't completely full. There's also no illustration on the website, which seems odd. I might log back in and get a screenshot of it before I post this. [Edit - I did not.]

There are also some item unattuners, which people always seem to appreciate. I hardly ever use them but I think I'm in a minority there.

With considerable irony, the final item in the pack is a 66 slot bag. That would have solved my space issues - for about five minutes. I was very excited when I saw it because, as the name of this blog might suggest, inventory management is a bit of a thing of mine. Well, inventory, anyway. Managing it, not so much.

After the initial excitement faded I started to wonder whether 66 slots would actually be an upgrade to any of my six character inventory slots. EQII is insanely generous with storage space. I counted the available slots per character once and it goes well into four figures. Even character inventory, the stuff you lug around with you, easily passes five hundred slots.

I checked and the new bag does actually beat two of the six I have equipped, albeit one only by a couple of spaces. I have two 88 slot bags, a 72, another 66, a 64 and a bog-standard 48 slotter that is now going to go to someone else. 

The new bag also doubles as an appearance item, a papoose with two "adorable" panda cubs peeping out. I don't really like those much. The pandas, that is. The bag itself is OK, especially the rolled-up umbrella down the side. It's a moot point anyway because you can either have your backpack showing or your back item, not both, and I vastly prefer those new wings to the pack. 

So much for the freebies that I wasn't going to describe in detail. At least that gave Lord of the Rings Online time to patch. 

The giveaway there is not all that interesting for casuals like me because the big ticket item is a new instance tuned for max level players. There's also a vanity pet and a "Portrait Frame", which is a thing I had no idea existed in LotRO. I associate those almost entirely with Eastern F2Ps. You need to use a code in game to claim all of these and the offer ends on 25 September.

Proving yet again that procrastination always pays off and a lot more interesting for occasional players is the news that the excellent mini-expansion from a while back, Before The Shadow, is now free to all. You don't have to do anything for that one. It's just there for everyone automatically. 

If you don't remember it, it's the one that added two large, new starter zones, which was why I bought it when it came out. I never even got to the end of the first zone so I could have waited until it went free, as it was always, inevitably, going to do. That'll teach me.

There is, however, a free mount to go with that offer. Two actually, one for freeloaders and a second for paying customers, although free players can take the VIP mount token and stash it for the day much wished for by Standing Stone when they decide to subscribe. 

Again, you have to apply a code in game for that one, something I am going to go and do right now... and it turns out the Azure Steed is the grown-up version of the Azure Pony I already have. Not sure if that's a hobbit thing. It's account-bound anyway so it can be handed on to someone who needs it.

Of course, what I really need in LotRO is that 66 slot bag...

The final update and login for me this morning was DCUO, where the freebie on offer was a crappy set of  dragon horns. Oh, sorry... "Archdragon Horns". That makes all the difference. I imagine someone is going to get all excited by the chance to have a couple of ugly protuberances grow out of their head but it won't be me. Still claimed them, though.

There are some much nicer cosmetics in the same free offer but for those you actually have to play the game a bit and I wasn't up for that today. I have parked in the relevant instance so the wings and baby dragon pets may one day be mine. The stupid horns are only available until 9 September but the good stuff stays on the instance vendor indefinitely, so no rush.

The giveaways in LotRO and DCUO are part of Daybreak's Year of the Dragon, a celebration of fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons, which does seem a tad random until you remember they also publish and, I think, own Dungeons & Dragons Online through SSG, who run both that and LotRO... or something. Who knows any more?

It seemed a bit odd I hadn't heard about similar giveaways in the EverQuest titles too but it turns out that's because I hadn't been paying close enough attention. I had to ask Gemini for the details, something I do quite often these days because it is quite often actually faster than just googling, believe it or not, and reasonably reliable so long as you check the sources. It seems I was only just in time.

The free gifts in both games are less than spectacular: a dragon statue for your house. They're available for no cost in the cash shop. You just have to log in and "buy" them but you'd better get on with it because both offers end tomorrow. If you don't have time for that, never fear! It seems there will be something else for free in both games for September. 

I logged back into EQII to pick up my dragon statue because I spend a lot of time in various houses there and I'm sure it will fit in somewhere. I long ago gave up trying to maintain my houses in EverQuest, though, and I don't propose to start again, so I passed on that one.

After all of that, I was pretty much done with logging into games to get free stuff. I'm sure there are lots more games on my hard drive that would like to shower me with gifts if I'd only log in but there's only so many hours in the day and I've used up all of those I'm willing to spend on it right now.

Tomorrow though...

Mish-Mash Or Mosh?

Mish-mash today, music tomorrow. That's the plan. Might be more mish-mash, though. Or musical mish-mash. Yep, probably that.

But that's a day away. Now, there's this:

EverQuest II - A Difficult Experience

Or rather a difficulty with experience. I continue to trundle oh-so-slowly through the levels on my never-ending journey to the cap. Seriously, it is so slow now. I know it was crazy fast before but this is ridiculous. 

When I finished the Signature Questline I was about half-way through Level 128. After a bunch of post-credits quests, of which there are an unusually large amount, including an entire instance which also counted for a weekly or a daily or something, I have made it all the way to two-thirds of the way through the same level. Nearly.

I checked the xp every time I did a hand-in and it was running somewhere between 1.5%-2% per quest. The instance might have been as much as 4%. At this rate I will run out of all the regular quests before I hit 129. There are loads of dropped quests, where you get the starter from mobs, but even if I was willing to do all of them and able to get the drops, I'm still not sure it would get me to the cap.

I googled it, thinking there would be no end of complaints and plenty of advice but there's nothing much. No-one seems to be having an issue with it, which makes me think I must be doing something wrong.

I did find this extremely detailed guide on how to set yourself up to solo Ballads of Zimara in the most efficient manner but although it contains some useful information on gear and particularly on what adornments to slot, it says absolutely nothing about XP. and how to maximize it. The assumption seems to be that you might have trouble with the content, which has not been the case for me at all.

It's nice that someone went to the trouble of putting all that information together but as a couple of people point out in the comments, BoZ is one of the most welcoming expansions in years for new-and-returning players. You can just play through it with the gear you get at the start and the NPC who gives it to you even tells you how to set everything up for best effect. It's the precise reverse of recent expansions in that the fights are easy but the XP comes slowly. Min-maxing your gear does nothing to help with that.

Fortunately, the gameplay is fun in and of itself so I'm relatively content to keep picking away at it but I have to say that playing for an hour and a half and only getting about 10% of a level is a nostalgia trip I wasn't expecting when I bought the expansion. I'd say I hope they tweak it a bit for the next one but I suspect most players are pretty happy with it as it is so I'm not expecting any U-turns come the end of the year.

More M&Ms, Anyone?

Then again, it's all relative. I'm sure my current leveling speed in EQII will look like hyperdrive compared to what Monsters & Memories players will have to endure. Or enjoy. I mean, it is a self-selecting pool of masochists whose eyes light up at the sight of another opportunity to grind all weekend to get a couple of levels in a game that's not even in Early Access yet.

I feel entitled to snark because I may well be splashing around in that pool myself come June, when M&M stages an "Open Playtest". No information on start and finish dates other than it'll be late in the month but presumably it will be on for at least a few days. There's also likely to be a Stress test before then, if you really can't wait.

I missed the last opportunity to trudge uphill in the sandstorms both ways but I'm going to do my best to give it a try this time. I played it once and liked it and I keep hearing good things about the game. 

Since they'll both be available to play at around the same time. at least for a while, it'll be interesting to compare M&M's merciless recreation of the genre's deep past with the Anashti Sul server's attempt to replicate the way things had progressed about half a decade later. I suspect the slow leveling I'm whining about in BoZ will look like fast-forward in comparison to either of them. Maybe that'll encourage me to get my head down and cap out there. I kinda doubt that'll be how it works but let's hope.

Don't You Have Anything Better To Do?

I was very much more than a little surprised to read today that Peter Jackson is going to make "a new batch" of Lord Of The Rings films. Seriously? Hasn't he had enough yet?

I don't know how many films make a batch but the first is going to  be arriving in 2026. It's called Lord of the Rings: The Hunt for Gollum, presumably because they're not confident cinemagoers will remember who Gollum is without a nudge. Andy Serkis is going to star. He's clearly not worried about being typecast as a speciality act. I think I saw him in something recently where he wasn't wearing prosthetics or a motion-capture bodysuit. Can't remember what it was though.

This news does not excite me at all. I saw the first three Lord of the Rings movies on release and I own them on DVD but I've never felt the need to watch them a second time. I also own the Hobbit trilogy and I haven't even watched that once. Plus I managed just one episode of the Amazon series and that was one too many. Are they making any more of those? I hope not.

I imagine another "batch" of movies is going to bring on the old "tide that floats all boats" effect for Lord of the Rings Online, which in turn might mean some bonus income and attention for EG7. Maybe as an EQ/EQII/DCUO player I'll benefit in some abstruse way form the trickle-down effect there - because we all know that's a real thing...

And Finally...

I know I said it was a music post tomorrow but I always like to end these things with a song. Let's see if there's anything appropriate in the slush pile. 

Ah, yes! From the post about Aussie thick-neck rockers I never got around to compiling. It'd be a shame not to share this one.

My Name Is Jim - The Smashed Avocados

Just be glad it's the only one you're getting. For now, anyway.

When Rights Go Wrong or Why Household Names Don't Always Sell Games

In the course of a post about Embracer Group and how its current financial difficulties might affect both Standing Stone's Lord of the Rings Online and Amazon Games' in-development title based on the works of JRR Tolkein, Wilhelm noted "there isn’t a track record of huge success for games based on the IP".

That tied into something I've been thinking about since I observed, in the thread on my own recent post about the move of Star Wars: The Old Republic to Broadsword Games, that "there's almost no synergy between huge, mainstream IPs and the mmorpg genre".

Has there ever been an mmorpg, based on a pre-existing IP not itself originating in gaming, which performed commercially to the same standard as other iterations on that same IP in other media? Or, if you'd like that in English, has any mmorpg based on a book or a movie ever been a runaway success?

I can't think of one. What's more, neither could Bard or ChatGPT. They were both bloody useless, frankly. Neither of them seemed capable of understanding what a "Non-gaming IP" might be, even when I gave them examples. 

For once, I won't derail  my own post by going on about AIs and their funny little ways. I didn't want to rely on my own dodgy memory, though, so without AI assistance I was thrown back on my own research skills, namely skimming through all sixty-six pages of the MMORPG.com list of games.

It wasn't much more help than the nonsense the AIs tried to fob me off with. The MMORPG.com list is stuffed with games that couldn't reasonably be described as MMORPGs even by the loosest of definitions. There were live games, dead games and games still in development that don't yet exist at all. I really need those AIs to get their act together so I don't have to keep trawling through this stuff. I have better things to do with my time. 

Oh, wait...

I did spot a handful of examples of games based on external IPs that I either didn't know about or had forgotten, so it wasn't a total bust. There were a couple of manga/anime inspired titles - Naruto Online ("an MMORPG turn-based browser-game that is set entirely in the NARUTO universe") and One Piece Online, which doesn't actually seem to be an MMORPG at all - but I don't feel qualified to comment on either so I'll pretend I didn't see them after all. 

I also probably ought to leave out the two Chinese titles I found on Wikipedia - Dragon Oath ("Based on the novel Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils by Jin Yong) and Fantasy Westward Journey ("Inspired by Journey to the West" - not least because to include the latter would scupper my entire thesis, given its probably one of the most successful - and profitable - MMORPGs in the world, at least if those old SuperData reports were to be believed. 

Sticking - mostly - with games released in the western hemisphere and/or based on "western" IPs then, here's the list I ended up with:

• Age of Conan
• Conan Exiles 
• DC Universe Online
  
• Hello Kitty Online 
• Lord of the Rings Online 
• Marvel Heroes 
• Otherland 
• Star Trek Online 
• Star Wars Galaxies 
• Star Wars: The Old Republic 
• The Matrix Online

It's surprisingly short, isn't it? Anyone think of any more? No? Actually, I can. That Lego MMO, for a start. Maybe Toontown? And wasn't there a Transformers MMO, briefly? 

Tough. Didn't think of them at the time and now it's too late. Anyway, all of those just shore up my argument so I don't need to shoehorn them in after the edit.

Let's go through the ones I did remember, one by one. 

Age of Conan - Main IP: Books and Movies.

Still running but in maintenance mode. Sold a lot of boxes but famously couldn't hold an audience much beyond the bait&switch tutorial. Honestly, I feel Conan is barely a well-enough known property to support an MMORPG to begin with, so it's incomprehensible to me that we also have...

Conan Exiles -  See above.

Okay, it's not really an mmorpg. Is it even an MMO? When I got ChatGPT to put the list into alphabetical order for me (Nice to find something it's good for, at last.) it prissily warned me "Please note that "Conan Exiles" and "Dune Awakening" are not MMORPGs but are included in the list you provided." I took Dune Awakening out to discuss separately, later (Which, as you'll see, I signally forgot to do.) but since the Steam page says "Conan Exiles can be played in full single-player, co-op, or persistent online multiplayer. (My emphasis.) I left it in. 

CE is doing okay. About 10k concurrent according to the Steam Charts, a population it's maintained remarkably consistently for several years now, putting it just barely in the Top 100. By no means a failure but also clearly no kind of mainstream breakout hit.

DCUO - Main IP: Comics and Movies.

According to the information that came out of the EG7 acquisition of Daybreak Games, quite a consistent performer. It makes money. People play it. For an IP that includes household names like Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, all of whom can and have been able to stand up multiple TV and movie series for decades, however, it can't be considered more than a modest success, if that.

Hello Kitty Online - Main IP: Merchandising and cultural icon

This one deserves a post of its own. It appears to have been either abandoned or possibly even forgotten by its owners, Sanria. The game was last known to be playable over a decade ago but the website, which hasn't been updated since 2012, is still up. A sad and mystifying fate for such a global icon.

Lord of the Rings Online - Main IP: Books and Movies.

I think we all know about this one. Doing just about okay for an aging mmorpg but certainly no more than that. Signally failed to capitalize on the massive global interest in Tolkein following the Peter Jackson movies and the recent Amazon Prime series barely moved the dial, despite the hype. I suspect that, much though the fans still worship the man and all his myriad works, the general audience has had about as much Tolkein as it stand for now, which may not bode well for either Embracer Group or Amazon Games.

Marvel Heroes - Main IP - Comics and Movies

Seemed to be doing reasonably well, perhaps on a par with "rival" DCUO until it suddenly and unexpectedly closed down. Even at its peak, though, it could scarcely have been said to have done justice to what was, at the time, one of the best-known and most commercially successful IPs in the entire world. If you can't bring the punters in by the millions with Spider-Man and The Avengers, really, what do you think you're doing?

Otherland - Main IP: Books

This one's just weird. It was a left-field choice for an IP to begin with, being a fairly obscure SciFi trilogy by an author better-known for his fantasy novels. No-one's bothered to make a movie or a TV show out of anything Tad Williams ever wrote, so why anyone thought a game would sell is a mystery. The game never really got finished, never attracted an audience, changed hands a couple of times and finally closed down without anyone noticing. It wasn't a bad game, as far as it went, but the IP did it no favors at all.

Star Trek Online - Main IP: TV and Movies

I called this "The game time (And the world.) forgot" in a comment on the post I linked earlier. It's a Cryptic production, which means it's solid enough but a bit dull, making it, some might say, an ideal fit for the IP. I always feel that Star Trek somehow manages to be well-known by the mainstream yet still entirely niche. This is one game on the list that may even have done about as well as the IP deserved. At least it's still running and people play it. Or I guess they do...

Star Wars Galaxies - Main IP - Movies

This, on the other hand, is a truly world-class IP. One of the very biggest. As Raph Koster is always keen to point out, the game he made using the Star Wars setting and characters was a success - just not a big enough one to satisfy the IP's owners. It's worth reading that piece for Raph's observations on the core topic of this post, the value of a non-gaming IP to an MMORPG - or to any other video game genre, for that matter. 

Raph puts it like this: "if you look at the power of licensed IP game genres outside of sports, it’s really not very clear that a license can or will imply a massive increase in game trials or purchases."  That's really the crux of the problem except that, in the case of an IP like Star Wars, the expectations are also hyped to the skies. It's a recipe for failure because even success on the scale of SWG (Raph claims it was weight-for-weight more successful than EverQuest, the market leader at the time.) doesn't count as success in the eyes of either the fans or the investors.

Star Wars: The Old Republic - See above.

And that, of course, is why SWG is only available on emulator and private servers these days. Along came the second MMORPG based on the IP and even though they weren't making Highlander Online, there could only be one. Sony Online Entertainment bowed to the inevitable and cancelled SWG so SW:TOR could have a clear run... and BioWare fumbled the pass.

Once again, the game itself was fine and sales were good enough for the genre. Just not good enogh for the IP. With the endless publicity pumped out by Disney since then, along with the ongoing global success of many, if not all, of the movies and now TV shows, a middle-ranking MMORPG just doesn't cut it. If it was an original IP, it would be deemed a major success - it's not like we have a lot of SciFi PvE MMORPGs to choose from - but it's Star Wars so it was widely seen as a failure even before the move to the Broadsword Home for Elderly MMOs.

The Matrix Online - Main IP: Movies

Oh, boy! I guess at the time The Matrix was reckoned a pretty big thing? It also has something to do with virtual worlds, I think, so I suppose there was some synergy there? I don't know. I'm vague on the details because I've never seen the movies. 

I've also never played the game which, given that it was published by SOE and included in the All Access sub I was paying at the time, ought to tell you everything you need to know about the appeal of the IP outside its dedicated fanbase. I mean, back then I was at least trying out just about every MMORPG on the market and I still didn't make the time to take a look at TMO. 

I can't even say if it was reckoned a good game or a good version of the IP. I don't even recall reading much about it. I'd guess most Matrix fans  probably didn't even know it existed and most MMORPG players didn't care.

TMO is like the poster child for why hanging an MMORPG off an external IP is a bad idea. It sums up the innate and seemingly insurmountable problem that comes from draping your MMORPG over the scaffolding of an IP that's been successful in another medium: chances are really, really high that most of that pre-existing audience doesn't even know what an MMORPG is, far less want to play one, while at the same time you're limiting your MMORPG audience to a subset that finds the particular IP appealing.

And it gets worse. There may be a very large and well-established market for video games that reference already-familiar properties but those games generally don't require the kind of time commitment and long-term dedication of an MMORPG. It's one thing to buy a Batman game, play it, finish it and put it away; entirely another to commit to raiding Arkham Asylum from 9pm to 1am every Thursday, Friday and Saturday for perpetuity.

And still worse yet. Even if you successfully tap into the loyalty and affection of your chosen IP's dedicated fanbase, the people eager and willing to consume, own and live inside every possible aspect of their beloved obsession, you're going to be opening yourself to disappointment, disgruntlement and maybe even DDOSing and death threats from those same superfans, many of whom will inevitably see your interpretation of their dreams as an embarrassment, a disaster or a betrayal.

Finally and perhaps worst of all, as the IP's licensee, you'll have to pay for the privilege of piggybacking on someone else's success, likely handsomely, on the basis that the rights owner is doing you a favor by letting you hitch a ride on the back of their money-wagon. You'll just have to pray that, when they've taken their cut for doing nothing at all and you've paid all the development and running costs, there's enough left to make the whole thing feel like it hasn't been a complete waste of your time.

Almost all the big, successful western MMORPGs are based on IPs created and owned by the companies that developed and operate them. With barely a couple of exceptions, even the ones we call successful aren't much more than a few big fish in a fairly small pond. World of Warcraft had its cultural moment but, unlike Star Wars or Marvel Comics, it couldn't hold on to it. The Warcraft movie is evidence enough. 

MMORPGs are a niche genre. Expensive mainstream IPs are a terrible fit. If picking a strong IP and slapping an MMORPG back end on it was a guaranteed - or even a likely - way to make a fortune, we'd have massively multiple versions of every TV show, movie franchise and best-selling book series of the last fifty years. Just like we do with the TV shows, movies and books themselves. But we don't because MMORPGs are a niche market and even the successful ones don't make a ripple in the mainstream.

I wish it was otherwise. I could list, right off the top of my head, a couple of dozen IPs I'd love to see turned into MMORPGs - and I might, in another post. It's never going to happen because IP-led MMORPGs don't work unless, like WoW or Pokemon Go or Elder Scrolls Online or Final Fantasy XIV or Guild Wars 2, the IP itself comes from another game.

So, if you're waiting, like me, for Scooby Doo Online, where we all get to ride around in the Mystery Machine, solving mysteries and catching bad guys in a lighter, funnier version of The Secret World, then you're going to have a very long wait indeed.