MMO Recruiting

I woke up this morning to two different emails from MMORPGs that I used to play. Both emails were espousing the new features recently added to the games. I wonder about the timing that caused them both to arrive at the same time. Is it just that they want to send out emails on Friday so that people think to use their spare weekend time coming back to the games?

One of the emails came from Final Fantasy XI. They've raised the level cap again and redid a few zones to provide higher level monsters. (Technical issues surrounding the PlayStation 2 apparently prevent them from adding new zones to the game.) I still want to play this game but recruiting up enough people to actually play with proved problematic. And unlike joining a new game (like Glitch, say) there's not a lot of opportunities to find people to play with, either. Most people returning to FFXI now will want to play to the new level cap (95). I have no ability to interact with those people in any real manner. So despite new stuff going on this email did nothing for me. The things that drove me away from playing in the second place still exist. (I left the first time because all my friends played WoW. That problem has since been solved.)

The other came from City of Heroes. I never actually played the original game but I did play City of Villains for a month and those game have since been fully integrated, I think. The reason I quit that game was a sort of combination of the reasons I'm not playing FFXI. I was already playing an MMO (WoW) and therefore didn't really have a lot of time to put into CoV. I didn't know anyone who played except for my brother, and often if we were both going to play a game it was going to be WoW anyway. I wasn't playing enough to justify paying a second monthly fee so I cancelled after my free month was up. I really liked my character, though. I was Oroku Saki and led a pack of ninjas called The Foot Clan. It was awesome!

The City of Heroes email was heralding the switch of CoH from a subscription based system to a free to play system with an item shop. Apparently because I played for that earlier month my account gets some sort of bonus in the free to play land. (I can join guilds, send private messages, and send in game mail.) It looks like anyone new who pays any amount of money ever also gets those same bonuses, which is nice. This switch does solve my initial problem. I didn't think I was going to play enough to justify paying, but now that it's free I can log in and tool around as the Shredder every now and then without feeling bad about it. Having to install the client is going to be annoying (why can't it be in a web browser like Glitch?) but I think I'll give it an install tomorrow and see. It's also quite conceivable that this change will actually bring new players to the game, giving people for my low level villain to group with.