Scarlet Blade

Yesterday I'd started thinking again about gender mixes in the Final Fantasy series. I'm playing Final Fantasy VIII which has an even split, and I was wondering about how male oriented it was going to seem on this play through. I don't actually remember all that much in terms of details in the game, but I was making a mental note to try to pay attention while playing. Then last night while browsing for something or other (I think I was looking for Blood Bowl patch notes) I saw an odd advertisement. It was advertising the open beta for what it termed an 'adult MMORPG'. The picture featured a scantily clad armoured woman with a big sword, so pretty much par for the course in terms of a gaming ad. Even browser games with no graphics to speak of will stick a girl in a revealing outfit in the ad to draw attention, right Evony?

What, I wondered, is an adult MMO? Are we talking some sort of Sims style game with the sex uncensored? Does it feature a lot of colourful language and an epic amount of blood and guts? Cigarettes? I did some poking around and it sounds like, for the most part, a pretty standard MMO with a sci-fi setting. You have quests to go kill 10 monsters. You level up. You can group for dungeons. There are two factions with massively scaled PvP battles. (80v80, apparently? 40 per side in Alterac Valley was bad enough, though I guess computers have gotten a lot better since then!) There's a tank class, a healer class, and 4 DPS classes. It's also running under a 'free to play' model, with an item shop. The item shop seems to have gone in a good direction in that it doesn't seem to be 'pay to win' at all. There are things to increase your backpack size temporarily, or to give an experience buff, or non-combat pets, or new outfits for your character to wear. A lot like the League of Legends item shop, actually. Or the World of Warcraft one. Nothing at all like the one in Ultima Online where you had to pay real money to prevent people from stealing your stuff.

There is one item I've never, ever seen before, and which is the reason they're advertising it as being adult. It's the 'lingerie unsealer'. Which apparently does what it creepily sounds like. All MMOs pretty much have a base level of clothing your character has to wear. Take off all your armour in World of Warcraft and you've still got your underwear on. Pay $20 in Scarlet Blade and your character doesn't have to wear underwear anymore...

I don't know how I'm supposed to feel about this. On the one hand I was brought up to be quite prudish and the idea of nipples everywhere just seems wrong. But on the other hand there's actually nothing wrong with nipples. The game is going to get an appropriate rating to keep little kids from playing it if you think they need to be kept away. And really, you're on the internet. If you just want to see nipples, you can find them. Or you could just watch the Super Bowl or the Oscars...

Oh, and one other twist to the game... You cannot play a male character. Everyone has to play a girl. I'd say woman, but apparently one of the classes looks 12. Apparently there's quite the controversy since the publisher is changing the way that class looks, especially when naked, for the US version. Some people think it's sick that she exists in any version. Some people think it's appalling that it's getting censored. People on the internet... Angry about anything!

I read one blog that made the claim that this game is actually less sexist than other MMOs. The idea was that while sure, it's full of naked women, they're actually all awesomely powerful naked women. It's a game celebrating women, unlike most games which seek to set women up as worse than men. Pretty much every other game has sexist design choices. FFXI wouldn't let you play a sexy cat man. Mithran were exclusively female. FFXI wouldn't let you play an optimal female tank. Galkans were exclusively male, and they were the toughest by far. In WoW there were pieces of armour that looked to offer real protection on men, but had bare midriffs and exposed cleavage on women. Having it seem like plate armour is fully covering some of the time implies armour does something and makes it ludicrous when the female characters are all exposed. In Scarlet Blade everyone is exposed, so clearly something else is coming into play to protect people from grievous injury. League of Legends keeps coming out with cool skins for their male characters and revealing skins for their female characters. Doing some of both for each gender would seem to be more fair, but male gaze pretty much keeps that from happening. Did random blog have a point? I certainly think things would be a lot worse if Scarlet Blade just had the mage and healer classes be naked women while the tanks and melee attackers were clothed men, so maybe they were right and this, somehow, is a step in the right direction? I don't know, and I don't know how to find out. Anyone have any opinions one way or the other?


Apparently there's a real sci-fi plot going on that explains why all the player characters are female. I read a fair number of comments from people saying things along the lines of 'I only logged on to check out the boobs, but it was actually a pretty good MMO'. Part of me really wants to check it out. It's in beta which is normally a deal breaker for me, but I think there's an exception to my buying new games rant from last week. No, not the boobs. It's localization. This game has apparently been out in Korea for more than a year. I'm sure there will be bugs and translation issues with a localization, but the game shouldn't be an unpolished mess. It's not like the game isn't tested, or doesn't have all the features coded, or they haven't bought enough servers. All of these things presumably were solved in the Korean release. I recall that FFXI's US launch was a lot smoother than the WoW launch that happened later that year for these reasons. The FFXIV launch that was global? Complete disaster. Just like pretty much every other launch I've seen. Except Blizzard expansions.

Also it would seem that you can get an ultimate ability which transforms you into a mech... But for some reason instead of having your character inside a cockpit or something you're actually attached to the outside of the mech, exposed skin and all. This just seems really, really weird...

Wizardry Online: Free To Die

Yesterday marked the launch of (yet another) new MMORPG. This one is based on the old Wizardry franchise of single player dungeon crawl RPGs. I've only every played one Wizardry game (Wizardry V for the SNES) and it was brutal but fun. From the sounds of things Wizardry Online is aiming to nail down the brutal half of the equation. If it'll hit the fun half remains to be seen. Some of the taglines in the FAQ really get my blood burning...
"This hardcore MMO will be the ultimate challenge for even the best RPG players in the world."

It then goes on to talk about how the game claims to be the hardest MMO ever. You don't automatically heal. Or level. There are no safe zones, and the world is flagged entirely PvP. Oh, and death can be permanent. You can steal from other players and there's some sort of crime/bounty system that comes from that. It claims to have lots of dungeons, puzzles, and traps...

This all sounds very interesting to start. I can remember losing my party in Wizardry V and having to restart a level 1 team from town. Who then had to enter a dungeon with most of the low level quests and stuff done, so I pretty much just walked in a circle grinding levels. Until I reached the point where 5 of the new people were strong enough to venture down to where my original party had died... Search up the corpse of one of them, bring them back to town. Pay to resurrect them in the temple. Repeat. Oh, and your guys all got older and lost stats as time went on. Oh, and sometimes the priests in the temple would fail the resurrection spell and reduce your people to ashes. You could try a super resurrection on the ashes but if that failed your guy was gone. Kaput. And you couldn't use any save/reload shenanigans! So my memories of Wizardry are definitely pretty hardcore. I did eventually beat the game, and I remember needing to draw maps because this was mostly in the ancient time before internets. It was a good feeling to win through all the frustrating obstacles the game threw at me, and I wonder if Wizardry Online can pull off the same feeling.

I'm always wary of MMO launches (or I should be... I still buy in on the first day way too often) but Wizardry Online is free, so it can't hurt to give it a spin, can it?

About being free... There's been a recent trend for games to go 'free to play' with the ability to pay money for extra things in game. League of Legends works this way where you can pay money for faster leveling, a wider variety of champions to play, or new costumes for the champions you have. League of Legends is definitely 'free to play' and avoids being 'pay to win' since someone who doesn't pay a cent isn't disadvantaged while playing the actual game. They may have fewer champions to play each week, and it may take longer before they can start playing ranked games, and they don't get to wear a Megaman costume, Slash's top hat, or dress Olaf up as Brolaf but they're just as good at playing the game. Will Wizardry Online be 'pay to win'?

The first clue is in their banner at the bottom. The game is not 'free to play'. It's 'free to die'. On the surface this is probably just a clever little banner bringing to light the fact the game is hard and you're going to die a lot. But in a game that advertises the possibility of permanent death I don't know that you want to link 'free' with 'die'. The website doesn't list the contents of the in game item shop so I can't tell for sure if you're paying to be pretty or paying to win but there are some clues...

Here are the three example items they list for things in the shop: a healing potion, a bag, and a talisman of security. The healing potion calls out that people will need healing potions since the game has no ambient healing. That's probably a bad sign, but maybe that just means you need to group with a priest. The bag just lets you hold more stuff and is probably a fair/standard MMO item shop item. As long as the free bag space is small but reasonable it should be fine. If you can't feasibly carry any loot without the item shop bag then it's worse. The talisman is really scary. It claims to let you spend it to prevent an item from being stolen when you die. The implication to me is that I'm going to get ganked by some high level dudes and then be presented with the choice of giving them my best item or giving Sony some money.

Talk about lose-lose! If I give them my best item they now know I don't have any of these talismans and am therefore fresh meat. Gank me over and over for pure profit! And since the game description implies there's absolutely no safe place to go it's possible they'll just follow me around until they have everything I own or I give up. On the other hand if I pay Sony money I get to keep my item and these thugs might even leave me alone (potentially no tangible benefit from ganking me when they could get loot out of someone else) but I'm now fallaciously pot committed. Every time I die I need to spend another one of these talismans or the first one will have been wasted. Depending on how much these things cost (and I guess on how valuable loot is) I could be looking at a huge cash sink!

Beyond the cash shop you can also buy a more standard MMO subscription. It does actually list everything you get for doing so. In particular, you and your party get an xp and stat bonus for each of you with a membership. You get a free bag. You make more money and things are cheaper to buy. You get a real money discount on something called a 'Dimento Medal' which gives you xp, stats, better drop rates, and titles. Oh, and a free one of those talismans of security just to make sure you know how they work to entice you to buy more.

Titles are definitely 'pay to be pretty' and I'm on the fence about xp and drop rate boosts. On the one hand the game is probably about leveling and finding loot so someone with a boost to those definitely has an advantage over someone who doesn't, but those just replace time with money. I don't know that I care how someone hits max level (time or money). Stats are more on the 'pay to win' side of things. No matter how much I play for free or how good I am the person with paid for stats will just be better. In a PvE game that wouldn't really matter, it would just frustrate me. In a worldwide PvP game it seems like it could be a real problem. Especially when the winner of the fight gets to steal items from the loser! Especially when the loser might suffer permanent death!


Now, scale might well matter here. Maybe the stats on those Dimento Medals are actually pretty small. Something to reward people who pay without being unbalancing. The Aardwolf MUD I played on many years ago had little donation pins with a small amount of stats for people who paid to keep the game going. Those seemed fine. But you could actually opt out of brutal PvP in that game! And maybe PvP in Wizardry Online can't actually cause the permanent death they're espousing. Maybe stealing items after a fight is a rarity. Maybe they get a random item and not your best item (which would make buying bigger bags potentially a good investment!) Or maybe this is just a game for griefers with deep wallets.


I think I may install the client and give it a try to see what it's like even though it just launched. Get a feel for how often ganking happens and what the stealing mechanics actually are. Actually find out what the costs of these things in the item shop are. But on the surface I really, really suspect this is a huge 'pay to win' game and I won't actually be happy playing it for long. 'Free to die' indeed.

Maybe I have to keep myself from getting attached to my character or my stuff. But just like with my Blood Bowl team I don't know how feasible this will be. The MMO market is pretty much founded entirely on the idea that people grow attached to their characters and their stuff. I haven't really played my gnome warrior in World of Warcraft in many years but I'll always hold on to his wrath gear, his Quel'Serrar, and his gladiator mount. Those things have meaning to me, and I don't know that I'll be able to play another MMO without becoming similarly attached. Which is probably Sony's plan all along with the talismans of security...

Huge World: Immersive or Boring?

I'm pretty sure this is me just being old and crotchety but I've been finding the amount of excessive walking around in Star Wars: The Old Republic to be a little annoying. To explain what I mean, here's what my current planet has been like...

You arrive by starship at the spaceport on the edge of the planet. In order to get to the main town on the planet (where my Sith master and main quest giver lives) I have to walk through the jungle. There's a quest or two to pick up along the way and monsters to kill as you go so it's really not very bad at all. (If walking around killing monsters for quests isn't your cup of tea then you should probably avoid playing a modern MMO.) When you get to the main town there's a speeder taxi you can talk to who will fly you back to the starport and from now on you can essentially teleport between the two spots. (It does take some time to fly but you're not in control or in any danger.) Ok, great!

Head into the town and discover it's huge! There are some vendors spread out, a cantina with profession trainers, and an auction house. There are also a couple quests you can pick up. Finally get to the back of the town and find another speeder taxi which will take you to your maser's estate. Get there, do some cutscenes, get a quest, head out. Get to the speeder taxi and discover it doesn't link up to the first two you found. Instead you need to taxi to the back of the town and then walk out of the huge town.

Repeat over and over as your Sith master sends you on quests to every corner of the planet. Finish quest. Speeder. Walk. Speeder. Cash quest. Get next quest. Speeder. Walk. Lots of walking. It really makes me pine for a flying mount...

But even if I had one, would it matter? I think back to playing World of Warcraft and with a flying mount that went anywhere I certainly got between places faster but there was still a lot of time spent flying around between places while doing _nothing_.

Is it really any different than flying around in an airship in Final Fantasy IV though? Final Fantasy X-2 abstracted away the airship and you just chose your destination and it took you there instead of needing to find it on the map. (The idea being you told the pilot where to go. Yuna had better things to do than learn how to fly an airship!) What about the run button?


Walking around in a big city is immersive. People certainly complain about the dungeon finder in WoW because it instantly teleports to a dungeon no matter where you are in the world. Having to actually travel to a dungeon before you can go in and beat up the monsters makes sense in terms of living in a virtual world. In terms of having fun playing a game? It sucked to wait 15 minutes or more while the slowest person in your group meandered their way to the dungeon. (I can remember leveling my warrior in Maraudon back in vanilla WoW... It was quite the trek from Ironforge!) Waiting around for the slacker in your group before you can start playing is a fact of real life. If an online world is going to simulate that properly it should have that aspect too. It is immersive. But it is also boring. I want to pretend to be an awesome Sith lord with a snarky blue companion. I don't want to jog around a big boring city. I just don't see why the two speeder taxi systems on the planet don't connect! It seems to be set up just to waste my time. Maybe they're trying to delay finishing the story so I keep paying monthly fees...?

Star Wars: The Old Republic Initial Thoughts

I got started on the game yesterday and played for about 6 hours after work. I'm pretty sure that's more time spent in one sitting than I played Final Fantasy XIV and Star Trek Online combined. Time will tell if it manages to keep my attention but for now my reaction to the game is positive and I think a lot of the people I played World of Warcraft with would like this game too. Here are my first few thoughts about the game...


Looting monsters in the game is done very well. Final Fantasy XI had the best looting system in an MMO that I've played (you didn't have to loot any corpses as the stuff just appeared in your inventory or in your group's loot pool for rolling) but SWTOR is a close second. The closest comparison is WoW where a monster with loot would have a little sparkle appear on its corpse. Right click on it to open the loot window and then click on the loot. Someone made a mod to remove the last stage so you just had to right click the corpse and you'd automatically take the loot. Blizzard eventually added that option to the client. SWTOR comes with that option as well, and a second one beside it in the option menu: autoloot all nearby corpses on right click! AE down a bunch of dudes? One click will loot all the corpses instead of needing to click each one individually! I think back to farming Dire Maul for librams to get the Insane in the Membrane achievement and wish so badly that this option existed in WoW.

There are a couple other good things about loot, too. In WoW you know a corpse has loot when it sparkles but the sparkle was designed to be pretty unobtrusive and therefore could sometimes be missed. SWTOR punches you in the face with the knowledge that loot exists by making a giant pillar of light shine out of any corpse containing loot. The cool part of that is the pillar of light is coloured based on the quality of loot on the corpse. There's no way you'll ever miss a magical item now! I can remember playing my hunter in WoW and having to walk up to every corpse in case it had good stuff... In SWTOR that isn't going to happen. If I don't feel like looting everyone that's fine since I'll always be able to tell when a corpse has good loot from a distance. The other great thing with loot is you can send your 'pet' on a trash run where she'll take all of your vendor trash items from your inventory and run off to vendor them for you. Talk about convenient! I again wish I had that option when farming in Dire Maul.



I like how the control system is customizable and can be made pretty much identical to WoW. One of the worst parts of playing a new game is relearning how to move around in the world. Final Fantasy XI was particularly bad for this but really any change at all takes time to overcome. (I remember playing Ocarina of Time and Dead Rising 2 at the same time and dying a lot when switching between games since they aimed differently.) At any rate in SWTOR I can walk forward by holding down both mouse buttons. I can steer with the mouse. I can strafe with A and D. Jump with the space bar. Just like I moved around in WoW! (The only downside is my character refuses to do a flip when I jump.)

A neat thing with rotating the camera is it made the sound come through different parts of my headphones depending on where I was looking. Maybe I'm just really out of touch but it made me smile when I discovered it.

The game actually feels polished. It's certainly not as smooth as a WoW expansion launch would be, for example, but it feels like this is actually a product ready for sale. (Contrasted with Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Magic Online v2 none of which felt like a product that had even been tested let alone ready for sale.)

The voices actually help a lot with immersion.

My character has a nice butt. This seems silly, I know, but the game is played in 3rd person view and you spend most of the time watching your character run around from behind.

I don't know if I can resolve the tension between the gamer part of me that wants to twink out my dark side points and the moral part of me which doesn't want to do evil things. At one point I was given a prisoner as a guide, and was given a shock collar control so I can shock her if she gets out of line. She was being snarky to some dude I was killing which I think is awesome. But I knew that if I was nice to her I'd probably gain light side points so I kept choosing the option to shock her which gave dark side points. She didn't understand why I was torturing her for no good reason and I don't understand it either. Maybe I'm just not cut out for being evil...

The difficulty seems a tad on the easy side so far. I wandered into a quest hub for level 7s when I was level 4 and was able to clean it out without much trouble. Well, I had to use my self-heal button after every fight... (Which in and of itself is awesome. Out of combat I can channel a heal on myself which fills me up in a few seconds. No need for bandages here!) Everything, that is, except the two group quests which murdered me. I came back and 2-manned one of them at level 8 with another level 8 and did the other one when I was level 10 with a pair of level 7s.


I still don't know anything about what the end game is going to be like. I don't know that I care. The game is certainly fun and I'm really liking the cutscenes and such so playing this as a short term game seems entirely reasonable. Diablo 3 is coming out presumably in the next month or two so I'd be switching to that anyway. So the endgame is pretty much irrelevant!

Star Wars The Old Republic: Defenestrator!

Getting setup with an account and getting the software for SWTOR took a bit longer than I would have liked yesterday. I guess I shouldn't be terribly surprised with how long it took to download and patch the files after buying it online. What was annoying is how the client wouldn't let me even start downloading files until I'd finished signing up for an account. Including a bunch of stupid 'security' questions! It didn't help that Chrome was throwing a hissy fit the whole time about invalid HTTPS certificates. (It turns out my system clock was reset to Jan 2010 and Chrome was _not_ happy about people trying to provide security from the future.)

At any rate I finally got patched up and able to log in just before I went to bed. I didn't create a character or anything; I just checked to see what the server picking window looked like and then went to bed. It gave name, population, type, and time zone. I'm pretty sure I want a light, PvE, east coast server but there were a bunch of them. I found a server status page on their website with the same information and there are still plenty of servers that fit my criteria so I need to pick one based on name. And what a choice that is turning out to be! The server names in this game are insane. Final Fantasy XI used summoned monsters as the names for their servers. Final Fantasy XIV used towns from the various games as their names. World of Warcraft used all sorts of Warcraft based lore as their names. Star Wars? It seems to just be crazy words thrown together!

What is a Firaxan Shark? Who is The Fatman? (As an aside, I googled 'The Fatman' to try to find out who that might be in the Star Wars universe and ended up on a pretty neat philosophy website...) Why haven't more people signed up to play on Drooga's Pleasure Barge?

Maybe Star Wars just has crazier lore than Warcraft. I don't know. What I do know is I want to throw people out of windows so I'm going to create a character on The Defenestrator. Why not! (Unless I get home and have an email from the Old Man telling me to play somewhere else.)  (EDIT: We're playing as sith. My character's name is Polemical.)

Star Wars: The Old Republic Launch

Today is the official launch of the new Star Wars MMO: The Old Republic. I'm not currently playing this game - though I am considering starting up - and I wanted to get a feel for how the launch was going. I did a quick Google search for 'SWTOR login queues' and found a 13 page thread on their forums. That's not so bad... I read it a bit and found that it was only 13 pages long because it was closed by a moderator. The moderator directed people to post in the official 'queue complaint' thread. (It's easier to ignore whiners when they're all in one spot!)

I went to check out the official thread and it turned out they'd actually hit the forum limit on posts in a thread and had to start up a second one. Which is currently up to 415 pages. And is growing faster than I can keep up. For the most part it seems to be pretty standard MMO-launch trolling. I paid for my free month and need access now... I'm already level XX and don't want to re-roll on another server... People are botting to stay connected so they don't get stuck back in the queue... I want more PVP-RP servers... Bioware is the devil... Bioware is awesome, noobs are the devil... Etc... I'm pretty sure I've gotten involved in this sort of thread for things in the past and it makes me weep for myself. And then I find a post that I'm sure is wrong and feel a need to make an account and reply! And then I weep some more...

From what I've been able to gather a lot of the problems are arising from the way Bioware chose to help out hardcore players. They let people sign up quite a while in advance to create guilds. These guilds would then be assigned a server during the early access period and the people who signed up would then get to create characters on those servers to play with their guilds. On the surface that sounds like a good idea. Having to arrange what server to make your characters on is a real pain. Even with FFXI when we played earlier this year it was tricky making sure everyone was on the same server. If I could have just filled out a web form and sent some email invites to my friends to guarantee they join the right server and automatically join a guild? That's pretty sweet!

The problem that's arisen is Bioware didn't properly divide up those guilds. They created a bunch of servers for the early access period and sent all the guilds to those servers. That makes sense, since the people likely to sign up early for a guild are also likely to be the people who pre-ordered well in advance. So you need the guilds set up during the early access period if you're going to get any benefit from the sign-ups at all. Then the game launched for real and they needed more servers. So they put up a bunch of new servers. From what I can gather those servers don't get any guilds on them because they were all assigned to the first wave of servers. This creates two big problems...

First of all anyone joining now who signed up for a guild is locked into one of the first servers. Bioware needed to make more servers because the existing ones were filling up but they're now funneling new players onto those servers so they can play with their guild. Clearly this is a good idea for those guilds but it means already full servers are getting filled up even fuller. This is causing huge queues for anyone on those servers.

Secondly all of the hardcore people are all on that subset of servers which I imagine is going to hurt the communities on the newly created servers. They're going to be populated by people with no existing ties to anyone who got early access to the game or who were keen enough to start a guild before the game launched. This isn't necessarily going to be a bad thing but having spent the last 4 years playing World of Warcraft on a low-pop backwater server I can see why people would want to avoid getting into that situation. It's harder to find enough people whose schedules sync up and who are on equivalent skill levels to enjoy doing endgame content together. It was really hard to find pvp teams, for example, and nearly impossible to find enough people to raid with who weren't either bad or mean.

Of course, as someone with no existing ties to anyone hardcore into SW:TOR and who has no real intention on getting tied up in endgame stuff this actually seems like a good deal for me. Many people who are trying to play now have to wait 3+ hours to log in to their servers while there are servers up with no queues at all. I was on the fence last week on if I wanted to give it a shot or not but I'm definitely going to do so now. Especially since the Old Man said he'd play too!

I don't think my laptop can handle the game so I'm going to have to finally get around to fixing my desktop. I'm also going to be in New Brunswick from the 22nd to the 27th and I imagine there will be board games to play! So I'm thinking I'll probably try to buy the parts I need on the 27th when I get back to Toronto and then start playing on some low population server on the 27th or 28th.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

In somewhat recent times (the last couple years) I paid extra money for the collector's edition of a couple of new MMORPGs. In both cases (Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy IV) doing so got me early access to the servers. To the laggy and buggy servers. In both cases I stopped playing the game before they opened the doors to the general public which one would assume would only make things even laggier.

Star Wars: The Old Republic entered their pre-launch launch period in the last couple days and I am not a part of them. I've been tricked too many times to play an MMO at launch and just been frustrated by it to the point where I didn't really even consider playing the game.

I haven't read a whole lot about it, but from what I have heard the launch seems to be relatively smoothly. To be fair they have heavily restricted the number of people who got early access to the game. Instead of it being everyone who paid extra it's everyone they feel like letting have access with some murky preference given to the order people preordered the game. So it's still entirely possible that while they can handle the number of people they've let in so far that it'll all crash and burn when they let the unwashed masses in on the 20th.

That said, what I've been reading has certainly piqued my interest. People complain that it's just World of Warcraft with lightsabers, voice acting, and cutscenes. But I played WoW for 6 years so clearly I enjoy the gameplay at least somewhat. I like good voice acting and cutscenes. Lightsabers are cool. And if playing all the Final Fantasy games shows anything at all it shows that I like playing the same basic game with some flavour and mechanical differences...

I'm still wary and waiting to reserve judgment until after the game launches for real to see how the servers hold up but I'm thinking of giving the game a shot after I get back from New Brunswick. So the question is... Is anyone else I know playing the game? Planning on playing the game? Willing to give it a shot if I do? Let me know!

NCSoft Response

It took 25 hours but the NCSoft people replied to my ticket about my lost log-in information. Unfortunately the reply was a form letter. I used to work in a support role for an online game and I certainly sent out my fair share of form letters so I'm not sure it's really ok to complain, but I'm going to do it anyway. In my case I was rarely in a position to actually do anything and sending people to a form to fill out was all I could do. I'd like to think in my case here that 'Sam' could have done something more.

At any rate, if I can't answer my security questions I need to fill out a bunch of other information. I can somewhat see why they'd want me to answer this stuff to prove I'm actually me since they don't want just anybody logging in to my account. On the other hand the account has been inactive for almost 6 years and I'm not asking for the information to be sent to me. I want it sent to the email address registered with the account when it was created. It feels like it would be a good customer experience to just give me my account back. Best case scenario I'm actually me and they make me happy by limiting the hoops I need to jump through. Worst case scenario someone steals an account I haven't used in 6 years. Disaster scenario is someone steals an account I haven't used in 6 years and then I actually show up and want it back too. In that case I'd just find a way to restore what I'd be missing and kick the thief out. It feels like the disaster scenario should be a lot rarer than the best case scenario, especially after they send out a recruiting drive email.

The stuff the form wants me to answer is my name, address, and date of birth as of when I created my account. (I can't imagine by birth day would have changed!) It wants the serial codes for the games added to the account, and the unique account IDs sent when I activated those games. It also wants the last 4 digits of my credit card used to activate the account.

Some of that I can provide. I do still have the initial email so I have that account id. I don't have the last 4 digits of that credit card since that credit card expired like 5 years ago and I didn't keep it. (I also had to have it changed after some fraud concerns.) I don't have a clue what the serial code would be. I've moved several times since then and the City of Villains box is not something that made it through all those moves. Frankly I don't even know where I was living when I activated the game. It wasn't out in New Brunswick since I was playing with my brother online only. It wasn't with Pounder, I don't think, since I don't recall trying to convince him to play with me. So it was probably one of the random places in Waterloo I lived in for 4 months?

So, yeah, I don't have most of the information they want. I might be able to eventually convince them that I'm me despite not having the info they want. (I once had my Yahoo account get hacked and managed to get it back by taking the 'come on, please?' tactic over and over until it worked.) Getting to take a picture of Oroku Saki is really not worth all that hassle though.

Time to uninstall a game I didn't get a chance to try again. Sorry, City of Villains, you lose.

NCSoft "Security" Issues

I got up this afternoon around 3 and, true to my word, started installing City of Heroes. It downloaded some sort of launcher program first and then that started installing the game itself. I busied myself in other windows, screwing around in Galaxy Legion and playing some turns of board games on Yucata.

Suddenly my second monitor went black. (My computer is a laptop with a larger monitor connected via an HDMI port.) My laptop monitor flickered and came back with a drastically reduced resolution. Then my second monitor returned. I was a little freaked out, especially since nothing had popped up to indicate anything would be happening. Things were lagging but I managed to get to my desktop and change the resolution back. Then I looked and realized that City of Heroes had finished installing enough to launch itself in the background without telling me and took it on itself to wreck my display settings.

I went to that window and had a hard time moving around. It would seem it didn't realize that I'd changed the resolution back so if I wanted to click a button I had to move my mouse to where the client thought the button was instead of where the screen was showing it. Ok, fine. I manage to click the exit button after fighting for a few minutes and relaunch it. It screwed up my display again so I sucked that up and tried to log in. No go. I didn't know what my password was and it wasn't any of my standard ones circa 2005. Not too surprising I guess, so I went to the password recovery form. They know my email address (after all, they spammed me to get me to come back) so this should be a simple fix, right? Send a new password to my email address and let me play.

Nope. I enter my username in the password recovery form and they tell me I need to answer the security questions I chose when I created my account. I hate this sort of thing, but ok. What questions did I pick? My father's middle name and the name of the hospital where I was born.

WHAT?

I don't know the name of the hospital where I was born. I can't imagine 2005 Nick knew that either. On a whim I checked my birth certificate in case it said. Nope. Other than calling my mother and seeing if she knows I can't think of a way to get that information. There's no way I would have done that in 2005 to create a game account. Maybe I put in dummy information assuming I wouldn't need to use it? Regardless, there's no way I can get my account back via the form.

I found a way to contact support and sent them an email explaining my case and complaining that the form wouldn't let me get my account back. That was 5 hours ago with no response as yet. On the one hand it is the weekend and maybe they don't have people checking their support inbox right now. On the other hand they did just send out a recruiting email and needed to expect some people would try to log in and be unable to. I theorized that they sent the email on a Friday so I could spend my free weekend trying their game out again. Well, I can't do that because they're not letting me and it's not making me happy. I was willing to spend a couple hours trying the game again. Instead I've spent those hours installing software which screws with my display settings and trying to get back an account. It hasn't been fun and I'm pretty much giving up at this point.

The launcher listed some other games. Aion, Guild Wars, Lineage 2. Apparently they all use one master account like Blizzard's Battle.Net. So I can't play those games either. I did a little searching about this NCSoft master account and apparently it's a bit of a disaster. Apparently those security questions I couldn't answer? Added in on March, 2011. Which raises all kinds of questions... How did NCSoft find out my father's middle name? How do they know where I was born? How can they possibly justify keeping me out of my account for not knowing the answers to questions they made up? Do they not even want me to be able to recover my account?

I then found a horror story which is really hard to imagine happening. Apparently when you logged into your NCSoft master account it would sometimes log you in as someone else. Changing your password and other information once you were logged in didn't require reauthentication. So you'd log in as someone else and could then change their password to whatever you wanted. Which would give you access to their Aion account. And their CoH account. And their GW account... Sleazy people who figured this out would then log in and our of their account over an over until the site gave them access to someone else's account at which point they'd clean them out and repeat.

I'm just flabbergasted. The way they seem to handle security given those two things just blows my mind. I have so many games to play that I can't imagine giving these people my time or my money. One of my old WoW friends has been trying to convince me to play Guild Wars 2 when it comes out but it's an NCSoft title and I'm really not sure it's worth the risk. If I'm going to invest a lot of time into a character I want to be reasonably confident that character isn't just going to disappear one day, either to the system getting hacked or to the site randomly locking me out.

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.