MMOs I Have Played – Pass It On
Taken from Trembling Hand, I thought this would be an interesting retrospective on my gaming.
How many MMOs have you played? How long did you spend in each one? Which did you enjoy the most?
They're the questions I asked myself the other day, and it resulted in the interesting list below (remind me: why do I still play MMOs, when I haven't enjoyed any of the recent crop?). I figured I'd also throw it open to the MMO blogging community and ask what MMOs have you played?
MMO -- months played -- star rating out of five*
- A Tale In The Desert -- 1 -- ***
- Aion -- 3 -- *****
- Cabal Online -- .25 -- *
- Chronicles of Spellborn -- .5 -- *
- City of Heroes -- 6 -- ***
- Dungeons and Dragons Online -- 1 -- **
- Earth and Beyond -- 5 -- ***
- Free Realms -- .5 -- *
- Guild Wars -- 6 -- ****
- Kingdom of Loathing -- 4 -- ****
- Lord of the Rings Online -- 6 -- ****
- Maple Story -- 3 -- ****
- Megami Tensai Online: IMAGINE -- .5 -- **
- Planetside -- 2 -- ***
- Pirates of the Burning Sea -- .5 -- **
- RF Online -- .5 -- *
- Rose Online -- 1 -- **
- Runes of Magic -- 1 -- **
- Tabula Rasa -- .5 -- *
- Warhammer Online -- .5 -- **
- Wizard101 -- 3 -- *****
- World of Warcraft -- 60 -- *****
*Star rating is an entirely subjective measure of how much you liked it at the time, not how much you'd enjoy playing it today.
Spoiled By WoW
After being out of WoW for almost a month, I realize now how spoiled I had become by the game. While there were a lot of spoiling in-game conveniences, that is not what I am talking about as many games do in-game just as well if not better. What I am speaking of is the access to information out of the game.
Things like WoWHead, Thottbot, WoWDB, WoWWiki, Elitist Jerks and even the official forums have completely spoiled me. Due to the millions upon millions of people playing the game, there is more information than you could ever need. It never takes too long to find out what you need to know if you have a question.
Still not able to find what you need for that quest? Checking on WoWHead probably shows fifty comments of people on any little aspect of the quest.
Wonder what gear or build is best for your class? The official forums and Elitist Jerks are going to be filled with threads and posts by people who have crunched the numbers and can tell you which avenue is best.
This ease of information is not available for most other games. There have been multiple times in Lord of the Rings Online or Runes of Magic that I have been frustrated due to not being able to find answers to questions. People in game do not know, there is nothing on the forums and the wikis on the games are incomplete.
I think the game with the most complete out-of-game info is Guild Wars. The two wikis for that game are amazing resources filled with maps, mission walkthroughs, and quest information.
While many people may blast the WoW community, at least having that many people makes getting information easier.
Understanding Microtransactions
In the past, I have not been a fan of microtransactions. And while I am still not a fan of content that is exclusive to microtransactions or double dipping with subscriptions and microtransactions, I have come to a peace with the concept overall. This has mainly happened due to Runes of Magic.
Runes of Magic has a giant item shop where you can buy a multitude of items that are a nice convenience. This is the kind of implementation I like. If you do not like microtransactions, you could accomplish anything you wanted in the game without spending a cent. The items within the cash shop are mostly things such as potions to increase your experience gain for an hour, potions to refund your training points (sort of like WoW talent points), mounts, unique vanity outfits, and other items like this.
Furthermore, you do not buy the items directly with cash. You go on their website and buy "diamonds" and then use the diamonds in the store to buy items. It is a similar to XBox live currency.
Two of the aspects of the diamond system I like the most is that you can gift items to other people and you can sell diamonds on the auction house for gold. This benefits diamond buyers and those that play for free. For a diamond buyer like me, I can basically buy gold through a legitimate in-game method and for people that play for free, if they are good at making gold, they can buy diamonds and have access to cash shop goods.
I like this system. It allows me to play when I want to rather than feeling like I have to play the game because I am tied in with a monthly subscription. As it stands, I could see myself spending $15-$30 a month on Runes of Magic between diamonds for myself and Rynala.
Ixobelle recently talked about microtransactions and "buyer anxiety" when it comes to making a ton of micropurchases instead of having an "invisible" monthly payment. I do not think that buyer anxiety has ever been my problem with microtransactions and free to play games. It has always been something more like Syncaine actually talks about in a blog post he just wrote up today. Free to play MMOs have a terrible habit of giving people who play microtransactions a terrible advantage.
The person playing for free will not be able to compete when the paying players can buy gear and weapons that are incredibly better than anything else available in game. Free Realms sells level 1 swords that are better than anything a level 20 blacksmith can craft. In Runes of Magic, it is limited to items of convenience so in the end the free player will be on almost equal ground as the paying player.
I think that the microtransaction model could pick up greatly in the west so long as it kept with a business model of limiting the microtransaction items to only items of convenience, not blocking off certain classes or content as only obtainable via microtranactions, and not trying to double dip with both microtransactions and subscriptions.
The Runes of Magic Romp
So my playing of LotRO has become a lot more casual lately. I was playing a lot initially, but now I am taking it quite a bit slower. LotRO is my game to play when Rynala is busy doing other stuff and does not have time to game. Weekdays are usually the time I get to play the most. As for WoW, do not ever feel a need to log in currently. I may occasionally stop in for five minutes for a quick chat with friends, but other than that, I do not see myself playing much again until patch 3.2 comes out.
The main game Rynala and I have been playing is Guild Wars. We are about 75% of the way done with the Nightfall campaign and are really enjoying it. We started back into the game a couple months ago and hit a rough patch when working through the Factions campaign. The Factions campaign just pales in excitement and epicness compared to Prophecies and Nightfall. Now that we are back in Nightfall, we are zipping through the game. I hope that Eye of the North turns out to be as exciting.
This past weekend, however, we decided to give Runes of Magic a try. I originally had played this game back when it was in beta in February and left the game due to lack of community at the time. Now that I have someone to play along side, I am enjoying the game quite a bit more. I am leveling up a Priest/Knight and Rynala is leveling up a Warrior/Mage. We both got to about level 14 on our main class and level 8 on our secondary class.
The game does some things that I really like. There are even questing designs like I talked about recently. In the middle of every town there are bulletin boards with lists of repeatable quests and although only 10 of the repeatable bulletin board quests can be done a day, you can do however many of each quest you want multiple times until you reach 10. The quest text in this game is VERY brief. An example of a quest would be: "Farmer Joe posted this notice: Beetles are in the crops. I hate beetles ruining my crops. Please kill them all." I love this design.
While it is not a game that I would end up devoting my full focus to, it has been a nice diversion. The questing is your standard affair of kill ten rats or deliver this package, but that has never really bothered me. I have really been just taking this game as something to play on the side and I think it works well for that. A lot of people write of off as just being a WoW clone and while there are things that seem stolen straight out of WoW, I think the game is better for that. The game has plenty of designs on its own that help it stand out in my mind.
The most amazing thing about this game is just how it handles microtransactions and its cash shop. I finally get it. I will probably write more on that tomorrow.
Runes of Magic
Just a quick post. I was up pretty late (due to falling asleep to early) so I finally got Runes of Magic installed and patched up (a 90 minute initial patching process UGH). I must say I am VERY pleasantly surprised by this game. I just wanted to give it a test drive because later today a good friend of mine from WoW and I plan on creating characters together and trying the game out fully. For the 45 minutes I played tonight, I must say this is the most polished free-to-play MMO I have seen yet. I will write more later today or tomorrow.