The problem with this is that if you don’t have anything for players to fight for, then there isn’t much incentive to actually fight except for bloodlust sake. Another way of saying this is that if you aren’t inclined to PvP all the time, then you aren’t going to do it if there is no reason to.

The big question I am sure many are asking is why would you care if a player PvPs or not? This is a really good question, and the simple answer to this question is emergent gameply, or player-created content. No matter how much we put time into programming NPC fights, they will be figured out and killed swiftly. Brad McQuaid once made a theory that inevitably what is impossible to kill today by groups will be soloable in a few weeks. This was an exaggeration, but the point is real. Any encounter that could take developers months to program won’t begin to equal a decent PvP system which might take the developers the same amount of time to code. Not only that, it would be a lasting feature which could potentially keep players occupied for years.

The other big ways that modern MMORPGs allow for Player vs Player is to have PK servers, PK switches, or arenas in towns. I don’t feel any of these really work. PK servers can work to get some of the more bloodthirsty players together, but it really only works for a larger game. For instance, I think it works in WoW but never felt it worked in Asheron’s Call. Switches, again only moderately works but is a poor excuse for PvP. I think arenas have the best chance of working if you try to both have tournaments and if you allow others to watch these events, most of the time neither of these you can do (watching in particular everyone is worried about cheating <sigh>).

All in all, none of these work because they only really help a small segment of the population who so avidly want PvP that they generally go out of their way to get it. You still have to put the same amount of effort towards game development to give content to those who don’t want PvP in their life at all or just don’t care. ¹

Personally, I am a non-PvP player for instance. Yet, I have played Ultima Online, Shadowbane, Dark Age of Camelot and the RvR server on Asheron’s Call 2. I don’t mind a fight, in fact I think I am fairly good in a fight, but I don’t actively seek it. In non-PvP games like Everquest 2, even though there were switches and PK servers and arenas, I never bothered.

It is odd too the perception of PvP. I remember my days back in Shadowbane which was another all out PvP game. I don’t recall being killed too much without cause. In fact, I only remember it happening a few times. I feel that part of this was because player’s created their causes in the name of nations and cities. Players would group together. You wouldn’t kill someone of your own nation, even if they could, which gave a sense of belonging and safety in an unsafe world. I think it is funny because this is precisely what Ultima Online didn’t do. It makes me wonder if they allowed for killing your own side in DAoC if people would if the forts, towns, and arties were important and built by your nation. I really get the sense that these factors alone are reasons that make a player feel worth to a particular side.

>The secondary thing that I feel that there needs to be consequences to killing someone. UO tried to program a reputation system in on the fly, and it had varying degrees of success. The main problem I feel that they had was that it was kind of put together hastily and didn’t work well together with other systems and thus brought around ways to exploit the system where the killer wasn’t the one who got negative reputation, the victim did which made it worse.

I’ve thought of several ideas which could work, many of which I’m not entirely willing to put out there. But one possible thing that I thought of that may be really easy to program is bounties. Say you got killed by someone, or otherwise griefed. You could make a post in the town square offering up X gold for a kill on that player, state why you want that player killed, and even allow for multiple kills. It’d be even better if you could maybe say you will pay for the item that this killer got off you, thereby making it so that the killer by default might be facing multiple deaths until the return of the item was gotten (if you limit how many items drop).

This post would allow players to start tracking the target which would make it easier for bounty hunters to find him. I think this sort of system in conjunction with a normal reputation system could do wonders to help allow players to police their own population. Because this is essentially what we want. We want the conflict, because conflict makes drama and drama is entertaining (as long as it doesn’t go overboard). But you also need to give the tools to the player to both give them something to fight for other than bloodlust, and to give them the tools to police themselves for the murderous psychopaths that are likely to pop up in such a system.Good PvP is one of the holy grails of the MMO worlds and I don’t think ignoring it is one of the keys to fixing it.

Cryptic has always been big on instancing, City of Heroes was one of the first games to really get the instancing fully integrated. Anarchy Online was really the first, but CoH took it to a whole new level. Basically, when a particular zone became too congested, another instance of that zone would be created, and when future players tried to enter the zone they’d be given the choice, oftentimes removing previous instances as they fill up. Every zone in the game was instanced, and to take it a step further, all dungeons were instanced specifically for the group entering them. Most games since CoH has done instancing dungeons at the very least to some degree, EQ2 had its dungeons instanced, both to the world and to the group.

Champions Online took it a step further. First, they allow for bigger populations in bigger zones at any particular time, this was natural progression. However, they also allowed for players to turn off their ability to select. Basically allowing the servers to make the selection for you. This really took a lot of  the instancing out of the player’s eyes in my mind. Personally, I’d rather they would have left this done as default so that only if a player was wanting to select zones, they would have the ability to turn it on. (For instance, you could at any time click on a box in the map to switch zones if you wanted.)

This really makes me wonder about the concept in a larger scale. I for one am not a fan of zoned games like City of Heroes or Everquest. I would much prefer a game be without zones entirely like Asheron’s Call or Ultima Online. These games seem fewer and far between these days, though I do appreciate World of Warcraft’s Psuedo-Zones which don’t actually feel like zones but still are.

Seamless worlds aren’t much different than WoW’s psuedo zones realistically. The world is always split up into several zones. I know both UO and AC had these boundaries which cause lag spikes and dupe bugs when crossed that were the zone boundaries. WoW is really just a little more blatant on these zones.

The point I am getting at is, why can’t we just instance these seamless boundaries thus lowering the amount of people in one particular seamless zone? The player doesn’t even really need to be that aware that it is even happening, it would just happen behind the scenes.

The real trick is making it so the player doesn’t notice as much. The first trick is easy, just have players enter the same zone as other players in the same group. After this, I think you could institute other tricks. For instance, when you zone in it could look at where your guild mates are or where people on your friends list are. This way making it more likely for you to enter an area with people you know. This would get rid of the awkward talking to your friend and trying to meet them only to find that you are in a different instance. Also, just the ever expanding ability to have more and more in the same area would help alleviate the issue as well.

Today it seems you can have 100-150 easily in the same area, maybe tomorrow it will be 500 and with 500, you will likely have more than enough for any given location. Major cities would really be the only areas that would need more than 100 anyway. Wilderness areas and even dungeons would probably cap at significantly less, maybe 50. And more serious areas, you could instance to the group like most other major MMOs do, just seamlessly.

There of course would always be complications, and it is with these that you would need to give the player the option to switch servers at will, like they allow on City of Heroes and Champions Online. However, I could see this being a rare problem that wouldn’t detract from the experience greatly. Maybe just at launch time, after all, I think the population spreads out enough once launch periods are over that most worlds could probably do fairly well without multiple instance.

Now don’t get me wrong, I realize that account sharing definitely happens around launch of any particular expansion. But that is mostly for people racing characters to get to the latest top level. This is generally temporary, and the account sharing generally goes away once done.

I also think there is another type of player you see dual accounts on, and that is gold farmers. Now think about this people. At first I can understand that people will likely think of this as a reason NOT to do dual accounts. However, one thing gold farmers are is efficient. They have characters online and playing 24/7 because they are scheduling them correctly. What this does is it lowers cost while increasing productivity. I agree that gold farming shouldn’t exist (have said so before), but while they are there we should certainly learn tricks that they do because they are masters at doing it well.

All that being said, for the average player and account that is actually playing. You don’t see much dual playing outside of rare occasion. Maybe we should. There are several benefits to doing it.

First of all, no one can deny the immense amount of time that an MMORPG can take to really do well at. This is especially true if you have your heart set on raiding. And we don’t have the time. Generally these games get dominated by those people who have a lot of time, this often is college and high school students, or independently wealthy. Most people not in this category get left behind very quickly. We have jobs, and family, and just general recreation time not associated with the computer that we want to do, but when we are playing MMOs, we want to be just as effective.

If you want to be even a somewhat effective raider there are many things you need. And a lot of these things result in doing raid after raid, instance after instance, time and time again. Just to get to be the best that you can. They take high level crafters, and much time running around doing the best fights, finding the best kills, etc. To get where you need to go.

Second, sharing an account with someone else can help spread the cost of an MMO around. Now currently, this isn’t a huge deal. Games usually cost less than $15 a month, especially if you buy a subscription for a year or so. And if you are lucky enough to have a game like Champions Online that offers life time subscriptions, it is only a one time cost. However, there are more costs to MMOs, especially these days. For one, there is usually at least 1 expansion with MMOs, and the initial box cost. The beauty of sharing here is only person has to buy, the rest can upgrade automatically because it is per account, not computer. Second, now adays MMOs are trying to find more and more ways to milk the consumers. Most games are now starting to give you the option of buying potions for xp boosts, and other goodies, and even at a bare minimum, it costs money to move servers, and it isn’t uncommon for raiders to move servers in order to find the optimum guild.

But even without all the bells and whistles, everyone has times where they are having financial difficulties. Right now I am having such a hard time financially that even if I want to spend $15 a month on an MMO, I just can’t. So I would leave a game right now if I were into one. If I was the main healer for a raiding guild, this would be devastating (I realize that many raiding guilds will also help out financially to keep their best players, but this isn’t always the case).

The last reason that I can think would be good reason for people to share accounts in online games is that people just naturally play at different times. Personally, I would be able to play most daytimes on Fridays, and then a couple night times and every other weekend. This isn’t good for the average raiding guild which generally will require raiding 4-5 times a week. Think, if you could get 2-3 people to split that 4-5 times a week, it wouldn’t be a huge deal would it? Plus then hopefully you can get people who also just play different times. Like personally, I have a friend who is from New Zealand. That means while I am sleeping, she could play and get better loot and more money. And then she goes to bed and I take my turn. The more players you have, the less time you have to have a competent account.

There is a negative side to this idea however….

First, people like to be themselves. When you are in a group account, you really tend to get a group mentality. This isn’t a problem in Travian, but in an MMO, where it is far more social and you tend to get to know people, it is a bigger problem I think. You want to be you, not someone else. And when an account has a multiple-personality disorder it is hard to be you, and other people get confused as well.

The biggest area I see this being an issue in is hotbar set up. I have a friend in EQ2 who is a healer, I was a healer in EQ2. I’ve logged into her account before… I had no idea how to do anything. She had a certain way things needed to be set up, and I have a certain way things need to be set up to work. This would be a huge obstacle with several people on the account. For me, I don’t see it as a huge deal. I have the Nostromo Game Pad and I could set up that how I want regardless of how the hotbar is set up.

Another problem is personal information. Travian actually has a fairly hands off approach on personal info. The account has an email associated with it but that is about it. When I log into my EQ2 account info, I see my real name, my address, my email address, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of games also had telephone numbers. These are things that I am not going to want just anyone to see. Am also pretty sure that anyone who is logged into my account can charge things with my credit card without my authorization. This is a huge pitfall and I wish they’d cover this aspect a little more for the games. Most people aren’t going to want others to know this, I don’t. Basically I’d only let this stuff go if the person already knew it and there aren’t many MMO players I feel comfy with it, even my close friends don’t have address. There is no iffs ands or buts, you would have to trust the person a great deal.

Forth is playstyles. Not every person out there can be a good healer. I do think there is natural talent for some class types, some classes I think anyone can do but some take some skill. So having 3 people on one account means you have 3 differing skillsets. I mean Player A may be a great healer, but then you will also have to deal with Player B who is above average and Player C who is utter crap. Trying to get 3 good healers on the same account playing a similar way may be really difficult. I think to some degree there is practice. I feel I was a very good healer, a very good tank, a slightly above average mage, and a below average scout. But I think the second two could have gotten better with practice. And obviously there would be a benefit of sharing an account in each player would be sharing secrets to make all three better (this may not naturally happen any other way).

Lastly is the legality of it within a game. I don’t particularly know how a game would handle it. I don’t know if they’d mind or not. I’m sure some mind, am sure some are ok with it. They don’t mind people having multiple accounts (because they get more money) but would the mind multiple people?

Even with the pitfalls, I do think that account sharing is probably a good thing if you want to be a raider, and i do, I just don’t have the time, and for now money. I think there are a lot of people out there like that, in fact I think this is why WoW became as popular as it did. It gave people who didn’t have the time to be hardcore players, the ability to do a lot of stuff without the time investment that other MMORPGs had. But maybe if people teamed up to share accounts people could be more serious players on more serious games.

I guess the only question that remains is… Would you dual with me?

The game at the time didn’t really seem to have much point. You farmed to get crop, sold it, farmed to get crop sold it, and every now and then you would break for a mini game or two. Well all that really hasn’t changed, however, I don’t know, maybe it is that there is more organization or knowledge amongst the players, but it seems to have more promise than it did before.

Specifically, it seems to me that because you know there are things to work towards and what those things are, you would be more willing to sit and deal with the early junk. For instance, I now know that on day 50 (which I recently passed) you get access to a large portion of the map that allows you to use stoves and wheat fields which give a 10% bonus to your efforts. Also having access to the map gets you access to more locations where NPCs spawns and it turns out that killing NPCs is a major source of experience, so I’ve been gaining more xp than I used to. Also at about day 35, you gain access to a second profession, so that you aren’t just farming anymore, you can bake or do something else as well.

In fact, this game largely seems to be of the variety where the longer you play, the more you do. You get access to cool baths and furniture, bigger and better beds which let you regenerate Occupation points faster, banks, gift shops and more. Certainly when I hit age 50, it became far more busy of a game than age 49. I think it is very strange and in drastic difference from Travian.

Travian actually has a really good first 30 – 60 days of the game. The first week goes rather slow due to lack of resources to really upgrade. They solved this to some extent however with the quests that they added that not only give you something to do, they give you resources to work with in this slow period. But after the first week, the game continuously picks up. The game is actually very addictive in the first few months…

Travians however is not addicting at all until the the first few months are over. When Travian is starting to slow down and get more boring, Travians is picking up and becoming worth playing. The problem is suffering the initial experience and getting to the meat of the game. I think this is why the game suffers and doesn’t gain many people. Most of the time when designing a game, you want to make a game that is at the very fun up front so that you bring people into the game but the designers of Travians failed on this utterly. They made a game that was fairly ok once you’ve sat there and tolerated it for a few months. This isn’t good for an on-line game however.

The developers have also been busy adding things over the course of the last two years, slowly but surely. Shortly after I came into the game again, they added a day/night function so that you can see night time. I also believe they have added an achievement portion to the game so that you get medals for doing various things in the game, like harvesting x amount of grain. They’ve added a few mini-games including Poker. Stationary for messages. I’m not sure if they added generations later, or if people just found out about it as it came. And of course they added more Diamond features.

The other real contention I had with it was that the game seemed like a big money grab by the developers. They wanted to get more money from their players than they ever had from Travian, and this point I feel remains true. Many of the nice furnitures costs money to get, and this I don’t actually mind. They have some furniture that is free so it is a luxury to get them. But honestly I wish that the furniture did something more than just look pretty for the money I spend on it. Baths and beds are one of the few functional pieces that actually cost real money. All baths cost at least a little money, beds are free unless you want say a double bed, that will cost money.

Besides furniture, you can just look at the list of things to buy in the features list and see that they really are trying to milk money out of their customers with this game. There is a list of 20 things to buy instead of 5.  And then there is redistributing Occuptional and Action Points in Travians, which I consider to be extremely similar to redistributing resources in Travian, a whopping 40 diamonds in Travians compared to the 3 in Travian. Now don’t get me wrong, I agree that it is a far bigger deal in Travians than Travian, but I still don’t see the value topping 10. In fact, if they did it at a value of say 6, I believe that people would use the feature a lot and they would probably make more money out of it overall.

I think that I can look down the list of diamond features that Travians offers and say that they are all a little overpriced. They aren’t bad things to pay money for the most part for, they just over did on the price for what you get. A lot of the other ones that may not be badly priced are just not described. Cheaper resources may be good but no idea what price cheaper is. It could be 1 copper less or it could be half price what you can get on the market. I think it is probably somewhere in between but who knows. I did buy a treasure map for 5 diamonds at one point just to see what I got, I got about 1.5 gold. I didn’t think this was worth the 5 diamonds and again, if they said “you get 1.5 gold” I probably wouldn’t have done it, especially since it still took me like 10 minutes to get the exact right spot for the treasure.

I do think the game can be pretty fun, but I think it is fairly sad that I benefited greatly from giving up on the game and coming back later. As it added 15 days to my life which really sped me through the quests and gave me access to the stuff faster. First generation players seem to matter less if you don’t level fast so that isn’t a big deal. I would say for new people to go play the first week, and then to just stop playing for a week or two and come back. You’ll be happier with the game overall than if you tried to suffer through the slowness of the first couple of months.

The first thing to note of Nile Online is the graphics. Initially, I thought that the developers pulled the art directly from Sierra’s old 90s strategy game, Pharaoh. Indeed, some of the buildings look strangely similar, but I will give them the benefit of the doubt given the similar topic of that game. The graphics are however quite nice for a browser game, but you do get kind of sick of looking at them as all of your villages tend to look the same. For instance, a gem mine looks exactly like a gold mine except for the type of material that is out front.

Not a huge deal in and of itself, but there is limited customization as well. They do give you several buildings to choose from, however you can only build a shop building in a shop plot, a warehouse in a warehouse plot, a temple in a temple plot and so forth. This means that your villages will look pretty much the same which was likely a boon for the development team but kind of sad as a player. The only real differences you get is where to put shops as you get 3 or 4 shop plots to place in. Of course of these, you must build a brick shop, a bakery, a pottery shop and a basket shop really leaving only one different shop per village.

The game seems to move extremely slow. Sometimes taking hours before you can do anything. Now don’t get me wrong, after having 50 things to do 24/7 in Travian for a few months, this is a needed relief but it gets rather boring at times. Really, I log in, set some things to build, try to set up a few trades, and maybe send some shipments out. Then I’ll leave the game for a few hours and come back hoping to find something to do again. Originally, I had hoped that it would be like Travian which is quite slow for the first few days, but I don’t think it speeds up ever, it is a really slow game.

You can build military troops in the game to participate in raids against your area by bandits, but this is a completely optional part of the game, you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to. There also doesn’t seem to be any attacking other players so alot of the game is just trading.

This is where some of the strategy really comes into play. There are 9 luxury resources in the game, of which any particular village can only have one. You as a player can only own up to 4 villages so at best you will get slightly less than half of the luxury resources at any given time. On top of that, these luxury resources can be combined with each other to create one of six luxury goods. These luxury goods are required at a very early stage to build various buildings, including the palace which dictates how many laborers you can have in play at any given time, which you then use to create more resources and goods.

So the strategy is certainly there, and they have a worthy system in place. I think the major disappointment in the game is the lack of any sort of military action between players, even if it is voluntary. I am very interested to get started in what military there is in the game, and you can build monuments later which I’m not entirely sure what the point is quite yet, and lastly at palace level 7 you get envoys which can do quests. These all I think add more interest in the later part of the game which I have not yet gotten to.

Overall, I think the game is a good way to pass time if you have a lot of time to pass. Unfortunately, I just don’t see any sort of longevity in the game, at least for me. I think I am going to get bored of the game rather quickly which I suppose is ok, but it is a shame because I have a feeling most players would.

Originally posted on 08/27/01
by species, not type

Honorable Mention:

I was fighting soldiers as per the usual for me when Kohlia logged in and said she was going to attempt to get the Sword of Lost Light. Being the good monarch that I try to be I offered to help as soon as I sold all the junk I was luggin around.  (Plus I needed it with this character as well!)

Remembering the tragedy that befell us on our last trip (with my other character) where both she and another friend had died, I took it upon myself to see if I could find some help on the job. I soon recruited Stranger II, Mythras, and Greystar to join in, but Greystar had some technical difficulties and couldn’t do it. And then we were on our way.

After stocking up I opened a portal to subway where we hopped a train to Mayoi and ran to the South Dires Portal. There we proceeded to buff up and put on our good armor and hopped in the portal.

The run through the South Dires wasn’t too bad. There were alot of various golems, tuskers, virindi, greivvers, and luggies but they weren’t too hard to run past though we did get stuck the occasional time with an imperil IV from a Striker. The main thing was is that this is a LONG run, I am sure there is a shorter way to get there but not by much. There aren’t any tyable portals in the area that people actually go to so we had to run it.

Once we got there, we rested off the debuffs, buffed up again and proceeded through the various doors of the dungeon. I didn’t write down the order of the doors because I had previously (and it is now buried somewhere in my papers) but Kohlia may have, if she does I will see if we can get the order posted in the message boards.

It isn’t a very huge dungeon because in a few minutes we were down on the bottom. Throughout the dungeon there are a few Lichs but not a great deal, that changes a little on the bottom where there are a bunch of Lichs scattered along the way.

We made our way through the Lichs and got into the main room. The main room has about 6 Lichs, 2 Lich Lords, 1 Granite Golem, and the Guardian. We quickly dispatched all of these, so quickly in fact that I wondered why we had a hard time the last time we went.

There is a 14 minute wait for each spawn so there was a lot of downtime just sitting around and chatting. We also helped someone who came in to get her Sword as well. It was a very successful quest and lots of fun.

The Sword of Lost Light quest is one of the best quests in the game and is vaunted for each sword user to get. It’s not the greatest sword in the world since the Atlans came about, but the dev team continues to update it with oils and the recent acid add-on to keep it viable. Not to mention it is still a huge status symbol.

I would like to thank Stranger II and Mythras for helping us get it. (and for those of you wondering, no there is not a fire orb.)

I have no idea why. Maybe it is because a couple of months ago I got an email from Turbine telling me that they are celebrating their 10th anniversary (a fact that the game has been around for 10 years still amazes me!!!). Maybe it is that I have a yearning for a real MMO, not the WoW-styled crap that seems to be swarming the internet gaming sphere these days. Maybe it is the want to return to the olden days of MMOs when I actually enjoyed them. Maybe it is that I just miss playing MMOs for real. I don’t know but I’ve been wanting to play AC again of late.

I do think that a good sign of a quality game is one that you return to over and over again through the years. Even if it is only for a month or two. I don’t think that is much. I mean obviously there are reasons that we have all moved on from older games, many of them have run their course. It really is difficult to play these games for hours on end if the graphics are subpar than what we used to. They are broken, deserted, etc. But they still are quality games that were very fun for us to play at one point, and likely still are for short bursts still.

My list of games that I probably would return to from time to time is Asheron’s Call, Ultima Online, and City of Heroes obviously. Champions Online I’m not sure how that’ll turn out, I am guessing not well considering I grew bored so quickly. I don’t feel it had the magic that CoH had even though it fixed many of the issues CoH did. EQ2 I also am unsure of. That game wasn’t ever really fun playing alone, you had to be in groups, and much of the content you could play alone with was repetitive to the point that I overplayed much of it already. And then it was also a game that was dictated more on raids. These types of features don’t lend well to returning to it very much and I’m also unsure of how high I rate it, probably not in my top 5, it was just my top 1 for the span of a year or two, not all time.

So with that, I’ve re-activated the account. Let’s say it is in honor of its 10th Anniversary. As we speak I am at 5% of downloading updates (hey Turbine, update your client download to include the patches!!!). I feel like I should read up on some of the changes in the game so that I can explore some of the new stuff but I don’t really have a ton of time to read through all the patch notes and from what I can see, it doesn’t seem to be as well organized as what it used to be.

I know not many people actually play AC anymore. From what I can tell to this day it is mostly populated by bots and macros. This is the primary reason that I stopped playing AC years ago and is a big reason why instead of playing a little every year I am playing a little every few years. It is a system that works well for the players and the developers that are still there. But works extremely poorly for trying to maintain or bring back older players who want to play the game honestly.

But it is there thing, I just need to plan on not talking to anyone.  I am glad they finally got global chat going in the game. In some ways it sucks that it is there. I remember people complaining about the lack of global chat in AC back in the old EQ vs AC debate. But after playing many games since then, I think I honestly prefer the globaless system of AC and UO far more to the constant chatter, bickering, spam, selling, trading, begging, and flaming that goes on in those systems. Even guild chat tends to be like this (though not as bad) and I guess I just prefer that if you have a group of players who want to chat, you gotta be near them. There is something special, it adds something to the feel of the game, whereas I think the global chat detracts from it.

I think the event really came in three main parts. The PvE, PvP and then the new powerset. The PvP I probably did the least, I did just enough to be able to get the perks that would unlock the power set for me. There were actually two pieces to the PvP events. There were werewolves and zombies. The zombie part I didn’t do at all. However, from what I heard about it, I kind of like it. All the players except one start out as humans superheroes. The zombie super hero then tries to kill the human ones and as the humans die they turn into zombies. The longer you stay alive the more points you get. A really cool idea, but I just didn’t have interest myself in it.

The other PvP was open zone between werewolves and hunters. Players chose either side, and then just went out and started killing the other side. You got perks for killing 100 of the opposing side, and in order to get the unlock you actually had to do it with both sides. I am torn on this. The event turned out to be a zerg, but generally if it was one on one, the hunter almost always beat a werewolf. The two sides were fairly imbalanced. In fact, when I moved over to hunter, I could take on two or three werewolves before they would get me down, and I wouldn’t even move constantly like other hunters would. Because you had to kill 100 on each side, it also became a thing where people would just kind of die so that the other side got their numbers. Still, when all worked well, it was kind of fun when there were 15 hunters attacking 15 werewolves and I think in those few moments the event worked well. It was fun seeing the werewolves in the game too and I wonder if they will continue to exist after the event is over.

The PvE events revolved around 13 super heroes who died in the Battle of Detroit, and you the player trying to save their souls from an evil super villain who is trying to destroy them. I really liked this premise for the main reason that it was really cool to head into the lore of the super heroes of the Champions Universe. However, 13 may have been a bit much. Each hero would involve attacking and killing the zombie hero, then entering a portal and destroying the soul’s captor. The first few heroes was great fun, but then it got really old really fast. By the fifth or sixth dungeon, I would essentially just run through, ignoring the hordes of zombies and get to the final room to free the soul to get done with it. There were only like three dungeon stages to travel through so it was really repetitive, and it didn’t help that they used the same voice acting for every single super hero. You might not have noticed had they been spaced out, but doing one after the other… it just was silly. I’d rather they not have voice acting at all than having the same voice actor saying the same thing for 13 different heroes.

Once you unlocked about 7 perks, you unlocked the Celestial power set. This was the big carrot. Some players complained that it wasn’t freely available to everyone without work, but I actually liked that they made it so that you had to experience the events in order to unlock the set. Largely because if you would have just let everyone have access to it, no one would have done the events, they’d just go create a new character and then there’d be loads of celestial heroes in the newb zone and no one doing the events. But also because it does give you reason to do stuff you might not do. I for one, probably wouldn’t have done the PvP aspect of the werwolf. I probably would have fought werewolves and just have been done, but they kind of forced me into the event and I had fun doing it.

The celestial power set itself is up and down. The graphics are great looking, and the idea behind the set is cool too. Champions Online needed a true healing power set and finally there is one. However, the set itself is kind of weak, by design you really can’t be celestial only because there just isn’t enough powers compared to other sets. I do like that it not only heals but it does damage too depending on what you have selected. However, this showcases an issue in CO that you really can’t target through another player in the game. If I wanted to go from attacking to healing it is far more difficult in this game than any other game I’ve played.

Another issue that the celestial power set has showcased in the game of Champions is that I know absolutely no one to play with. My main character is now level 33 and has never needed to group to level quickly and thus I don’t have a list of friends to play with. So when I switch to a healer type character, I find myself at a disadvantage because not only do I not know anyone, no one else needs a group either to level quickly. And even worse, the LFG functionality is so deeply buried in the game that no one even knows where to look to find players even if they did want help. The inclusion of a support role into the game really emphasizes the fact that no one groups in the game which really is a shame for a genre that lives and breathes off people playing with each other.

Lastly,  I wanted to talk about another thing that came up over this event. They included with the first weekend of the event a free weekend that anyone could play if they wanted to. So if you weren’t sure of the game, you could download it and give it a shot. This is really a bad sign for the game. Usually these games don’t start doing this until a couple years down the road. Yet here it is in the second month and they feel the need to do this to try to draw in more players. It actually could be an ingenious plan to try to continue the early growth that likely starts to die down after a couple of months, but if you ask me it looks bad.

I think the future of the game will be shown by the next content update. Both in how long it takes for them to release it as well as what is in it. If they don’t put the next patch out in two months again and wait longer, it isn’t looking good or if the next patch doesn’t have as much if not more than this one it doesn’t look good. And let’s also keep in mind that they have yet to announce their first expansion.

And why wouldn’t they? This advertisement is a form of validation to the WoW player and they need anything they can get, as anyone who plays constantly waving the paid prescription number in everyone’s faces can prove. In fact all MMO players generally need this validation in reality. The MMO market has been looked down upon by anyone and everyone, even other gamers. A commercial that gets aired as regularly as this one is like these guys proving that what they do is worth doing.

There have been similar instances in the past. The main one I can recall is when Sony Online Entertainment put a feature in Everquest 2 that allowed players to order pizza from Pizza Hut from within the game by typing /pizzahut. This got lambasted by WoW players at the time, and Blizzard even poked fun with a /pandaexpress April Fool’s Joke.

So the irony is not lost on me now that they are selling out to their own commercial interests and WoW fanboys are loving every minute of it.¹

I mean lets forget that this tie in isn’t as good as the Pizza Hut one completely. At least the Pizza Hut tie in brought something to the table. I mean it made sense. Gamers like pizza, MMO players don’t like to leave their game. So why not bring their food to them? Now don’t get me wrong, Pizza Hut is really crappy pizza and I would have rather they chosen a different brand, but the idea behind it was top notch. What do you get for the Mountain Dew commercial? That’s right, annoyed.

Still, I don’t necessarily blame them. I am sure if a similar advertisement came out for EQ2 or another MMO and/or game that I really enjoyed I’d love it too, despite being horrible. It’s just kind of the nature of the beast. The real question that should get asked though is how many new sodas will Mountain Dew sell for this tie-in? I doubt they bring anyone new into the mix.