We Fly Spitfires – MMORPG Blog

Welcome back weeks are always a great way to tempt old players back to long forgotten MMORPGs and yesterday I received an email from Codemasters offering me a free 7 days of Lord of the Rings Online starting Monday 8th March. Top it off, they’re also advertising a discounted 3 month subscription for only £17.97/€25.38 which isn’t a bad deal at all (although I can’t help but wonder why the Euro rate is the equivalent of £22.50 – Codemasters must be trying to exploit Jimmy Foreigner). As far as I’m aware, this offer is for the European LotRO only.

My mild mannered middle aged avatars always scare the crap out of enemies

I was kinda tempted. For a moment. But I’ve decided again it and I don’t think I’ll be embarking to the land of Middle Earth any time soon. It’s a shame, I know. My big problem is time and I just never seem to have enough of it these days to squeeze in all of the gaming, blogging and wife-lovin’ that is required. Right now, I’m happy enough patronising my brother in World of Warcraft and fantasizing about returning to EVE Online. Plus, no matter how much I try, no matter how much I know that it’s a good game, I can’t help but find LotRO quite, well, dull.

That’s the problem with games based around strong IPs. It’s great for getting you hyped about a game and it’s great for providing you with a familiar setting but ultimately there’s only so many movies, books, comics, video games, action figures and decorated underwear that you can consume before you eventually become sick of the entire thing. If anything, I think that’s going to be LotRO Achilles’ heel.

So don’t expect to see Cromwell the Wonderful romping around Gondor anytime soon.

P.S. Dark Age of Camelot Europe is also offering a free trial until the 25th March to celebrate the game’s liberation from the evil hands of GOA. The game is now operated by EA-Mythic themselves meaning we should see up-to-date patches and proper customer support. Not that I ever had anything against GOA and their astounding incompetence.

The BBC News website had an article about EVE Online today. Apparently CCP employ an economic analyst to monitor the in-game economy and the daily transactions (all 1.2 million of them), watching the ebb and flow of commodities and looking for trends and possible cheating. It’s sounds like the perfect world for economists, one in which every minor detail is recorded perfectly, data mining heaven for the right sort of geek.

The EVE UI: Slightly less painful than being punched in the face

This particular geek with the lucky job (I mean that sincerely – stats are sexy) happens to be Dr Eyjolfur Gudmundsson and apparently he reckons the real world (y’know, the Physical Realm) could learn a lot from EVE Online. And if by that he means greed, backstabbing, dirty politics and corruption, then I hate to break it to him but it’s a lesson we’ve already learnt.

Of course he doesn’t though. He means that Planet Earth and it’s fragile banking system could benefit from the level of transparency available when analysing a game like EVE. Gudmundsson says “people do make the good choices when they have the right information” and that the lack of information is why we’re all in the mucky money mess we’re in now. I couldn’t agree more.

And on another note, this is exactly why EVE is outstanding and the perfect example of how it’s more of a “virtual world” than a video game. It offers a living, breathing, flowing economy, the likes of we we don’t see in most MMORPGs. It’s heck of a lot of fun, but it’s also the closest thing we have to actually escaping into another Matrix-like dimension. Plus it’s just bloody fascinating. The game has it’s own in-house statistician for crying out loud!

Whilst writing yesterdays article, I noticed something a little odd about Ten Ton Hammer’s 2009 MMO awards (note that their tagline was “Recoginizing excellence in the MMOGs of 2009″): their award for best RPG went to... Dragon Age: Origins?

"If you draw aggro, I'm so not healing you"

DA:O is a great game and deserves recognition but I was slightly baffled as to why it was happening in an award “ceremony” reserved purely for MMO games. Unless I slept through a gigantic patch, Dragon Age is strictly an offline single player game and thus not only should it not even be a consideration for the category but surely it should be getting stomped into tiny little pieces by all of those glorious games that are defined, by name and nature, as being Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games.

However, as Ten Ton Hammer pointed out in the article, they couldn’t actually find a MMORPG that offered any decent sense of roleplay or story and therefore had to look further afield for something suitable. A little odd but, more to the point, extremely concerning. If not even a single cotton-pickin’ MMORPG can win an award for being a RPG in the MMO category then, by Gawd, something must be utterly wrong, right?

I’m not entirely convinced by TTH’s argument about lack of roleplay in MMOs though as I believe it just takes form in a different way from than in a single player games. In single player games, you are force to conform to a role yet in MMO you, the player and your personality and the way your talk and interact with others, are responsible for your own roleplay. You don’t need to do anything to roleplay other than to just log in and start doing it.

However, I can definitely certify that fewer and fewer MMORPGs are supplying roleplaying functions and facilities. World of Warcraft, the most popular MMORPG, doesn’t even give you the option to write your own character’s biography, something that I find pretty shocking. Plus, the story in almost every MMOs is pretty minimal and forget about doing anything to permanently influence NPCs or the outcome. At the end of the day, when we compare our MMOs to great single player games like Dragon Age, the RPG mechanics come across as lacking (to say the least).

So I can completely understand why TTH gave the RPG award to DA:O. It’s sad though and depresses me a little. I mean, why do we even bother using the term MMORPG anymore anyway?

EVE Online’s February newsletter revealed that the game was voted the best MMO community of 2009 by Ten Ton Hammer. I wasn’t surprised at all by this and I’m not going to dispute the award but I did think it would be interesting to look at it in more depth and comment on some of their, um, comments.

EVE Online... it does make for lovely screenshots

Ten Ton Hammer’s justification for determining that EVE has the best MMORPG community is based on a few things: the fact that all players exist on a single server, that the developers work closely and communicate with the players, and that it’s just plain “hard to play EVE without becoming a part of the larger community”. The author must have been tight on time or watching the word count because all of these points are pretty flimsy and lacking in depth.

Although factors like the single server and Council of Stellar Management (CSM) help, they aren’t the be-all and end-all of community from my perspective. I don’t think size matters (/giggle) and to me it makes no difference is a server encompasses 2,000 players or 200,000 players, quantity doesn’t impact quality of community. Likewise, if we judged community by forum interaction or number of fan sites and blogs, World of Warcraft would come out in leading position and well all know that would be utter rubbish.

So do I think the award is wrong? No, actually, absolutely not. I only played EVE for a couple of months but I did get a sense of something vast and exciting out there, a large player base bonded together either through comradery or backstabbing hatred. Some people banded together to help newbies, some to defend their empires, some to become rich beyond their dreams and some to just wreck havoc and bring anarchy to the Universe. And those are the thing that I look for in community: communication between players, willingness to help (or destroy, as the case may be – anything that involves interaction), a sense of kinship and fraternity, a real bond with my fellow gamers, and the ability to share in the fantasy of escapism with others.

All of those things are hard to quantify and sum up as a singular aspect though. I see it as the warm, fuzzy feeling you get in your nether regions when someone helps you out for no reason or actively engages in a conversation with you for more than just buff requests. It’s that special little feeling that makes you feel part of something bigger than yourself. Everquest had it, Everquest 2 has it, World of Warcraft doesn’t have it (or at least it’s very well hidden) and I believe that EVE Online has it too.

So, as I said, I’m not surprised by the award nor am I disputing it. In fact, I think it’s very apt. However, I did want to explore a little more behind the reasoning for it. So what do you think – does EVE Online have the best MMORPG community?