I can’t remember that I stopped playing MMOs during any summer of the recent years. I even played as if it was a dark and cold winter in some years, completely burying myself behind supplies of water and fast food, nerding the hell out of my actual game. Who needs different weather anyways if you won’t leave your place until you run out of food? As fun as it sounds (well actually, it doesn’t in retrospect), I can’t get myself to a game in particular this summer. Actually, it seems that I begin to break my oath of ‘gaming until death’. Suddenly, with a lot of stuff going on in my real life, I feel somewhat disconnected from the whole scene. All of a sudden, hardcore gaming as it is, doesn’t feel so attractive anymore. What happened to the good and warm feeling of owning shit out of noobs? I don’t know.

All Points Failure: Reloaded. Although very communicative, Gamersfirst is months behind their original schedule.

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Since my flu seems to finally wear off a bit - at least I don’t need to cool my head off with ice over and over - I decided to take on something I mentioned through the whole E3 coverage the last days and especially when following the official SWTOR forums in that context. Never before have people reminded me of a quote thats so true that it hurts already. And the fact that it comes from a SWTOR dev makes it even better.

“We don’t have friendly fire in The Old Republic for a simple reason: a lot of players are, well… idiots.”
-Damion Schubert

Sand people vs. Sith Inquisitor. To date the AI has probably a higher IQ than the average player.

And the good thing about this quote is: Its even more true when you erase the friendly fire reference.

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lright. Maybe its just my pill-ridden mind that causes me to post yet another philosophical blog on MMO phenomena but if it helps to fight down the recent flu I catched up, so be it. While my attention span goes down in a horrible way when I’m ill, at least regarding games, I always notice that I begin to check up on older titles I left. And the fascinating thing is that - except for the really horrible titles - you almost always can talk yourself into the good aspects of your former games quite quickly.

Almost as quickly as discovering why you left certain games a long time ago, falling into the same trap over and over.

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Well, the answer obviously is that it would end up as a largely underrated game that gets far less attention than it deserves and spreads far too slowly throughout the global gaming market. It would still be one of the most awesome games ever created, even if you don’t consider yourself one of the grindy persons who work their way up to unlock hero mode encounters along with all the raids available.

Every viking would envy this absolute carnage infused hammer-combat paradise.

At least thats what Vindictus seems to be. A pimped up Secret of Mana on crack and speed alltogether with maybe the best action rpg combat system ever created, along with a physics engine that is unparalleled in this kind of games. Read up.

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Its two months again and after ditching Rift for repetetive content I couldn’t bear any more, I turned to rl sports along with working on parts of my house for the time being. Mostly due to a lack of games worth investing time into and the fact that I had several marathons where I invested time into games on a 24/7 basis, starting with Cataclysm, along with Earthrise and then again with Rift.

Star Wars: The Old Republic - Everyone gets his own shiny ship!

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Oh yeah, all that time invested, all that hours I stood in front of a crafting machine, all that plans I set into motion in advance of territorial warfare.. and not to forget the countless hours my character was stuck in the game or the servers were down - again. It was fun though and Earthrise is still an exceptional game. But while the game gets more and more fixed every day, the community itself is so broken that it seems barely worth to log in anymore. This chapter, as sad as it is, is over.

While on the search for the next big nerd adventure, I decided to return to the guys of Intrepid and pick up Rift until some of the shining stars which are to be released later this year give me a chance to beta test them.

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February, 4th marked the beginning of a ’should be’ long term gaming experience, a sandbox game with territorial warfare, plotting players and guilds against each other for a fight over ressources, exchanging bullets for the last remaining spots capable of delivering the precious treasures of an otherwise scorched earth. As stated, I knew that the game had and still has a lot of issues and I still stand by my statement: This game could be one of the most awesome MMOs ever created. But things happened, that keep this somewhat infant behemoth still struggling for air.

Uberrobots with mechanized death tentacles. Optimus Prime would be jealous.

Lets round up some of the things that went wrong and check the chances of ER being able to give the reaper a good boot to the head.

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Most of the stability and lag problems have been resolved or are on the brink of being erased from the game. Overall stability has been greatly improved and the question is: Are there enough players left to keep the game running and alive? Masthead has been busy fixing stuff and they did a quite good job at resolving those issues in the last couple of weeks.

Many players left already though and the remaining people can hardly keep their guilds together, being busy pointing with fingers at others for alt-f4′ing, exploting, macroing, botting and whatnot - regardless if its true or not. It gets ugly when the playerbase for a game that somehow thrives from players keeping their secrets for themselves and offering only the minimal of help to others, encouraging people to fight for ressources, loot and farmspots over anything, gets so small that the ingame conflicts are not enough at some point.

The deadly oneshot-assasination team.

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From the time between blog postings you are certainly able to tell that server performance has been increased significantly. I didn’t realized that the performance of the game servers has gotten better this far until I checked when I wrote my last blog article. Holy shit, the days went away.

Earthrise is still far away from being a enjoyable experience without lag, de-syncs and servercrashes. They happen just a lot less since the last fixes. But the work the tech-teams of MHS have put into their server architecture begins to pay off and I am somewhat satisfied that there in fact is light at the end of the tunnel.

Things that don't suck: Launchers.

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And this is one of them: I smiled today.

Mark this day. Really.