miko2

There's been a big flareup on the World of Warcraft boards recently, over the fact that in their next expansion they plan to let good guys play the shaman class and bad guys play the paladin class. WoW is split into two factions, the Horde and the Alliance, and up until now there's been no such thing as an Alliance shaman or a Horde paladin. This new development goes against the game's written history and background, of course, and is seen as a cheesy way to appease people who were upset that no new classes were being added in the expansion, and as a cheap method of balancing things betweeen the two factions, as paladins were considered infinitely superior and more useful/vital in PvP combat than shamans.

So people screamed. They're ignoring lore, they're ruining the game. I won't play after they do this. It all seemed pretty funny to me because they weren't even taking anything away from anybody or nerfing anything -- but I guess some people really get into the lore and background of the game. Whatever.

But the funniest part to me was people threatening to leave. I mean, come on, we're talking about a game with millions of subscribers. Leave if you want, but you can't threaten them in any meaningful way. They'd have to really screw things up to drive off enough players that they'd notice the loss in revenue, and I don't think this qualifies as really screwing things up. Not even close.

But more than that, everyone who threatens to leave is pinning all their hopes on "the next big game" which at this point is Vanguard of Heroes. This is a game being assembled by the people who originally did Everquest, and while I expect them to produce a very good game, no game is going to be the One Big Game Before Which All Others Pale In Comparison, because everyone has a different idea of what makes a good game. And let's face it, WoW is that game right now, and many people still don't like it. Vanguard at least promises to be very different -- in ways that I do not like. It will include forced grouping, corpse retrieval, harsh punishments for dying, things that make it very unfriendly to casual or solo gamers -- things that Everquest did, that many players did not like, that games like City of Heroes and World of Warcraft fixed. (I've had friends who say that if you're not deathly afraid of dying, if it doesn't make you scream at the computer when you die, then it's just not as much fun -- to which I say, I don't play computer games to become frustrated and angry. You can have your "fear of death", I'll take casual-friendly games every time.)

Anyway, back in the day there was only Everquest and a couple of sub-standard alternatives (Asheron's Call, for example), and every game that was announced was seen as the Next Big Thing that would sweep Everquest away. Two of these games were Horizons and Shadowbane, and their followers were absolutely convinced that they would be the greatest games ever. Horizons promised a whole host of game innovations and cool things like the ability to play a dragon, while Shadowbane promised to be the be-all end-all of PvP based MMOGs.

Time passed, and both games eventually managed to publish. Neither did well. In fact, both were pretty mediocre fantasy rpg games. Not only did they fail to drag Everquest down, they were also left in the dust by many other MMOG games, like Dark Age of Camelot, Guild Wars, City of Heroes, etc.

The artist who writes the comic /GU started writing periodic "zapper" jokes, in which various badly-run MMOG games and companies were represented by flys, and the big blue bug zapper was what they flew into when their game or company went belly-up. The joke was that the Horizons and Shadowbane flies would hang around the zapper but never actually fall in, and they usually commented on the other guys who got zapped. Anyway, /GU is one of those comics that I can't really explain why I keep reading it because it's not always instantly funny, but over the last few years it's allowed me to follow some of the trends and storylines in gaming. In particular, the recent saga of Horizons has been quite fascinating.

It started off with the game being sold (for the second or third time, I believe), this time to a company called EI Entertainment. They said all the right things about wanting to fix up the game and help it grow and expand... but one visit to their web site instilled grave doubts because it looked like it had been assembled by a junior high student -- in 1995. Evertying about the web site screamed "amatuer!" including their mascot/logo, a bright yellow light bulb with a goofy face saying, "Hey dude, we want to publish your game!" (I kid you not, that's exactly what it said.)

Also, the new owners had fired the entire staff that had been working on the game before they bought it. Not a good sign.

So Woody did a cartoon about the light bulb trying to drag the fly towards the zapper to check it out. Cute, and got the point across -- these guys at EI potentially could just be the final nail in the coffin for this game. The guys at EI dropped by the /GU forums to say hello, they weren't offended. (The people who had run Horizons previously had always been big fans of /GU and never took offense to the zapper jokes, and had even placed a character who looked suspiciously similar to writer/artist Woody Hearn in their upcoming expansion -- named "Hoody Wearn".) Also EI immediately fixed up their web site a little bit. Not a lot, but they seemed to be trying.

The other shoe dropped very quickly. At the end of July, just a couple of weeks into their tenure as the new owners of Horizons, EI switched to a new billing system. They declared that they were going to use Paypal exclusively, but that if people insisted on being billed by credit card, you could write to them, including all of your credit card billing information, and they would bill you within a couple of weeks. Oh, and btw -- many people noticed that their new billing system was entirely insecure. In fact, it stored and transferred your billing information as a plain .txt message.

As you might imagine, many people were upset that they couldn't just be billed automatically by credit card or that they had to go through Paypal (some people hate Paypal), and when the security problems were pointed this out on the forums and there was an even larger uproar. EI did not respond for 24 hours or more. Eventually they promised that they were switching back to the old billing company, but those who actually called and talked to said company were told that no, their contract had run out on the 31st of July, and there was no new contract. In fact, they apparently instructed their customer service people to repeat this message over and over to any Horizons customer and say nothing else until they went away.

Lots of people have been quitting the game. Only, as they've discovered, there is no way to cancel your account -- from inside the game or from the EI customer web site. People have actually been cancelling their credit cards and telling others to do so too, as not only the only way to "quit" the game but the only smart thing to do when such an incompetent and amatuerish company has your credit card information.

The forums were in such an uproar that EI decided to do something about it. They locked down the forums for half a day. When they brough them back up, they'd completely nuked the areas where people were complaining or posting "goodbye" messages, and they'd placed the entire forums under moderation, where anything posted had to be approved (and possibly edited) by EI staff before appearing on the forums.

Well, you can imagine how that went over with the gaming community. More angry people, more screaming, more people quitting the game. They just couldn't say so on the official Horizon message boards anymore.

At this point I can't imagine the game's going to stay afloat for more than a few months at best -- it will certainly be dead and gone before the end of the year.

Not that I ever played it or ever wanted to play it, but... it's just amazing how fast the new owners have destroyed their shiney new toy. It's more and more obvious that they only intended to milk it for as much money as they could, and had no intentions of actually working on game development.

The last couple of days I've actually spent more time reading about MMOGs than I have playing them...