GW2: Lost Shores From Yet One More Perspective – Part 1

As mentioned, I’m crazy enough to attend these events when I can, simply because I HATE the thought of missing out, even if they ARE scheduled at 4am local time for me.

It so happens that I was able to arrange my real life schedule to accommodate being up at 4am on MONDAY morning -this- time around, but I admit to this sense of impending dread that I won’t be able to manage it for all subsequent Mondays where ArenaNet has the “bright” idea of scheduling their goddamn one-off events at such an hour.

I really HATE the thought of missing out. And yet, fear of missing out becomes an obligation, rather than fun. So fer heavens sake, ArenaNet, these one-off events are NOT FUN to me.

So I have thusly conveyed in the survey they have just sent out to ask their players.

What was the whole experience like for me?

Let’s begin.

Phase 1:

It started with some promise as eagerness and anticipation overtook everybody.

Attracted by Blingg’s incessant voice-overs (normally I don’t stay in LA long enough to be annoyed,) I was running about checking the new Consortium location and admiring the soon-to-be Fractal portal and talking with the NPCs and screenshotting everything as I suspected these might change once the event was over.

As you can see, at this point, I was still open to the idea of a one-off event for the whole ‘impact’ after, permanent-consequence sort of thing as I was running around trying to capture memories of the “before” event state.

Some person kindly announced in map chat that ArenaNet had just twittered a hint to hang around the lighthouse.

Being the explorer I am, I knew where the LA lighthouse was and made an immediate beeline towards it, while groping for my iPad to check out the Guild Wars 2 Twitter feed for myself (couldn’t find it, settled for grabbing my phone.) Sure enough, that report was a real one, so I joined the couple of others who had made it to the lighthouse at this point.

Meanwhile in map chat, you had the expected “where is the lighthouse?” questions and some griping about ArenaNet and their propensity for using social media to convey this sort of information.

I’m kinda neutral about this. I see their points, and they are valid ones, but Twitter, Facebook or Reddit is a convenient fast way to make announcements too, if the forums can’t cope for whatever mysterious reason. And I’m obviously a hardcore enough player to be able to check them as needed.

The lost ones who needed guidance to find the lighthouse, I feel a little bit more for, but you gotta admit, this sort of “I know and you don’t” makes a certain subset of Explorer types very happy/smug, and too few MMOs these days allow for these guys to have their day in the sun.

Eventually the news, linked waypoints, map directions and so on filtered down to the rest and we were soon joined by a throng of people.

Halp! Can’t breathe….

I eventually found a seat with a much better vantage point. Pretty much lucked into it by accidentally falling off the edge of the throng *ahem*

There was plenty of time to do this, as we waited… and waited… and waited some more for the appointed hour to arrive…

…and were finally treated to a presentable cutscene of the Ancient Karka’s arrival.

Keen eyed observers (or those who don’t mind risking bleeding from your eye sockets) may note that my graphics level has been cranked down to the lowest setting of shitty as I harbor no illusions about my 32-bit Windows GW2 client not crashing out of memory during such crowded events otherwise.

Even so, as the Dynamic Event began and the hordes of veteran karka and young karka and hatchlings began spawning at all the orange fist areas, amidst the throngs of people in varied armors, lag hit. Quite badly.

My framerate went down to about 6.

Which was about 4 better than what some reported, 1-2 FPS.

Skills took a couple seconds to fire off, around 1-3 seconds (this would be still better than what hit during one part of phase 3, which we will get to later.)

And I was sure the karka no doubt looked quite impressive, if only I could see them.

Thank you, invisible culling.

Fortunately, I am clever enough to equip a staff on my guardian for such events. The wide cone means I can just keep spamming 1 and point in the general direction and probably hit something even without actually SEEing it.

Here I am surrounded by young karka corpses, which I can see, and a veteran young karka whom I actually can’t, but at least there’s an arrow and a nameplate, so what the hell, point and spam.

Sheer fear and self-preservation in the face of an enemy that didn’t render got me retreating to the edge of the battle for safety and fighting the miniature-sized ones at first, which worked out for the best, as I lucked into popping two karka samples quite early on.

I scrambled my way through chaos, trying to head for the sample collector NPC icon, stopping to hit one of the veteran karka egg layers which finally appeared on screen for me.

Long enough to register pretty much zero damage, and a check on his buff yielded an “armored” buff which said it was apparently immune to damage. The sheer weight of players and conditions and what-not eventually nickle and dimed this one to death… at which point, another popped up in its place.

Being fairly immune to the Look-Straight-And-Shoot-Everything-In-Front-Of-You syndrome that plagues most players (be it in DEs or WvW), that was the point I said “screw it, I’m booking it out of here” and backed off to get my samples to the NPC.

Whom I couldn’t see either.

But I assume he is there from that helpful icon. In between trying to talk to him and actually, I dunno, READ some of the story, some young karka decided to get extra-friendly with me. From the icons, I think I got face hugged, leg chomped and god knows what else.

If I weren’t on my guardian with heals and heavy armor and toughness and some vitality out the wazoo, I do not even want to begin imagining how many more times I would have gotten downed.

A lot more chaotic fighting later, the collect karka samples DE was completed, through very little effort on my part.

 

I managed to get the 2 samples I popped early on in, and one more later, that was about it. It had turned mostly into a fight for keeping myself alive, rather than attacking anything on purpose.

Alas, after that, we were supposed to get rid of all the karka plaguing Lion’s Arch. Armored immune-to-everything egg layers and what not. Urgh?

Cue more banging away at seemingly invincible health bars. One take away from this that I hope all designers will pick up, it’s not really fun for players to just keep repeating the same actions with decimal point progress at best, it just becomes boring and tedious (see karka reinforcement stages in phase 3 later too.)

Eventually, after a few more of these so-attractively-big-but-cheating karka, a greater number of immensely bored players decided to shift focus and just clean out the young ones which we could hit. Which was probably the designed intent to begin with, but you know, the more people and chaos you add to a situation, the harder it is to form any kinda of plan, tactic or strategy besides hit the first thing in front of you, preferably the biggest most obvious ones. Cat herding and all that.

Suddenly, while we were still a third of the way through on the progress bar, three mails popped up.

Whuh?

Because I am immensely curious, and can multi-task, and hell, it’s not like I’m actually making much progress or a significant dent on these crabs anyway, let’s let the 23094714 other people do it, I engaged in social loafing and took time out in combat to skim read the mails.

Spoiler: The lighthouse bites it.

Also, I was somewhat tickled, amused and pleased that ArenaNet took the previous feedback about being able to donate construction materials to the lion fountain which was lost on Halloween and applied it to the lighthouse.

Which was still conveniently there on my overflow server, so I took advantage of the foreknowledge to catch one or two last shots of it.

Though to be honest, it’s not much of a lighthouse at these graphic settings. But there was no way I could adjust it up any higher while in the middle of such crowded combat.

Shittons more karka later (are you tired yet? I’m getting exhausted simply recounting this to you,) we finally completed the event, and were treated to the expected cutscene of the Ancient Karka taking out the lighthouse.

Thus blissfully ended the lag-ridden somewhat buggy (mail mid combat, really?) chaos that was the phase 1 one-off karka event.

Subsequently, as the servers (or my computer anyway) stopped choking on the immense amount of people in one place, I eagerly rushed the marked NPCs to talk to them and see what had changed after the event.

Again, I was full of anticipation and hope. The one-off event didn’t really do much for me, but ok, all that lag and stuff was understandable, a bit buggy but we did see the story progress some… now that we were back to something that can be done at leisure during a time convenient to you, surely things would be much better, more sedately paced and more immersive.

Discovering the scavenger hunt was quite fun and thrilling. Most achiever players were still milling around the lighthouse, or looking for a reward chest, or complaining bitterly about lag and you could tell only a small subset of curious explorers were chatting up the NPCs and getting led to the wreckage along the Lion’s Arch beach to continue the plot.

Some clue hunting later, a little Googling of certain named areas as my map isn’t world complete yet, I was having quite a bit of fun racing around my as yet fully unexplored Caledon Forest trying to look for the relevant parties.

Alas, all that delay in finding the next guy led to this scene by the time I got there.

Not only is the amount of people offputting and unimmersive, I got there barely in time to catch the end of his little event with very little knowledge of what happened before that. It was quite impossible to chat and try start the event again for the story as everyone and his mother were also trying to do the same thing, and all it takes is one guy who doesn’t care to read the quest text to beat you to it.

I eventually gave up after a few more beat-em-up scenarios and went on to the next clue in the chain, thinking to maybe come back later when it was less crowded for the story. I suppose I should consider myself lucky, as I hear this NPC may have also broke some time later.

It was at Garenhoff where our luck ran out. Canach was broken, and broken good.

Some aimless running about later, I decided to check out the other bit of the story that involved Zommoros. I was quite pleased where I saw that the mails included the “show me” option, so that there was at least some in-game direction as to the location to head in, as compared to either knowing it straight off or having to resort to Google.

I was LESS than pleased where I got to Pastkeeper Saballa to find her foot stuck on one corner of an underwater cage, the escort event stalled and bugged out beyond all reckoning. Nor was the lagos responding by the time I swum up to him and his chest didn’t trigger at all.

Pissed off by the bugs, and no doubt, the hour I was attempting it at (hello, 5.30am), I didn’t bother to check on the hylek alchemist and logged off to snatch some sleep.

In all honesty, I think I would have stressed out less had I known there was more time to attempt this chain in. Knowing that phase 2 began less than 24 hours later, there was a very short window in which to experience the continuation of the story.

Seriously, ArenaNet, just how unreasonably hardcore do you expect your players to be?

And then to find it bugged, was even more infuriating.

I was quite confident that Anet would eventually get the bugs fixed. And if it were a week long scavenger hunt thing, no worries, plenty of time. But this was hurryhurryhurry all the way and keep watching Twitter to see if and when fixes were made. Not very fun.

Which was a shame, because I do rather like these scavenger hunts. Mad Memoires was very nice.

Eventually, 12 hours later, I logged back on at 5pm local time to get all three NPCs done, they were functional by that time. It took a while longer for Canach, but somehow, I lucked into him being responsive at about 7pm.

That’s wee morning hours for the North Americans, so I dunno how many managed to get them done in that short interval before phase 2.

No doubt, the story must have been quite intriguing, but to be honest, I barely remember it now. I’ll have to read the screenshots I took. All I remember is the bugs and the sense of needing to crank it out and complete each DE before the impending time limit, preferably before it breaks AGAIN.

Later I would breathe a sigh of relief that I got it done, before the miscommunication of when and whether you could continue with the chain while the event was in phase 2 or later. I honestly don’t know if the chain still worked later on. Lots of complaints on Reddit said it didn’t. I dunno. I stopped caring about it.

GW2: The Controversy of “Grind”

208 hours later on a single GW2 character, up creeps a growing pressing need to switch things up a little. I’ll be doing a short post on what else I’ve been playing soon.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I still intend to play a lot more hours on GW2 – I’m barely at 47% world completion, there are about 75% jumping puzzles still unseen and unsolved, taunting me, and I basically still enjoy wandering around the world, soaking up the lore and the scenery and grabbing screenshots of everything, plus WvW and sPvP. I like ‘em all.

I can’t help but notice that there seem to be a ton of people who have retreated back to the GW2 Guru and official forums to start bitching and whining about everything under the sun, though, and most of those complaints seem to have to do with “boredom” and feeling “forced” to “grind” for endless hours to get to the uber max of uber maxness.

*sighs*

I don’t want to swing that ugly word of “entitlement” around because it’s too easy a cop out.

Also, I can’t help but notice a certain similarity of protest and reaction with my rabid loathing of what City of Heroes did with their Incarnate raids, even though this time I’m on the side of the “fanboys” and apt to just shrug and ignore it.

However, I do want to point out that my issue was more of a lack of alternative choice/option for a different playstyle (not liking mass group content) who would also like to be an Incarnate.

Conversely, the big PvE issue of max stat exotic armor has a ton of alternative choice. Enjoy the DEs? Karma will get you there in the end. You can also craft exotic armor. You can buy exotic armor off the trading post, which is the fastest and easiest shortcut method. Like dungeons? Enough tokens will also get you there. I haven’t looked, but I suspect WvW may also have an option handy.

The next issue that this argument always segues into is a disagreement on the amount of TIME it should be taking. Way too long, is what the unhappy are complaining about. On this, I have some sympathy. Back in CoH, a bunch of us were fairly rabid for a while regarding the pathetic exchange rate of solo Incarnate earning power versus someone who just jumped into a group and closed their eyes and pressed random buttons for 15-20 minutes. Though I think the most galling thing was the perceived lack of respect for our preferred playstyle and a distinct disparity of faced challenge/difficulty level versus reward.

Honestly, I don’t really feel that disparity in GW2. Crafted exotic armor is basic, looks okay and works. That’s the baseline. Karma exotic armor is going to take a longer time to accrue, but not at that high a difficulty challenge, so that seems more or less fair. The sobbing mostly comes due to the dungeon exotic armors – which appear to be meant to take a pretty damn long time, and involve a high level of challenge in group coordination. The additional cosmetic aesthetic reflects that.

I think it’s intended that you feel pretty special when you get one piece of exotic armor (and over the moon if you ever get a legendary) but the baseline of these unhappy players seem to be set at a much higher level. Being decked out in exotic armor from tip to toe seems to be the expected thing, so correspondingly, they get upset when they learn it’s going to take at least a month or more.

(Me, on the other hand, I’m carrying a set of decent stat yellows around for dungeons and WvW and slowly upgrading it with crafted or karma exotics, I got the shoulders swapped out and nuthing more. I also wander around in PvE zones in an el cheapo blue and green magic find gear left over from crafting, studded with slightly less cheapo major runes giving magic find, with omnomberry bars to hand (whoever thought of that berry name is awesome) and manage just fine, with a yellow weapon or two.  I -just- swapped two of the pieces to yellow rare Explorer’s yesterday after checking my bank and going, oh hey, there’s 30 sharp claws in here! Yes!)

I’m not sure there’s that much to worry about. In dungeons, how well you play and your build and how cooperatively your entire team works together will help you survive a whole lot longer than slightly better armor. I’ve successfully gone through explorable modes in yellows (and before that, in blues and greens) and no one can “inspect” you to be all huffy about it either. (If anyone ever demands for linkage, I’ll group them with the groups who keep on chatting LFG guardian/warrior on my avoid-list, thanks.)

In WvW, while you may very well have an advantage 1 vs 1 or 2 decked out in very shiny armor at level 80 versus some random lowbie in blues, all that orange glamor is not going to help that much when a zerg of 10-20 or 60 rushes into you. It’s a lot more about group organization and coordination. Some siege equipment would do a hell of a lot more damage to that wall or door, fer instance.

Perhaps it’s just the style of game that promotes a mindset of acceptance in me. Guild Wars 1 has a long history of long-term goals, some of which should be attempted only by the most insane or the most completist. GWAMM, fer instance. Legendary Defender of Ascalon wasn’t that easily achievable either. To this date, I have neither of those, nor does many of those who played GW1, I’m sure. But some have achieved them. That scarcity makes it all the more special to them, no doubt. And I don’t have a problem with that, I can still enjoy the game without those titles.

I guess the problem for some comes when you layer a cosmetic skin on as a reward, rather than a title. For some reason, words are easily dismissed, but something so visually shiny is harder to bear for them. (I do fine looking el cheapo in Glitch, but judging by the number of players who have paid money for credits to dress up their toons, there’s a huge pool of folks who love customization and self expression and possibly keeping up with the Joneses.)

I can’t really help there because I have the ultimate cosmetic cheese-out solution in the form of the HoM. Whatever the hell I’m wearing, if I hate the look, I can make it look shiny enough with those bonus skins. (And I still get tells about that flaming dragon sword.)

But I think some examination of the cheaper crafted armor skins and mix-and-matching with cheap stuff bought off the trading post and free transmutation stones would probably work as a stop gap measure.

Perhaps things will get better when they finally start selling costume and transmutation skins in the gem shop.

Oh, don’t gasp, GW1 has a history of that too. And lemme tell you, those skins can look absolutely gorgeous. I wear ‘em in preference over armor any day. I look forward to all the bitching and whining about unfairness that will start up when that happens – little tip, save up those gems if you can’t convert spare irl cash readily!

Finally, there’s the issue of just not liking the style of game. Seriously guys (and gals), if the lore or the environment or the aesthetic just leaves you cold, don’t bother following the hype and being disappointed later, you just won’t want to play it. Period.

I got nothing invested in WoW lore. I disapprove of the holy trinity and the endless raid/gear grind and achievement mechanic. I only fiddled with it up to level 60 during Cataclysm because I was bored and wanted to experience the fluidity of WoW combat, but I knew it wasn’t going to last. Two months, mild entertainment, no hard feelings. Done. Got my money’s worth.

If you got nothing invested in GW2 lore, disapprove of the control/support/damage trinity and the explore/wander time-based grind mechanic and don’t like DEs, jumping puzzles, dungeons, WvW, PvP – then… why keep playing?

—

On that note, I’m going to repost my thoughts on “grinding” from an earlier post, which I’m sure barely anyone read, because it was a wall of text regarding A Tale in the Desert:

On “Grinding”

I believe there is no such thing as “grind” as long as you are aware of your own feelings and reactions and honest with yourself.

1) Are you taking any pleasure in the -present- activity you are doing? (Not looking forward to what you’ll feel when you reach the end, but actively, what you’re doing, do you like it?)

If you’re neutral, or just tolerating it, that’s a warning sign. Do ask yourself if the long-term gain will be worth it or if you might regret it later. And be on the lookout for emotional progress to…

Actively loathing is bad. Stop, stop now, before it’s too late and you ruin the activity for yourself for good. Take a break, go do something else. Come back only when you can honestly answer yes to the question, being neutral isn’t good enough once you’ve ever started hating the activity before.

2) Whenever you start feeling bored with the repetition, even though you do think the activity still has its positive sides, stop and do something else. Don’t ever try to ‘work’ through it or push yourself through a bad spot. It doesn’t work. Burnout lurks behind that self-rationalizing corner. It’s a game, it’s not meant to be a chore or an obligation.

CoH: Fare Thee Well, Old Friend

Like a lot of others, today, I heard the news announced that City of Heroes and Paragon Studios will be closing down in a scant three months from today, on November 30th.

It is a hard thing to hear, and my sympathies go out to those who will be losing their employment in this euphemistically called “realignment of focus” but at the same time, on a personal note, there is a bittersweet relief mixed with keening nostalgia.

How do I say this?

I will miss City of Heroes deeply.

I will miss every so often visiting boards.cityofheroes.com on a whim and lurking around reading all the threads.

I will dearly miss the community, though they probably never knew me.

Names like CuppaJo, DJ Jester, Samuel_Tow, Arcanaville, Nethergoat, Aett_Thorn, Steelclaw, TonyV, Leandro, Aura_Familia, Megajoule, Paladin, Memphis_Bill, Bill Z Bubba, Altoholic_Monkey, Bionic_Flea, Texas Justice, Techbot Alpha, GadgetDon, TerraDraconis, Snow Globe are merely a random selection out of a whole host of other names that made the place familiar and a kind of home.

For a long time, those forums stood out as a surprisingly mature place, filled with sensible sentences and discussions, a ready helpfulness, a always-out newbie-welcome mat and bolstered by an odd harmless crazy meme, like UniqueDragon’s jerkhackin’ and gone to the Americans thread, Kill Skuls, and so on.. .

(Until things rapidly ran down the drain in the last two years, as folks turned insular and aggressive, helped along by the positive smiley troll Golden_Girl and some twisted new permission to post LOLcat pictures and the like.)

Hell, for a time before my “falling out” with the direction of the game (I still hate raids) and my dismay at the changing tone of the forums,  I was a long time wall-of-text contributer.

In the spirit of all the reveals amidst the fond farewells (Fyndhal is Castle, Tic-Toc is Back Alley Brawler! Ye gods, I recall that name!), I will share with you all here that I went by the handle Lycaeus.

You may recognize the blue-tinted wise wolf somewhere else… (hooray for grayscale)

(No, not Lycanus, who is another player who messaged me once about a similar name, but Lycaeus, for the wolf and the mountain.)

Joined in Dec 2004, and hit about 1.8k posts, most of them all lost in the mists of time.

In my newbie days after sampling the only four tank armors at the time, I wrote a lowbie guide to tanking and holding aggro, also lost now, which is for the best since it is about 20 issues outdated.

I made an amateur CoH machinima music video about my favorite in-game story, “Oh Wretched Man,” around the time demo-editing and making videos of stuff became popular, after being inspired by folks far better than I, such as Samuraiko (Dark_Respite) and Aralcox.

For those few of you who don’t like pop and can only listen to metal or something noisy, too bad, deal, don’t watch it.

But the bittersweet tenor of the music and the lyrics have taken on a new meaning in the light of the news, especially these lines:

I don’t regret this life I chose for me.
But these places and these faces are getting old,

Be careful what you wish for,
Cause you just might get it all.

—

You see, though I -am- saddened at the prospect of losing an old friend, I fear I went past the stages of grief and loss some time ago and hit acceptance some time back.

What I miss, and still do, are the old days of City of Heroes. When people got lost in Perez Park trying to reach the Hydras, whose xp had not yet been nerfed. When folks made teams on a regular basis and fought as a concerted synergistic whole. When the community helped each other and gave each other random gifts of influence because we were heroes.

City of Heroes was my first true MMO. It introduced me to how things worked in three dimensions (rather than in text on a MUD,) about aggro and pulling and LOS and AoE, about class roles and through a happy accident of fate (or poor game balancing and subsequent tuning,) it skewed off from a classic holy trinity and gave buff/debuffs and crowd control as much importance as tanking, healing and damaging.

Even knockback, that typically red-headed stepchild, I learned, could be put to great use in this game, from positioning smashing mobs against walls and corners, to flying above their heads and knocking them down, and orbiting the fray and knocking mobs into the reach of meleers, rather than automatically away from all and sundry, forcing people to chase.

When City of Villains came by, it was another sea-change. Hybrid classes, built to do well solo, could also learn to cooperate together, in nothing quite like a standard trinity. Splitting aggro, control, support duties among all that could handle them. You didn’t need one pure specialist per role. You just needed a couple of guys that could absorb the alpha strike by whatever means necessary (their bodies, an AoE control or debuff, their pet minions, etc) a couple of folks that helped to mitigate the damage taken by the team for the few moments it took for everyone to do damage and defeat the mobs.

The dev team pioneered many things: the character creator with a multitude of options that all other subsequent MMOs had to struggle to match, developers that chatted with their community over the forums and listened and explained things, and they were never afraid to experiment and create odd new systems, some of them more successful than others.

I believe my mindset is much broader having come from such an innovative background.

But I also know that I have learned all I could from this game.

When you play a game long enough to see past the trappings and grok the patterns, boredom begins to set in. You have no idea how many groups of 3 minions or 1 minion and 1 Lt I soloed before one could set the difficulty level to match the challenge one wanted. The same missions became way too predictable, to the point where I enjoyed street sweeping more because the spawn sizes were a lot more random.

I saw the community start to slip and become more selfish as the concept of “loot” reared its head, with the ultimate grindy goal of making oneself uber-powerful and self-sufficient. Well, as time passed, that happened. And when you can take on all the spawns in a mission solo, why would you wait or care about others on your team? It’s all about getting to the end as quickly as possible so as to farm the mad rewards, no?

And eventually, the ultimate hamster wheel of Incarnate raids slouched its beastly way into existence. There, I drew the line. It’s a personal preference, but I don’t actually find much intrinsic joy in standing around for an hour waiting for LFG chat to gather enough people together, then rolling through as a big zerg where one barely can keep track of all the team members, trying to figure out unclear gimmicks in order not to die and to succeed. And even worse when there was no other alternative or option, and one would be in fact, compelled, to attempt them if one wanted the rewards.

Players like autonomy. Players like choice. When finally they listened and created a solo path to Incarnatehood, only then could I feel it was okay to give the raids a try. Because I didn’t -have- to do them. I was choosing to attempt them. And mostly I did so just long enough to see how they worked and how the story went, and I never wanted to do them on repeat loop ever again. Personal preference and all that.

One thing became rather clear. The thrill of basic combat was gone. I could stop playing for 4-8 months, come back, and my fingers would automatically hit the keys in the appropriate patterns for each character and take down the mobs. Over-familarity. The new stories were… not that terribly well-written, with a couple of exceptions. I was mostly ambivalent about a good part of the game. I could stop the sub, stop playing, and not really miss it very much.

The stuff I liked and still do? The zones, mostly. The scenery. The cleverness of the scripted mobs and street-side encounters. And of course, the good ol’ memories.

Be careful what you wish for, you just well may get it. For a long time, the cynic in me has seen it coming, despite the denial of the ever-more-insular players on the forums. Player numbers and profits appeared to be dropping badly over the past months and years. Going Rogue wasn’t as successful as hoped, though it seems most old players bought the expansion. Freedom gave CoH a monetary boost at the expense of morals, by utilizing lockbox lotteries and milking a lion’s share of money from the most passionate players with the cash shop. A lot of the later additions have seemed a desperate attempt to garner sufficient revenue to meet quarterly targets.

I do believe it still could have lasted as a F2P game for a good while yet, though not with any record numbers of anything, but alas, we all know how ruthless NCsoft can get.

A lot can happen in three months. Perhaps we can hope that some other benevolent investor or company steps in to buy over the game or keep it afloat in some fashion. But if the worst happens, I am prepared.

Nothing lasts forever.

All things pass.

There is a time for all seasons, and every season comes to an end.

I will mourn for the loss of a good, passionate community.

I will, no doubt, spend at least a while in-game to take even more screenshots than I already have, of my characters and favorite zones.

I might even make myself get around to making a few more demo-edit videos of stuff I had ideas for, but never found the time or urgency to work on. (The deadline is certainly there now.)

But I am ready to move on.

I have been for some time now.

For ultimately, all that lasts in an MMO are memories and relationships, hopefully good ones. (I wonder if all those folks grinding for electronic bytes find their efforts worth it now?)