Grand Experiment Archives - Page 186 of 200

Fish On

June 25, 2013 by Belghast

Here goes my attempt to write one of these posts quickly. I am certain I will fail at it, but this morning is trash day… and as a result I need to go around the house and gather the rest of it. I am doing a bit better than I was yesterday morning, or at least I am feeling slightly more awake. Today is the day my wife travels again, so not really looking forward to that one… but at least this time she will be back by Friday. Unfortunately however it seems like she is going to have shittier wifi, so that will be annoying. Why is it that a budget hotel can give you free wifi, but a ritzy hotel does not?

Fish On

The last tradeskills I have to level are fishing and survival, and mostly due to the hours of doing next to nothing… I have put off leveling them. I like the fishing system in Rift so much more than I did the one in WoW, but in either situation it is still a very passive activity. That said it was designed hand in hand with Survival, so if I wanted to be able to make nifty stat increasing foods… I figured I would have to level the two skills together. More or less that has been the case, except that the fishing always seems to lag behind the survival level.

The fishing system is much more enjoyable as a whole than the one from World of Warcraft. Namely they have introduced several new things into the genre. Firstly and the most important thing… you can target the water you want to fish in. The thing that drove me insane over in WoW was the recasting over and over hoping that you got your lure in a school of fish. Additionally there is a mechanic for telling you if you are fishing shallow or deep water, and different things can be caught in each. The real hook for me however is that you have a decent chance of fishing up random artifacts and housing items.

I set out last night to fish and level survival all night long. I literally spend roughly four hours fishing last night, and in that time I went from around 200 to around 270 in fishing. Additionally I managed to level survival from roughly the same place to 300. During the time I got a few dozen artifacts, and four housing items that were contained in chests that also rewarded crafting currency. There is something strangely peaceful about fishing, and I had my hotkeys set up that I could fish entirely with my g600 mouse. It really is the perfect activity to do while watching tv… I am still shocked no one has packaged this mini-game and created it as a mobile app that lets you fish up in game rewards.

Plane of Water

Last Friday Trion had another one of their live streams talking about the future of Rift. You should check it out over on twitch if you are interested, but be warned… it is roughly 2 1/2 hours long. Essentially they teased a bunch of features for Rift 3.0, the next expansion in which they showed the picture above hinting that it would take place in the elemental plane of water. Essentially at this point all of the dragons are now dead, and the Rifts still have not stopped… so it is time to investigate the planes themselves for the cause of the tears.

The coolest thing is, that they seem to have firmly adopted the D&D model of elemental planes with the quasi-planes intact. If you notice in the above drawing you have a glacier, ocean, giant overgrown coral forest, underwater areas, undersea caverns… a really rich environment rather than one giant non-descript ocean. I personally am pumped over this expansion… I think I am one of the few people that really enjoyed Vashjir in WoW and while it obviously seems like they won’t be fully underwater… I am sure there will be elements of it. They mentioned that they will likely begin releasing small bits of underwater content to test out the tech well before the expansion release.

The thing that really caught my attention however is that they mentioned they would be adding some more meat on the bones of the companion system. That you would be able to level them, and assign them certain tasks. This immediately got my mind spinning… and I thought to myself… man would it not be amazing if they found a way to merge the Pet Battle system from WoW with the Crew Crafting system from SWTOR. If I could send my companions off to go harvest ore, craft an item, or more importantly ferry crafting materials to my bank… I would be in heaven. I was surprised at how much I liked both systems, and I would love to see them create a new hybrid system.

Finally they announced that there would once again be four new souls. Essentially this one was expected… in each case there is one role that a given class lacks, and they are filling in these gaps. Warriors will be getting a pure healer, Rogues will be getting a pure healer, Clerics will be getting a pure support, and finally Mages will be getting a tank. The concept of a tanky mage is just intriguing. I figure they have two ways they can go with this one… they can either make the pet tank, or give the mage magical armor to absorb damage. As far as warriors, since they already have paladin souls… I am figuring their healer is going to end up being a lot like the WoW paladin with tons of single target heals and a combo point based healing finisher system.

In any case… I am now super pumped about the expansion. I honesty did not expect to be hearing news about it quite yet, but given that it is Trion and with their rapid development cycle… it makes sense. I am wondering about the time frame, knowing how Trion works it could be entirely possible that this is a November/December expansion release date. That would make for a very merry Christmas indeed… essentially they would be delivering on the promise that Blizzard has never been able to… an expansion per year. This is about the speed the EQ2 has managed to maintain, so it is entirely doable so long as they always have a team devoted to expansion.

Rift Nights

One of the things I miss the most by being a nomad is the constant camaraderie of the Stalwarts. I am trying a new experiment, and not sure how well it will work. Right now in Rift we are not in a guild of our own, but because of this it opens up a lot more doors to grouping and regular open raiding. It also makes it hard to organize the people who are used to playing together in other games. As a result I have decided to start a server channel that way folks connected to House Stalwart that are playing Rift again can join in and get into group activity regardless of what server they are on. Since everything is cross server it makes life easier for getting together.

Additionally I am going to try and set up Monday and Wednesday nights for group activities. Roughly 8pm EDT til bedtime I am going to be around and available for random grouping with anyone that happens to be in the channel. The idea will be to grab whoever is around, and pick an activity that suits our levels and numbers. Rift is amazing good at giving something to do with varied group sizes. Some of the many options.

20 Man Raids – Require 20 well geared players

10 Man Raids – Require 10 well geared players

Elite Dungeon – Require 5 Max Level fairly well geared players

Dungeons – Require 5 players gear level completely open

Chronciles – Require 2 players gear level varies – These are essentially 2 man raids, see all the storyline.

Crafting Rifts – Variable group size, special crafting rift lure awards high level crafting mats

Hunts/Greater Hunts – Variable group size, special hunt rift lure opens up a hunt leading up to a boss fight

Elite Rifts – Variable group size, special elite lure opens a dungeon like open world rift encounter

Raid Rifts – Variable group size, special raid lure opens a raid like open world rift encounter

Instant Adventures – Variable group size, over world objective based event, has cool mini bosses every so often

Rifts and Zone Events – Variable group size, essentially rifts and zone events form all over the world all the time.

Conquest – Variable group size… 3 faction pvp system, similar to DAoC frontiers and feels like Alterac Valley.

Scenarios – Variable group size… these are essentially like WoW Battlegrounds. Not big on PVP but willing to try.

Basically there are a ton of different activities and the excellent mentoring system in Rift allows us to tailor the activity so that everyone is getting benefit. I posted this note on our forums, and social media yesterday, but it is a bit too soon for it really to kick off. However off and on through the night we had four people joining the channel and it at least became a more friendly chatbox option. If you are a current or former member of House Stalwart, or just someone interested in this little endeavor check out our forums. I will be turning off forum account sign-up moderation for a few days in case folks want to check it out. We get an inordinate amount of spammers hitting our forum, so ultimately I will be turning it back on in the future.

Wrapping Up

I need to get up and around and finish gathering the trash. I hope you all have a great rest of the week, and you get whatever accomplished that you need to. I made some serious progress on one project yesterday, but as soon as I did four others popped up in need of attention. Right now we have thirty five active projects for three people… so I have become adept at juggling work. It leads however to an extremely unstable and frustrating environment for me. Thank god I have amazing people to work with on my team.

Sinking Sands

June 24, 2013 by Belghast

Morning is being a pain in the butt today… or at least the whole trying not to fall back asleep thing is. For whatever reason I really did not sleep that super well last night, and as a result I am super exhausted this morning. Seems like a pretty horrible way to begin a new work week, so here is hoping that I figure out what switch I need to flip in my brain to wake the hell up. The worst part is, that this is going to be an extremely stressful work week, so I have to get my act together.

The Sinking Sands

I spent a good chunk of yesterday roaming around in the Sinking Sands region of Everquest II. This has always been one of my favorite zones, and I try my best not to skip it on any characters. I have a deep nostalgia for the region in part because I spent so much time in the Desert of Ro / Oasis of Marr area in Everquest. This zone is like a nostalgic love song to the original zones, and there are so many points of reference and mobs that make an appearance.

The only real negative is that the sand giants and wraiths are no longer dread worthy encounters. I can remember the constant chorus of “Sand Giant to Docks!” as yet another one of these death machines came roaming through the zone. Almost as a callout to that era, there is the ghost of a sand giant that paths right along the dock region named “Hatar”. Additionally Lockjaw still exists, but this time has his own dungeon rather than being a world spawn that will decimate the masses.

I think one of my favorite things about the zone is it is completely flush with named spawns. Each of them drops a single type of item, in flavors designed for each type of class. So essentially if the mob drops a ring, then it will drop one for priest, warrior, scout and mage. It feels like they have increased the spawn rate of these champions, because I can remember being out in the zone for days without ever encountering “Dune Digger”, a armadillo that spawns near the ramp leading down to the beach. However over the last few days I have seen him up almost every single time I have passed his spawn point.

The Lesser Faydark

I had made my way through the major quest lines of Sinking Sands when I noticed I was sitting at level 51. I checked the wiki and sure enough that put me pretty much ideally leveled to start on Lesser Faydark. Even dating back to the original Everquest, this has been a zone I disliked. In that game it was mostly for the fact that it was populated with lots of things that could kill you almost instantly. In EQ2, it is mostly due to my general dislike of “elven” and “fae” zones, and that it is annoyingly three dimensional. It feels extremely difficult to traverse it because of the constant changes in elevation, and the tunnels that are used to connect things up.

Additionally this zone is populated with a lot of flying things… that often times do not want to lower to the ground into melee range. Since I play almost entirely melee characters it makes it an extreme pain in the butt. However since I have never really done the quest chain I figured I would follow the timeline guide and start with the correct NPC and follow it through until I just could not. So far it is every bit as annoying as I remembered… since you hop around the zone wildly.

Another reason why I tend to avoid Lesser Faydark is it is off what they call the “golden path”. Everquest has a really robust questing system, and so long as you say on the golden path you get these blue markers on your map showing you there region for a given quest. However for whatever reason they decided only to apply these tools to a specific number of zones that make up the golden path. So if you choose to stray at all, you are on your own… thankfully I also have EQ2Maps which lets me search for what mobs spawn in what region. I think that is probably the single best improvement they could do to the game, go back through and apply the golden path treatment to ALL zones.

At the point at which I ended my Everquest II journey yesterday I was almost ready to ding 54, which is not bad considering I started the day at 48. Leveling in EQ2 is just a relaxing experience for me, and that is precisely what I needed yesterday. I keep thinking I need to play the game more often, and while I always eventually cycle back around to it… I also spend a lot of time ignoring it. I have been kicking around the notion of trying to set up a rotation of games, in that I always play this game on this day. It sounds good in theory, but I am just not sure I can bring myself to follow a schedule.

Wrapping Up

This is going to be a relatively short post today, as I am still fighting sleep. I need to get up and around and hopefully woken up in the process. I hope you all have a great day, and that you are not nearly as drowsy as I am this morning. I am not sure what I will be doing tonight, either venturing back into the faydark or over in Rift leveling fishing. I have to say the patron gifts are an interesting carrot that ends up making me log into Rift every day. If you are a patron you receive a large loyalty gift every week, and a small loyalty gift everyday. They do not accrue over time, so you have to log in each day to receive it. I find myself being drawn to log in each and every day for the promise of free stuff. Speaking of which… I think I will check on that right now before I head on into work.

Foraging Sucks

June 23, 2013 by Belghast

Getting a super late start this morning because… reasons. Firstly the bed was super comfy this morning, and after not sleeping really well the last few nights I really did not want to leave it. Secondly I had to shower and get dressed and go acquire food. Thirdly my wife conned me into a trip to Wal-mart explaining that it would be less busy while folks were in church. While it might have been less busy, it was still far busier than I would have liked. But we are now back and it is 10 am and I am finally sitting down to blog.

Foraging Sucks

I have been in a really spastic way with my new laptop and wanting to download all the games and see how they run on it. However yesterday afternoon I finally settled into one for awhile. When the F2P conversion happened in Rift, one of the many things I did with my bonus shop currency was purchase Foraging and Weaponsmithing for Belghast my main. The end goal was that he would have the ability to harvest all the things, as well as be completely self sufficient in both Armorsmithing and Weaponsmithing. The reality behind this, has not been nearly as exciting as it sounds.

Essentially over the last few weeks since the conversion I have been foraging everything I could find as well as mining all the low level ores so I could level both of the new tradeskills. One of the stark realities thus far is that Foraging Sucks. It is hands down the most painful gathering profession in rift. I have never really spent much time doing it, as I always tend to focus on the armor making professions in any game. The amount of herbs that you have to pick to get skills raises just seems unbalanced when compared with butchering and mining.

It took me roughly four hours of running around high end Storm Legion zones to be able to gather enough herbs and lumber to level from 350 to 375. The problem is not necessarily the harvesting… it is trying to find the right level of herbs that give you a skill up without running into the level of herbs that are too high to pick. Essentially the storm legion foraging spawns are really really poorly designed… or at least poorly designed for someone trying to level. I remember being max level in mining before I hit level 54, so as a contrast it was so much easier.

Grandmaster Weaponsmith

It was shortly after dinging 375 foraging that I turned my focus to all the ore and lumber I had collected in the process. Within another 30 minutes I had finished leveling weaponsmithing to 375. Now I need to spend a good deal of time doing the daily quests so I can pick up those epic weapon patterns. While this is not that useful now, I am really looking forward to seeing how self sufficient I am when it comes to the next expansion. Part of me wonders if picking up outfitting, but not leveling it… would trigger the code that causes cloth to drop faster for outfitters.

Onwards to Fishing and Survival

Now my new goal is to work on leveling my fishing and survival. This pairing is an odd one as they seem to be out of sync. At 160 survival I need materials from the scarlet gorge/scarwood reach area, however at 160 fishing the optimal waters for skilling up are in Moonshade Highlands. So essentially I will be focusing on leveling the survival skills and the fishing should take care of itself. Finding shallow and deep water in the various zones is a bit of a pain also. The pool shown in the image above is one of the few deep water spawns in Scarlet Gorge… and they are way up by the entrance to Foul Cascade.

I am not sure if the shallow/deep water thing is easier if you are doing the guardian zones or not, but at this point I guess both factions are merged together. I didn’t really run into the problem until this set of zones. I have a feeling that in Moonshade the opposite problem will occur, that most of the water you find will be deep, as it tends to have ocean and lakes. Fishing is somewhat mind numbing, but it is a good activity to do while trying to catch up on recordings from the DVR.

Gold Rush

This week the Gold Rush promotion began over in EQ2 and as a result I decided to pop over and level in my Swashbuckler a bit.

If you’re a Gold Member this summer (June 21 – September 21), you will have access to a special daily spell that provides bonus coin loot (increase of 15%), an experience bump (increase of 10%), and additional mount speed (increase of 5%)! This spell grants these benefits for four (4) hours each day, all summer long! This is in addition to all of the other perks you receive with Gold membership.

You will find this spell in your hot bar or in your spell book under abilities. Look for “Gold Rush.”

With this happy little buff I decided to take Belgrifter over to the Clefts of Rujark dungeon and run around grinding the various higher level orcs for a bit. The xp gain was actually far slower than I expected, but then I realized that I had my AA slider set to 50%. Honestly I still have one of those instant 280 aa tokens that came with Chains of Eternity expansion.. so I am considering turning the AA levels off completely for awhile to maximize the xp gain. With my magical werewolf healer mercenary I was able to pretty much wreck everything in the zone.

While I didn’t end up getting an xp level, I did manage to get 3 AAs in the time spent just from killing all the named star mobs that I had not killed before. I will have to sort through the loot I got, but I didn’t see anything that was better than what I was currently wearing. I found running around the zone killing mobs a relaxing experience… that is one of the things I like most about EQ2 is that the combat is so slow paced that you can be doing something… and still do it without raising your blood pressure. It is far less twitch and far more slow and steady… and there are certain moods where that is the perfect recipe for me.

The laptop runs the game gorgeously, probably far better than any machine I have had so far. I can crank all the things up pretty much to the highest setting and just bask in the beauty of this aging game. I don’t care what people say, it still looks absolutely amazing. They do zone design better than almost anyone else. The sheer scale makes the world feel far more real than any other online game. The scale of mountains and valleys and monuments are often lost but this game feels immense.

Daily Dose of Cute

We have had bunnies in our lawn for years. I think they end up living in the hedges in the backyard, and since we don’t have much in the way of flowers… or any sort of garden… they have been a welcome addition to our lawn. However in all this time I have never seen a baby, even though I know they must be producing several for them to survive every year. Today my neighbor’s son was mowing our lawn, and he almost hit this little guy with the mower. Thankfully he is a nature loving boy, and is always looking for wildlife… he shut down the mower, picked the stunned little bunny up and brought it around to show us.

Is that not the most precious thing you have ever seen? Apparently at this size they are fully weaned from their mother and essentially self sufficient. We didn’t spend too much time with the bunny, as we didn’t want our human scent to rub off on it too much. Additionally we placed it carefully under a bush near where it was found. The little guy hopped around happily in the shade and hopefully will stay there til our lawn is finished being mowed.

I really hope this little guy makes it through the summer. In years past I have had to fish the occasional bunny out of the pool… and it is always something that tears me up inside a little when it happens. Hopefully it will remain a relatively moist year. If it gets hotter I might have to try and figure out a way to give them a water dish they can more safely drink from. Because seriously… who cannot love something this cute?

Wrapping Up

Well I have rambled on at length for a long while this morning. I hope you all have a great day and get accomplished whatever needs to happen on your Sunday. I know we likely have to run around a bit later and continue with the whole “preparing for wife to leave” thing again. Luckily this time it is a much shorter trip, so hopefully it won’t be nearly as stressful on me.

Bel VS F2P

June 20, 2013 by Belghast

I am breaking the mold yet again tonight and knocking out a topic that I have been kicking around in my head all day. Quite honestly the topic is not my own, it was suggested to me by Syl of MMO Gypsy. There is a really interesting discussion on this weeks Cat Context podcast between Syl and Liore about their feelings regarding free to play games. I started the discussion up on twitter as well, because I tend to align more to Syl’s thought in that free to play is generally a good thing.

The Non-Believer

The funny thing is… I did not always have this opinion. In fact there was a time I was pretty vehemently anti-free-to-play model. I even believe at one point I wrote a blog post about the fact that I did not believe the industry pundits that all games would be switching over to free-to-play in order to survive. I really disliked the thought of a pure free to play game.. and in part this was due to some bad experiences with early games in the genre.

My first real taste of the free to play genre was with the blatant wow clone Runes of Magic. During one of my bored with WoW phases, I ventured out… downloaded it and tried to get into it. The problem is, the game at its core was this fairly horrific grindfest, that could only be sped up by spending “diamonds” on the in game store. It had some other fairly egregious money sinks in that most of the mounts that were available were “rental” only, giving you it for a fixed number of hours at a time. Some of the only permanent mounts came from… you guessed it the cash shop.

Later on I had gotten into the closed beta for a pretty nifty game called Allods. It was essentially a very unique looking russian/steampunky wow like game. I played the heck out of it in beta and really enjoyed it, and was looking forward to launch. Then towards the end of the test period they introduced their take on the cash shop. I don’t remember a ton of details other than the fact that so many things were pay-walled behind real money transactions. One of the mini-games i refuse to play in an MMO… is inventory maintenance… and the only real way to increase your bag space was through dumping cash into the in game store.

Both of these games served to give me an extremely negative impression of what this whole free to play genre was. Combine with the fact that the servers I was playing on seemed to be entirely populated with kids… aka people unable to buy their own subscriptions to games… I thought subscription gaming was the only way to maintain a thriving community. As new free to play conversions entered the market, I would give them a spin, especially if it was a game I had played before. Every time I would walk away disgusted by the horrible community I found there.

What Changed?

When Everquest 2 first launched its forray into free to play, I really paid no attention to it. Essentially it held nothing for me. Gameplay was essentially corralled off to its own dedicated server, so you could not play with your friends currently subscribed to the game. Additionally the various tiers of access felt extremely punitive, locking away functionality behind numerous paid gates. However after a period of time they decided to open up the free to play options on all servers. This is the point at which I started to notice changes in the game.

Firstly the station cash shop is pretty amazing, stocking all manner of things from nice cosmetic armors, mounts, amazing houses, and various buff potions. With my 500 station cash a month stipend from subscribing, I was able to pick up all sorts of things that improved my enjoyment of the game. Additionally I noticed the server populations start increasing, and these players were not necessarily the “unwashed masses” I had seen in my earlier ventures into free to play games. Some of these folks were really solid community folks, that just lacked the ability to commit to a month subscription.

The game was still extremely limiting for free to play players, but at least you got to play on the established servers with existing players. The guild I was a member of saw a massive influx in recruits and at one point we had 20-30 players on some nights during the peak of this influx. Additionally it felt like we were seeing a faster speed at getting cool features out to the players like the dungeon creator, eqemote, and new content areas like sirens grotto and skyshrine. It felt like there was a new kind of free to play player that I had not seen before, one that just wanted to play the game without commitment and had no qualms about spending money at their own pace.

Eventually recently they have completely dropped all race and class restrictions from free to play players, and we have seen another big jump in people in the game. There are still some functionality locked away, but the game is at its most playable state for a subscription free player. The game feels more healthy in every sense of the word since the free to play conversation happened. The cities are bustling, the zones have players available for grouping, and the brokers are completely loaded with goods.

Changing My Opinion

After watching the transformation the free to play model has had on the Everquest 2 community, and seeing the numbers released at just how much better Star Wars the Old Republic has been doing since it made its jump. I started to turn my opinion around on the payment model as a whole. While there are still some pretty egregious practices going on, I think for the most part these games are doing better under the new pricing schemes. I will always prefer the option to subscribe, but having free access to my characters gives me the ability to boot up a game I have not visited in months on a whim and spend a few days without feeling the need to fire up my account officially.

I feel like as the conversions happen, each game gets a little better at the model. So far Rift seems to be the best conversion I have seen, in that they chose the route to give subscribers bonus “premium” perks… like increase in coin, token and mount speed. Additionally they have taken the cash shop model to heard and provided hundreds of cosmetic armor available from day one. Sure there are lots of questions about whether or not they took things too far… but really I don’t believe any game has come even vaguely close to “play to win”. No cash shop has offered something so amazing that better cannot be attained in game through grinding out whatever passes as end game content.

Ultimately at the end of the day the real question is, do you want your favorite virtual landscapes to stay alive and well… or are you willing to see them suffer just to make sure they stay away from a free to play model. I don’t think it is about success or failure anymore… but more about survival. These games cost a significant amount of money to keep up and running and keep staffed. These are old figures, but it was reported that between 2004 and 2008 Blizzard spent 200 million dollars on upkeep of the World of Warcraft servers. Dividing that out it ends up at over 4 million dollars per month in upkeep and maintenance fees.

Granted most of the games that have gone free to play don’t have the number of servers or staff that Blizzard has, however I am sure it is still a fairly staggering amount. If they can get 5 players that are willing to pay 5 to 10 dollars on cash shop items per month, instead of 1 player that pays their 15 dollar subscription fee, they end up well ahead and have more money to invest in the game. The games that have gone to free to play seem to be doing well with the model, and that income gets invested in making new content. When Vanguard made the switch to free to play, the influx of new money allowed them to invest the first month in half a decade in development. As a result the players got the benefit in the first ever holiday event, and major server patch.

The Last Starfighter

Right now realistically there are two subscription model games left: The World of Warcraft and Eve Online. Eve is kind a bubble in itself without any real competition in that space, however World of Warcraft has been losing subscribers on a regular basis of late. After the successes of the Star Wars the Old Republic conversion, and if Rift ends up being as successful as it is looking just by the server activity and players returning with a vengence… I feel that before the end of the year we will at least hear about plans for a free to play conversion for WoW. We know that Titan is a long ways off, and their development cycle has always been prodigiously slow. They lack the hook of new and fresh content to keep players engaged.

I feel like the big announcement at Blizzcon will be a conversion to some form of a free to play model, or at least a tiered payment model. There is a huge part of me that mourns the subscription era, but I think it has been shown that the hybrid model ends up wildly successful. The folks that want those premium features are still willing to pony up for a month subscription, whereas the folks that are not wiling to have the monthly commitment are still going to buy the occasional doodad or account unlock.

For me the real takeaway is that whatever keeps these companies healthy, and keeps developers and support staff in their seats instead of hunting for jobs is going to be better for the players in the long run. Right now it is seeming like the free to play model is doing that. Rift for example has had to roll out a couple of new servers just to handle the influx of players. Personally I have had at least 8 friends start playing the game again, with more waiting in the wings to see just how successful the first volley is. When we are talking about MMOs that are not blizzard… we really are not talking about a lot of profiteering going on there. Ultimately they are fighting for survival, and if the free to play model gives it to them… I feel we are more likely to be able to keep playing the games we want to play.

Wrapping Up

This post ended up far more rambly than I intended it to. I can’t say I am really passionate for or against the free to play model, but at this point I feel like i understand why it is occurring so frequently. I love playing MMO games, it is the one thing I always fall back on. I am in theory embracing free to play, because it seems like the most likely way for these companies to continue getting the money they need… to keep supporting the worlds I care about. Ultimately none of these companies make these games out of the goodness of their hearts. They need our money to make sure they can survive and grow, and at the end of the day… how ever that happens I feel is pretty much fair game so long as it isn’t done in an exploitative manner.