My lizard, Leapster

When you think about it, Fae are just the right size to be eaten in one gulp by the EverQuest 2 jumping lizard mounts. I’m too terrified to dismount, and so I leap from place to place within Lesser Faydark, death from above for the invader Tier’Dal who nonetheless managed to drag me from my mount last night and slaughter me.

Experience is slow in the Lesser Fay. Every EQ2 story I read tells of people hitting 60, 70, 85 before they realize it, in just a couple days, but I’ve been working on this zone for months, with breaks to do quests and some seasonal events. Clearly, this hasn’t been my main game.

I cashed in all my station points to buy a month of “gold” membership, then almost immediately went back to Star Trek Online. STO, though, has become a mission grind to earn tokens from the three Borg space special task forces to equip my starship with the best gear. I’m just six missions from earning new engines. I’ll finally be able to lose that worrying plasma leak.

The USS Manchester is ALMOST de-Borged

Last night was the first night of Star Trek Online’s “free to play”. Everything was busy. The STFs were AWFUL. One went pretty well, but the other two — I don’t want to insult anyone by suggesting that they have no idea what they are doing. But some of these people had no idea what they were doing.

All the STF missions have the main thing you’re supposed to be doing, and some other things that someone needs to be in charge of. In “The Cure” space mission, someone needs to destroy the ships that the Borg shipyards keep launching while the rest of the group is destroying the shipyards. When a shipyard is destroyed, the other shipyards send out more powerful ships. This role is usually handled by a science ship, who can keep the NPC at the center healed. The rest of the group heads back to the center after each shipyard to take on the tough ships before proceeding.

Imagine my shock when four of the five of us stayed behind to take on the easy ships while I was the only one working on a shipyard. Imagine my further shock when they proved unable to kill them all speedily.

I guess this is my hint that I should be working on elite missions, except most of the elite missions I have tried have been with people just as clueless, except the enemies are much stronger.

And the reason I say nothing is because I don’t want to be “that player” who makes all the other people in a random pickup group feel bad by dissecting their mistakes.

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New Freeport

I have a friend who is so into Rift. “You have to come back!” he said. “Ember Isles is amazing; the new warfront is awesome; the instant adventures are great!” I want to come back and see all this! Then he started playing SWTOR.

I really still want to come back. Problem is when I log in, I have to figure out all the new stuff; seems the soul trees change every time. I have to remember how to solo and how to group. I guess the penalties for getting it wrong aren’t that high, and the new instant adventure thing could help get my feet wet quickly. I should check it out.

Tonight, though, after working on some Spotify playlists I wanted to get saved, my goal was to see how many MMOs I could get working again. Seems EQ2, STO and DCUO had all decided within a space of days to just give up and refuse to work.

EQ2 I got working via downloading it from scratch. I did the same with DCUO. Since I wanted to play EQ2 and DCUO was taking up my main account, I logged into my second EQ2 account, intending to take my 80 Inquisitor and do some Freeport exploring. Instead, I took my 71 necromancer out.

Her skills and gear weren’t impacted at all by the silver account status; she just didn’t have any amazing stuff. You don’t focus on these things when you’re still leveling, after all, as every spell, ability and piece of gear will just be replaced.

Anyway. Yesterday I couldn’t continue on to the new gliding mount on my berserker, Scatter, as she’s only 58 and 60 was needed. Nothing was holding Adora back; in fact with my vast selection of pets, none of the encounters were any trouble at all (granted, most of them were gray). Far sooner than it’d taken to get the leaper mount, I had the wind Komodo mount. It’s… a little hard to control. I nearly glided right off the Kingdom of Sky, so I took the spires back down to the Commonlands and went to have a look at Freeport.

Aside from floating towers spinning slowly overhead everywhere you look, there’s no zone lines any more! All four parts of Freeport and one zone now. The whole city looks like it was brought into sharp focus and saturated. Very pretty. The EQ2 character models have always been a little too realistic; now that extends to the architecture.

I still haven’t _done_ anything in the game. There’s a huge gap between futzing around looking at stuff and getting ready to group. The latter takes real commitment.

T'pral at the library computers

Someday, I’d like to be invited to Starfleet Academy to _teach_. But this time I came to learn — about duty officers. I’d played with them a little bit on my main. There’s a tantalizing little minigame involved. Various missions require various skills and temperaments. The better your duty officers match the requirements, the better the result.

I’d played with the duty officer system just before STO went free to play. After it went free to play, I couldn’t log in any more. So… just as with EQ2, I deleted everything and downloaded everything again. And this time, I got right in. Weird.

I just plan to keep current on duty officer missions, at least with my Vulcan captain, until I figure out what I want to do in the game.

At least it works now, though.

Back in black! Er, yellow!

Couldn’t get into DCUO past few days. I downloaded it anew day before yesterday and still no luck! Today, DCUO dropped a massive 5GB patch and afterward I could play just fine.

I didn’t do anything. Just flew around and remembered I’d forgotten how to do anything else.

Next up: Rift and Wizard101. And then I’ll have enough MMOs to keep me busy for awhile.

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Rapture Raptor!

I do WANT to play Bioware’s Star Wars: The Old Republic. I WILL play it. Just… not right now. I’m not in a good place with MMOs at the moment. See, I’ve just spent a month playing Skyrim, and it’s left quite an impression. I just don’t know if I can play a tightly scripted MMO when I’ve just spent 130 hours exploring a world.

There’s just too much hype around the game right now. The hype makes it impossible for me to consider the title calmly, because, being the contrarian I am, I’d be inclined to hate it. It can’t possibly live up to its hype, but why should that matter? Someday I’ll sit down and watch all the Star Wars movies, or maybe play KotOR again, and then I know I’ll want to play SWTOR. Or someone will want to form a static group — because it doesn’t even matter what game it is, meeting once a week for a static group is reason enough to play anything. My time in DDO proves that.

Anyway, EQ2 was my game tonight. I’d had to stop playing months ago when some sort of driver upgrade kept resetting my video card every minute or so, making the game unplayable. When EQ2 went F2P last week I deleted entirely all my old installations and made a new one from scratch — and it worked wonderfully!

BUT… EQ2 F2P is not EQ2. It’s some different beast. I was grandfathered in to a “Silver” account, but my characters were too far advanced in abilities and gear to use much of their stuff. I understood that EQ2 wasn’t ever going to be playable entirely for free once past the very beginning levels, but I’d been hoping.

I couldn’t get into my account details (for some reason) to check out my subscription plans. SOE customer service just tonight cleared that up. I got in game and blew the rest of my Station Cash on a one month gold subscription. 31 days to see what’s happened to EQ2 since the last time I played. A long, long time ago.

Why do I need to carry messages back and forth?

All that time ago, I’d been working on the quest for the one “flying” mount available to a level 58 berserker, the leaper. This quest starts at a fossil dig in Butcherblock Mountains, and involves bringing a fossilized egg to life. There’s so much back and forth couriering between two close NPCs that finally one of them lampshades the absurdity by wondering loudly why the OTHER NPC doesn’t just COME OVER and talk to him!

The quickened egg is used to summon a fully grown “sailraptor” into Norrath, which instantly imprints and just begs to be jumped all over the zone. How could I possibly refuse? I could not.

The next mount, the glider, requires level 60. The flying mount requires level 85… but Fae, such as my dear Scatter, can actually gain true flight without needing a mount at all. So that’s something cool.

I don’t think I’m getting Scatter to 85 in 31 days, though. To be honest, I’m not even sure how I’d go about soloing a berserker. Fae are hardly the best race for it. I just rolled her up for fun when the race became available and never expected her to get out of her teens. Now look at her.

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Scene from a WoW raid

There’s probably worthwhile studies to be done on the MMORPG phenomenon. The games of the genre are designed to keep you interested and engaged for thousands of hours. The game itself is a potential setting for the formation of a long-lasting community that could extend far beyond the game realm. MMOs have provoked real life violence. Prisoners are rumored to have to play them to support repressive regimes by bilking money from Westerners.

More than near any other sort of video game, MMOs have gravitas in the real world and a transformative effect on their players.

“What Gamers Want: Researchers Develop Tool To Predict Player Behavior” advertises itself as a study of how gamers play MMOs. With such a study, the authors claim, “we are able to predict what a player in a game will do based on his or her previous behavior, with up to 80 percent accuracy”.

Intriguing. What kind of person crafts, or plays the market, or focuses on PvP? Are some people likelier to become community leaders? Who likes the follower role — are these people the healers? There’s hundreds of questions that could be asked.

This study, however, doesn’t focus on the players at all, really. It focuses solely on achievement. Not in a general sense, either: it’s a study on how people earn achievement rewards in World of Warcraft.

From the press release: “Specifically, the researchers collected data on 14,000 players and the order in which they earned their achievement badges. The researchers then identified the degree to which each individual achievement was correlated to every other achievement.”

So, this study didn’t focus on actual player achievements, like leadership, community building, teamwork, life/game balance, or anything. It correlated the Blizzard-defined achievement rewards, conditions that Blizzard chose because it was something they could track and would help keep players in the game by giving them specific goals.

This paper doesn’t study MMO players. It studies Blizzard’s efforts to guide WoW players.

Compared to 2008′s study of EverQuest II players, where they used extensive logs that recorded every action players took in the game, this WoW achievement-focused study looks weak.

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The awe-inspiring Harbinger of Regulos

If you took all the bullet-point features of Rift and compared them against all the bullet-point features of World of Warcraft as it was before its first expansion — Rift comes out fairly well. The appearance armor and dye systems which lets my rogue look like I want her to look STILL haven’t made it to WoW. And the rift system itself is a real game-changer, and there still seems to be plenty of room to experiment when building a role from souls.

But, I have my vanity pets. There’s the mount collecting. There’s the warfronts I’m grinding for PvP gear because I can’t queue for T2 expert dungeons for reasons unknown to me. There’s grinding dailies in high level zones in order to build some faction whose only purpose is to let me buy better stuff. Crafting is the usual AFK system. Macros simplify combat and healing. If add-on support is added on, we can expect Rift to instantly become just as agonizingly simple as WoW, not that either game is all that challenging to begin with.

I have no problem with that. MMOs are really intended to be social games first, and since you can’t ship an MMO these days that doesn’t cater to solo players of all abilities, challenge had to be left out of the equation.

Lord Soptyvr in the Beholder Maze

This last weekend I took a nostalgia trip, in EverQuest, from Qeynos to Freeport, walking the entire way. I wasn’t level five like the FIRST time I did the run, back in 1999. I brought my level 58 shadow knight along for the trip. It was a fun romp, took a couple of hours (stopping to see all the sights along the way), and I even died once, in Kithicor, because I just didn’t expect anything to be able to harm me. I was wrong, so very, very wrong. In keeping with the theme, and being bound in the Nexus, I took the Nexus portal down to Antonica and retraced my steps for a corpse run. This time I kept to Kithicor’s edges.

Look, I was just wondering if the dark elf camp in the middle of the zone would like my character, since she was ALSO a dark elf and a shadow knight besides? Short answer: No. They chased me back to Rivervale and I apparently died while zoning into the city.

While documenting this journey on Twitter, Justin Sanchez and I were discussing how Rift failed in capturing the EverQuest feel. EQ had meaningful faction, unique starting cities for every race (Erudites had two — Paineel and Erudin!), and starting experiences that soaked you in the lore of your particular race before you would ever come to meet someone of another race. The starting zones were built to naturally guide you up through level ten or so, but after that, the whole world opened up. Pick a direction and see what you could find. The first thing you would want to find would be friends.

Rift has taken enough from WoW. If it plans to be inspired further by another MMO, it should turn back to EQ.

Factions. The two faction system is particularly artificial. I know the lore — the pantheon of the Vigil brings back Guardian players, while the technomagic of the Defiants resurrects Defiant players. But both sides have the same roles and abilities and armor and everything else; it’s an entirely artificial distinction, especially considering the game lore states that both sides were equally at fault in bringing about the current state of the world, and if the sides sat down and worked things out, they could probably get an understanding, resolve their differences and, you know, save the world.

Properly, players should be able to switch sides or even join a neutral side. EverQuest allowed this through factioning (on the non-race based PvP servers, anyway). EverQuest 2 even has a formal system for betraying your faction, including the addition of a neutral faction AND a neutral faction city. Well, more of a hideout.

Cities. On the heels of objections to the two party system comes amazement that there are only two major cities, Sanctum and Meridian. This could (and hopefully, will) be solved in expansions. Even WoW only started with four cities, Orgrimmar, Undercity, Stormwind and Ironforge. EverQuest, started with how many? Felwithe, Kelethin, Ak’Anon, Kaladim, Freeport, Neriak, Oggok, Grobb, Rivervale, Erudin, Qeynos, Surefall Glade, Halas — I feel I am missing some. To those were added Shar’vahl, Crescent Reach, Cabilis, Thurgadin, Kael, Skyshrine, Plane of Knowledge, Katta Castellum, Sanctum Seru, Shadow Haven, and I know I am missing some. Does the castle in Twilight Sea count? The Outpost at Firiona Vie and the matching one in The Overthere. You could even bank and do some other business in Runnyeye if you built up your goblin faction.

It was these wide-ranging cities that gave the world of Norrath much of its charm. You’d leave your racial home, and the beasts would get more dangerous, the world a little darker. Eventually your cheery mood would turn to caution and terror — and then after a long time, the monsters would get manageable, and you knew you were coming back to civilized lands. If the locals liked you, you could have a new home for awhile — and if they didn’t, you could decide to start helping them and earn admittance and their grudging respect.

Rift’s world is torn apart by the intersection of the planes. There are no truly safe places. But as players push back against the darkness, couldn’t more cities be uncovered from newly recovered lands? Rift is enough like WoW already. It needs to open up and become a world, with meaningful factions, and varied starting experiences.

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The SOE sheep live in danger

I work a full day in the office, then strap my laptop to my back, pedal home and work a full night as well. It’s called crunch time, this is the third month of it, and work people pay me to do is taking priority over writing which nobody pays me anything to do. If I were working on a game, I could excitedly drop hints about it, but the only way you’ll see what I’m writing is if you need to be bonded. Or you happened to be a bond agent. BUT! If you ARE, well, we’ve got something pretty amazing for you this summer :)

On the plus side, that picture is part of my commute. One of the bennies about biking to work is that it’s more acceptable to just stop by the side of the road, outside someone’s house, and start taking pictures. If someone popped out of a CAR and started snapping shots, well, people would stare.

The Great Sony Hack of 2011

Big news these last couple of months has been the hack attack upon Sony’s PlayStation Network as well as Sony Online Entertainment’s customer data servers. This was a crime, perpetrated upon Sony and SOE by criminals, and they have essentially turned my PS3 into a brick, made them the object of a million rants and they are costing themselves and their partners thousands of dollars each minute the service is unavailable. It’s just a tragedy.

I feel Sony, though, is drawing this out needlessly. Sony has the best engineers in the world. I can’t believe that they couldn’t have saved their forensic data and plugged whatever security holes were used to break in in more than a couple of days. I don’t think anyone on the outside has any idea why Sony has floated May 31st as a “go live” date. I just don’t know.

But I worry. I worry about SOE and their games. SOE just recently had some pretty massive layoffs. After a strong start, their latest MMO, DC Universe Online, tanked on the PC. That can’t be good with such an expensive IP. Now that game is looking at a month and a half of nobody being able to play it. PC players have already abandoned it, and PS3 players will be playing some other game. So, DCUO is likely dead now. Vanguard’s handful of players can’t be expected to stick around, so that game is dead. SWG only had until SWTOR came out to live, anyway; ironically, pre-NGE SWG might have been different enough from SWTOR to co-exist. Anyway, SWG – dead.

Free Realms — unknown. I played it for awhile, but the constant money grubbing turned me off. I think kids will be happy to return to it after a delay, where adults might find something better to do. Plus, it had only barely launched on the PS3, so it’s ripe for a relaunch. Clone Wars Adventures – minigame portals like CWA can survive global thermonuclear war. They are the cockroaches of gaming.

Anyone who plays EQ is there because of all the games available to them, EQ is the one they want. It will survive. EQ2… and its F2P cousin, EQ2X… will survive, but look for massive server mergers; perhaps EQ2 will finally fold into EQ2X.

For the games in development, Planetside Next and EverQuest Next… I can’t imagine SOE will have enough revenue to continue serious work on these games. They have to focus on rebuilding their money properties right now. I feel SOE’s best hope is to separate from Sony, lose the mandate to put their MMOs on the PS3, and focus their efforts on a couple of really high performing games. I think it’s long past time for SOE to become Verant once again.

Skype is Microsoft’s new MMO!

The US Navy, via a program at the Naval Postgraduate School which I have totally visited (yay Monterey!), is soon to launch an online, collaborative brainstorming tool called MMOWGLI, which stands for “I Bet I Can Come Up With A Silly Acronym, Leveraging the Internet”. Anyway, “players” will be presented with some real world scenarios and will be able to collaborate with others on possible solutions using a graphical tool. Which is great; all the armchair admirals will finally be able to make their voices heard. Someone at work, when I mentioned this, said in response to the initial scenario of dealing with the Somali pirates that are harassing shipping off the coast of Africa, “shoot them all”. That could be an option!

I think it’s a great idea. I just hate that the term “MMO”, which we’ve come to use as shorthand for MMORPG – massively multiplayer online role playing game – being applied to any online activity involving more than two people. And what I hate more is the professional gaming press jumping on that same bandwagon, when they should really know better.

The worst are those places which try and explain that MMOs are games like WoW, except for this one. Kudos to that writer for also trying to compare it to a MUD, which it isn’t.

My old WoW guild

WoW loses half a million players, attributes it to a rounding error

So, news comes that WoW has lost a small percentage of their user-base, a marginal number of players that would total more than the active base of any other subscription MMO in the world.

Upshot is, their two year expansion cycle just isn’t working for them any more. People chew through all the new content in a few months (if that), and then drift off to other games, like Rift.

All these years, Blizzard has told us that this is how long it takes to come up with an expansion’s worth of quality content. It can’t be rushed, hurried or scheduled. It’s done when it’s done. But, now Blizz feels it actually could churn the stuff out a lot faster than that if it wanted to. It’s vowed to push Diablo 3 out the door sometime this year, instead of somewhere in this decade, their previous estimate. There’s a new sense of urgency coming out of Irvine, and I feel it’s long overdue. World of Warcraft IS the elder game now, and it has to move fast to keep relevant.

It’s not about the money — they have record profits, and if they ever feel they need more cash, they can add some more mounts to the cash shop and make an achievement for buying them all. For Blizzard, it’s about remaining the game that people think of when they think “MMO”.

We Heart Lucent Heart!

Masively Multiplayer dating sim Lucent Heart’s latest North American beta, “B.F.F.”, starts today. So here’s your chance to find your best guy or girl online, team up and kick some bully butt. I can’t say enough about this game. Everyone should play it. WoW-killer.

A fan who won a contest will be cosplaying at E3. So if you’re there, get a picture taken with her. Remember, if you’re lucky enough, you too could someday grow up to be a booth babe. It can happen!

Argh, so soon?

Time to hit the road and go to work. I miss blogging :(

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Being the only player in the Outpost of the Overlord is like being the only kid at Disneyland. Rides aren’t as fun without someone else there! But at level 10, there’s absolutely nothing that gives my little coercer any experience.

Once she leaves the Outpost, though, it’s gone forever. No characters can start there any more, and this beautiful little island will never see a new struggling newbie, nobody will plead for help with the cave or the pirate or the graveyard, and one of the most wonderful starting experiences I’ve ever had will be forgotten.

Remember when you got to the island in a boat after being fished out of the water by passing traders, thus starting your long association with the Far Seas Traders to whom you literally owed your life? Remember when you’d just figured out how to move around on the ship when drakes attacked? When you finally came safely ashore, someone demanded of you your class — fighter, mage, scout or priest. The original Four Archetypes of EverQuest 2. The same four you see in Rift, today. As in Rift, you soon specialized — and then again, finally choosing your subclass at level 20 after having been given a brief look at every choice along the way.

I wasn’t one of the ones who hated the archetype-class-subclass system. I liked the tests and challenges, made leveling a new character fun. But, like the Outpost of the Overlord and the Queen’s Colony. those little bits of adventure are gone forever, like the Glory of the Empire, the song my Freeport Bard had to sing to some orcs to earn her Troubadour stripes.

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I do log in to EverQuest 2 now and again. Mostly for two things — to keep Scatter’s spell research going and to redeem the AA scrolls I win by playing Fortune League on Facebook.

Every three and a half days, Scatter gets a new spell level. Every week, she gets another couple AA. It’s like EVE Online. Actually, though, Fortune League has a hard limit of 21 prizes you can win before your prizes no longer show on your Fortune League prize wall. I’d figured out a way to show the additional prizes, redeemed them, and hurried into EQ2 to claim and apply them.

It’s such a homey place, Scatter’s inn room in Qeynos Harbor. She moved from Kelethin a few weeks back because the acorn rooms just weren’t exciting me, and I could never find anything in Kelethin.

Anyway. Homey place. Front room is the bar, where all my critters are drinking and holding polite conversation. In back is my bedroom, made up to look like a forest glade. And to the right as you come in, the trophy room, with my three Fortune League trophies beaming beatifically, front and center. I wanted to bring my inn room to my blog. But how?

This is a blue/red anaglyph 3D image. Get your funky glasses on!

3D is all the rage, but not many people have the red/blue glasses to see it. WTF, right? But there ya go. Besides, with all the glowies and moving things in the apartment, it’s really hard to find a scene still enough that two screenshots would look identical except for position. It had to be animation.

And the price for this animation software would have to be “nothing”. I’m not paying six hundred bucks to Adobe for Photoshop to put images on my blog.

I gave up Photoshop a couple years back when my pirated version stopped working. I never felt good about using pirated software ANYWAY, and “everyone does it” really isn’t a persuasive argument to someone who might conceivably wish to sell her own software at some point. So I’ve been using GIMP as a replacement. GIMP is a free and open source photo/picture editor, roughly comparable to Photoshop for the things most people need. Its name is an acronym that stands for “GIMP Is The Stupidest Name For A Paint Program, Ever”.

Anyway, it’s free and has thousands of plugins. The plugin to make red/blue anaglyphs was free; I can make them with a single click now. With Photoshop, it was a long process (though I could have made a PS macro to do it, I know).

Animation is a built-in plugin. It’s under the Filter menu. Here’s how I made the trophy room animation at the top of the post.

First, I used FRAPS to take a half dozen screenshots a second apart. You could just take screenshots with the PRTSCRN key; I just happen to have FRAPS available.

I opened GIMP and dragged the screenshots, one at a time, into the drawing window, making a drawing with a half dozen layers, one screenshot to a layer. I then resized the image to 480 pixels wide — I knew it was going to be shown here, no need to make the file any larger than it had to be.

GIMP supports a few animation formats, but the one that browsers know to start animating when they load is called GIF animation. This is important.

From the Animation entry in the Filter menu, choose Blend. Just click OK to the dialog it shows. This turns the half dozen screenshots into a movie with frame interpolation to keep things running smoothly. The animation will be in a new window. Choose Filter > Animation > Playback to open a playback window, click the Play button, and if it looks good, close the playback window and return to the one with the animation in it.

Filter > Animation > GIF Optimization. This will select the minimum rectangle in your picture that contains changing information. If you were moving while taking screenshots, every frame will be 100% different from the previous frame and cannot be optimized. But in this case, there’s no need to redraw the floor and carpet every frame — it doesn’t change. This option displays the floor just once.

File > Save As. Save it as a GIF file by typing nameofyouranimation.gif. Since the GIF format does not support layers, GIMP will ask if you want to flatten it or save it as an animation. Save it as an animation. It will also note that it cannot save full color images, and needs to either index the colors or change it to grayscale. Choose to index the colors (the default).

Click the Export button, find it on disk, open it in your browser and go oooh and aaaah. You’ve got a cool animation, and you didn’t have to spend any money on it.

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Three Wolf Moon cloak

Lore text: This cloak will make you more desirable! Also has the property of featherfall.

And why it’s particularly funny…

The whole “Three Wolf Moon” phenomenon started with this comment on Amazon.com, and from there took on a life of its own (and spawned hundreds of imitators):

This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that’s when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to ‘howl at the moon’ from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn’t have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn’t settle for the first thing that comes to him.

I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the ‘guns’), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

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Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot! She has been setting alight our beacon, which, I just remembered, is grail-shaped. It’s not the first time we’ve had this problem.

– Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Is Fortune League a social game? The “fantasy raid party” game is on Facebook, after all, but just putting a game on Facebook doesn’t make it social — not by itself. It seems to me that social games require other people to play. When this came up on Twitter a few days back, I thought that the whole reason why they were called social is that, by definition, they couldn’t be played alone.

By that definition, Fortune League is not a social game, but it is social in an entirely larger way. The value of each hero in your six member party changes both on how well their race/class combination does in the actual game, and on the demand (or lack of demand) for that race/class combo within Fortune League itself, which varies with the needs of the particular adventure and the daily opportunities.

It’s also social in the way almost any Facebook game is, in that you get talking to the other players. I’m in the Antonia Bayle Champions league, a “guild” for those of us who play on the Antonia Bayle server. Through that I’ve met Zack, who is stationed in Afghanistan for another month and plays Fortune League because he cannot play EQ2 where he is. He is one of the top ranked players globally. And then there’s a bunch of us lesser lights who struggle through.

Small Wings of the League

Inspired by Stargrace’s victory in the first adventure, I was spurred on to see if I could figure out how to play the game and to win at it. Four(!) spreadsheets, two Python scripts and three weeks later, I’d made it not only into the top 20% (to earn the wings), but the top 40 players for the adventure to win the Fortune League cup, the glowy trophy in the first picture.

You can spend money in the game, but money won’t move you in the ranks. All money buys you is the ability to trade out characters more often than free players. I did buy a couple of trades to catch up — while I was learning the game, I made some disastrous missteps. Once I’d sunk money into the game, though, I was determined not to leave without getting the cup.

Sure, it’s just going to sit in Scatter’s room in Kelethin, but there’s that thrill of progression, you know? I started out really sucking at the game, through my own study I managed to find a winning strategy, and I bet real money that it would be good enough to win the one lasting reward from the game.

Stats of the Wings of the League

The wings themselves aren’t too bad. They are a fabled back item with passive featherfall, and a clicky “sky glide” which, I think, gives you the gliding powers of a Fae for 30 seconds. Perfect thing to keep in your appearance slot to easily swap into your main back slot when you need a glide more than you need stats.

We’re into the third adventure now; I don’t plan to spend any money this time around, and I’m not doing as well. I wouldn’t play it at all anymore, except I like chatting with the other AB players and congratulating each other on good moves, or sympathizing with runs of bad luck.

So, maybe Fortune League is a social game after all.

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