Hunter's Insight – A Guild Wars 2 Blog

Runes Of Magic Reaps What It Sows

I played Runes of Magic for over 10 months. It was a buggy game, with middling graphics, and unimaginative story. There was something to it though. Perhaps the way it allowed a secondary class, or the way you could work on multiple quests at the same time, or maybe it was how it mixed easy gameplay with difficult challenges. I don’t know.

I ended up quitting because the endgame burns through money like wildfires through California. They just kept releasing more and more difficult endgame instances propelling you to spend more and more money.

Couple that with the ways they kept cornering people into spending even more money, the fascist-like forums, and often immature community team, I had had enough and quit.

Some people have taken the opposite approach. Scott Jennings summarizes things rather nicely.

Not only does it seem someone hacked Runes of Magic’s webpage, but he claims to have their billing information. He’s holding that information hostage with several demands.

His first demand? Stop abusing the forums. And honestly, that is not as big a surprise as it should be. RoMs forums are incredibly restricted in what you can say. Any negative criticism or acknowledgment that RoM isn’t perfect is at risk of being targeted. Post deletions, thread closings, thread deletions, bans, are all common place.

Translated I think

What really scares me is this threat.

We will release the high quality accounts (including billing access) later if frogster ignores my requests.

About half the demands he makes I semi-sympathize with. The forums are a joke, Frogster never struck me as the most honest business, updates to exploits are slow in coming, and nobody should be spied on while they’re working.

You know what I did to fix my problems with Frogster though? I stopped playing. I stopped sending them my money. I played other games with companies that do appreciate my business, and treat me with respect.

I didn’t compromise the financial security of my fellow players like some pathetic, juvenile, immature, idiot.

Frogster is not without blame either. I’ve never seen a company so willfully ruin their relationship with their own customers. It was like a time bomb ready to explode.

Boom.

Blunderhoof Hills

Rogue

The Other day, Runes of Magic released a new zone as a part of it’s next expansion. I wouldn’t release my expansions piece by piece over the course of months but then I don’t run an MMORPG.

I probably would’ve jumped in the first day too, except when I went to download it, it took about 3 hours and by the time it was done, I didn’t really want to play. One new zone, 3 hours of downloading. It just seems wrong.

On the second day of the Thunderhoof Hills release, I logged in to check it out. I had last logged out in Boulderwind, and the town was jumping, I thought that was a good sign. I warped over to Dimarka, and stumbled across the NPC that takes you to the continent of Zandorya. Fantasy settings: Putting random consonants and vowels together to form place names since 1954.

Thunderhoof looks pretty good. High grey cliffs, rivers, peppered with small villages and castles throughout the relatively small zone. There are new daily quests all over the zone, but actual quests are laid out in succession. You basically do 2 long chains of quests that take you through the zone.

I barely fought anything. All of the quests (so far) were talking quests, or Fed-ex quests, I had two maybe 3 quests where I was asked to kill something. I got 2 million experience from about 20 or so quests this way. I’m still 15 million xp from leveling.

Dalanis, the capital, is similar to Varanas (and Obsidian Stronghold), the capital of Candara. They’re both very large cities filled with NPC’s, they give a very grand sense of size, and majesty. Sometimes these cities are so large they seem practically empty because of how spread out everything is. Dalanis is cluttered though, and narrow, parts are abandoned and filled with vagrants. Completely unlike the clean, white, sort of elven feel of Varanas.

Unfortunately at one point, I ran into a fairly normal problem in any MMO, and a common one in RoM, one of the quests was bugged. Since all quests in the zone are basically chained, this means I couldn’t continue that chain. Great right? Kind of makes the whole idea of chaining all your quests together a bad idea. You’d think they would have learned that in Weeping Coast when it happened there.

It’s also pretty painful for people who want to level up immediately. 17 million xp is a lot to just get one more level. Not having access to the normal quests is a big barrier.

When I finally made it to Dalanis, after questing around for a while, I realized I’d missed something important. Particularly on my first day there. Although I spent some hour or so moving around TH, I had only seen 3 people. On the second day of release. A Friday no less.

When Weeping Coast, or Savage Lands, or Aotulia Volcano had been released (all in the same parceled out, delayed fashion) people had rushed in there. You couldn’t go anywhere without bumping into people. People tripped over each other to complete quests. There was bustling activity.

Not so with Thunderhoof Hills. It was about a half hour before I saw my first person. I won’t deny on my second day, it was a lot busier. I only went several minutes without seeing anyone a couple times. Okay it wasn’t that bad, but it still wasn’t anything I would call busy.

I started wondering if it had anything to do with the Diamond trade being removed. I went to the forums to check it out. After looking around for a few minutes, I got a little confused for a moment. I couldn’t find any threads on the subject. On an internet gaming forum. About a major change to the game. On the internet. Emphasis via short sentences.

They deleted any and all complaints about the removal of diamonds on the Auction House. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I had forgotten that RoM forums are particularly… deficient. Check it out, I was polite there. You should see the two sentences I deleted.

The forums being a completely uninformative waste, I checked in with some friends. Yes, players are pissed, yes my old guild is 90% people who buy all their diamonds via the AH, yes, it’s a big deal. I’m not predicting a collapse though, as this game seems to have survived any major screw ups previously.

That’s phase one of the expansion and it just leaves me wondering if I should even go back. I probably will, I’m a wimp like that, but they don’t make it easy.

No Diamonds, No Mail, No Service

When I first started playing Runes of Magic I quickly realized getting around would be a lot easier with a mount. If I wanted to buy a mount, I’d have to get about 10 dollars worth of diamonds, the cash shop currency.

There were 3 ways to do this at the time. Get my credit card out, sell things on the auction house for diamonds, or sell gold for diamonds slash buy diamonds with my gold.

I mostly farmed crafting material and sold it for diamonds, at first. It was a lot of work but in some cases I could charge whatever I wanted as I had little competition. Once I had lots of gold, I bought the remainder of the diamonds.

About a month after RoM left beta they removed the option to sell things for diamonds. It was a big disappointment. It was my preferred method of getting diamonds because it meant I still had gold to throw around.

I’m not sure if it was at the same time or shortly after, but they also restricted the gifting of diamonds to others with a 30 day wait. Didn’t really effect me, kind of pissed off a lot of others.

In January they restricted those who buy diamonds with credit cards from selling them on the auction house. This left only people who buy game cards from Target, Amazon, and other sources as the only people who sold diamonds for gold.

Now despite my chicken little approach at the time, prices for diamonds continued to drop. When I began playing in March they were cheap, around 5-6k gold per diamond. By around August I think they had gone way up to 22k per diamond. In January they had dropped to around 11k. After I stopped playing (facepalm) they dropped even further (facepalm) to half that (facepalm).

I can’t remember if Frogster ever specified that their changes were temporary or permanent, I do remember them saying they would consider letting players sell items for diamonds if things changed.

Things did not change.

Then comes this announcement, sprung on the populace with no warning. Runes of Magic is “temporarily” taking away the ability to trade diamonds for gold, send gold in the mail, or send items in the mail.

They say this is due to the large amount of gold sellers/spammers that have recently hit the game and “As soon as we’re certain that the trading of Diamonds and gold between players can safely resume, we’ll lift the temporary block.”

Crock of shit.

Gold sellers have always been around and aren’t going to go anywhere, so we all know this is never being activated again.

I know for a fact that every person I played with supplemented their actual purchases from frogster with diamond/gold trading. Even with supplementing my own diamonds this way I still found the game too expensive to play. For an end game player anyway.

This doesn’t even begin to comment on the sending of gold and items in the mail. I have 3 mules in RoM, and according to this, they’re useless.

They’re just putting the nail in their own coffin I think.

Stopped From Stopping In

I ducked into Runes of Magic the other day when Aika’s servers were undergoing maintenance. Not much had really changed.

The developers of this game seriously confound me. They announce hosts of new features, especially considering there’s an expansion coming up, and yet all the same old basic problems still exist.

Does that effect it’s popularity? It doesn’t look like it. They’ve announced they have 3 million players. While I don’t think that’s anywhere near true, it probably signifies that people do continue to try out the game. I really hate MMO companies tendency to tout numbers, but that’s a whole other rant.

The first problem I noticed when logging in was how long it took to update. I just wanted to pop in for a few minutes, I hadn’t played since January. It took over an hour to patch. I know from experience this doesn’t mean the long standing malfunctions (I’m not using the word b-ugs, because a certain long eared rodent is my #1 search term, and it annoys the living crap out of me because he was only in one post) have been fixed, what it usually means is that new malfunctions came up and had to be hot fixed.

To top that off, it got corrupted and I had to download the patch a second time, but I’m fortunate. There are tons of people out there who have to manually download each patch and apply it themselves. The client has always been buggy and they’ve never quite fixed it.

I could write volumes about the difficulty in actually downloading and playing RoM. I ran into a crash bug with my client about 6 months into playing, and unfortunately had to redownload the whole thing. It took 14 hours. Why so long? They don’t update the client to include the patches, so you have to download every single patch the game has ever had. I’m on DSL, so admittedly, it could have gone faster, but it’s still crazy. I can’t imagine how many new players are discouraged from playing on this basis alone.

I’m absolutely terrified to uninstall Runes of Magic.

When I got in, there were a few new features of course. A dungeon I can’t run (because nobody can) and a few minor features weren’t much to hold my attention for more than a few minutes though.

At the beginning of March, Runes turned one year old. They’ve actually added more content than most games in that year, but considering all they’re doing is translating and adjusting the game from the original Asian version, I’m not impressed.

How To Be A Jerk In Runes Of Magic

Not long before I quit playing Runes of Magic, I discovered I had a much more well known reputation than I had previously realized. I only occasionally spoke in world chat and didn’t engage in trade often. I kept to myself in zone chat unless someone was being a total tool. I was nice when I did speak, especially to newbies in lower level zones. Or at least I thought so.

One day after returning from Heart of the Ocean to Boulderwind Village, I happened across a /say conversation between a lot of the more elite crowd. Nobody on the level of the top two guilds on the server, but many amongst the next few good guilds. They seemed to be talking about various people and their attitudes. I thought nothing of it and went to my house.

Some of my guildies were close enough to hear the conversation and quickly got my attention in vent.

“Oh Hunter, somebody doesn’t like you”.
“What?”
“These guys are talking about you in say chat”
“Who? Where?”
“These guys in Boulderwind”
“What’d they say?”
“They said something like “Some people in this game are awesome at this game and fun to play with, and some people are really good at this game but are terrible people” and then someone else said “Yeah, like Hunter” and a few people agreed with him”
“That is hilarious.”

I have had precious little contact with most of the people who had participated in that conversation, especially the person who mentioned me specifically, lets call him Merchant. I’m definitely a bit of a smartass at times, and if I see someone being a tool, I let them know they’re being a tool, I’m pretty sure that’s where that rep came from, but Merchant is different.

The guy bought his gold from the auction house and spent it all on top of the line gear. He had never been inside an instance as far as anyone could tell, and yet he sure thought he was king ape. Every time someone tried to sell something in world chat, whether it was for his class or not, whether he actually wanted to buy it or not, he would message you and ask how much. Every time. He never once bought anything from me, and he was kind of a dick about the prices I quoted, making fun of me or even swearing at me because my prices were too high (purposefully, for negotiating) and believe me, you get sick of that really quick.

One day I was selling some gear straight off the final boss in HoTo, a boss not everyone could do at the time, and he wanted the mod but not at the price I was quoting. So I said “Go kill Medusa then” because you know, he couldn’t. I was pretty fed up with him. I shouldn’t have to argue over the value of a piece of gear that virtually nobody can get their hands on.

One of the other people in the /say conversation and I had had an incident with as well, lets call him Emodude. During a particularly lame Friday night moderator hosted event, (come find me and I’ll give you stuff!) we were getting spammed with mod world chats. Pretty much the entire server was annoyed by this. There’s multiple problems with the Mod events, they’re boring, only one person can win, the rewards aren’t great, it’s over inside 10 minutes and I suppose I could go on.

But the main problem, at least at the time, was the constant spam that you could not avoid. Quickly, most of the smart ass types on the server started making comments in world chat about the spam. This provoked a none too friendly response from the moderator. I think you can guess what happened from here, even more people responded and complained, zone chat lit up, it was quickly 10x worse.

I had added a few mostly benign comments. I seriously didn’t want to get involved but when someone leaves themselves open for a joke, it’s hard to resist. Unfortunately, the mod made yet another negative comment, threatening to leave and then threatening to no longer have mod events on the server.

Anybody who has ever been on the internet should at least be vaguely aware that trolls exist in great numbers. That statement brought them all out, daring the mod to follow through on his promise. At this point, I made two critical comments on how immature the mod was acting, and a satirical comment on his behaviour. Shortly after this, I’m sure having nothing to do with me, the mod left.

I was quickly messaged by several people both in support and criticizing my comments. I responded to some, but took particular notice of Emodude. He was caps locking it. Blaming me entirely for the mess that had just happened, he was furious that I had pointed out the mods unprofessionalism and was deeply worried we wouldn’t have any more events on our server. He called me names, freaked out, and generally gave me some good laughs. We never quite got along after that. Especially when the mod logged in the next Friday night to tell us we were being punished for the previous week.

After my guildie informed me of the conversation, I left my house and noticed the conversation must have taken a quick turn in the 30 seconds since I had run by. I was disappointed, and I won’t deny pretending to leave, going stealth, and returning to see if they would continue to talk about me or anyone else behind their backs.

Nobody ever thinks of themselves as the villain. Hell, maybe I am a jerk, I don’t know. Yet I don’t think I am. I make funny comments, I do nice things. I don’t tolerate dbags being dbags to people. Does that make me a jerk?