Standing Stone Games: the perils of being part of a captive audience

I was recently reading the "biggest MMO disappointments" piece over at Massively, and one of the comments really stuck out to me.  MJ Guthry talked about how a close friend of his/ hers had their extremely expensive lifetime LoTRO account stolen, and after two months and many customer service requests Standing Stone Games has done absolutely nothing about it.   Normally I might be a little skeptical of this friend of someone I have never met, but this is Standing Stone Games.  That story not only tracks, I would be slightly surprised if it went any other way.  

I personally have been lucky enough never to have any issues I needed CS assistance with in LoTRO.  But I have had a handful of issues come up in the other SSG game, DDO.  I stopped submitting tickets over there altogether a couple of years ago because the chances of one getting resolved in a way that is helpful seems to be zero.  Out of something like a dozen tickets over the span of a decade, most of them were closed without any comment.  I did at least get comments on two. The first comment was "You weren't online when I checked so I have closed the ticket." Note that this was done in the middle of the day more than 48 hours after I submitted the ticket.  I do have a job, why on earth anyone would expect me to be on then I can't imagine.  

The other one said "I don't understand what you are asking for, ticket closed."  I submitted the ticket a third time, laying the issue out in enough detail that a mentally challenged elementary school student  that was only vaguely familiar with DDO should have been able to figure out what my problem was, and that one was completely ignored.*  It may still be in the system to this day for all I know.  I stopped paying attention after about the first two or three months after I submitted it.

I fully believe that the only reason SSG even has a ticket system is as an escape valve for pissed off customers.  They hope that most players will submit a ticket, give up after a while, and then forget about the entire incident that made them submit one.  This might make a slight bit of sense if SSG was some unknown studio working on obscure games no-one has ever heard of.  But they aren't and they don't'.

Dungeons and Dragons and Lord of the Rings are incredibly well known properties in fantasy nerdom, arguably among the two most important.  Right up there with Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and Final Fantasy. The games themselves are also doing well.  The last set of hard numbers we got indicated that DDO and LoTRO alone have a "net revenue" of somewhere in the 10 million a year range.**  However, since then revenue has apparently more than doubled.  This is a company that could easily afford to have a functioning CS department.  They simply don't care to allocate the resources to it.  

SSG is also in a good position to get away with this because the two games they run don't have any real competition.  There really isn't any other MMO that combines the insane character customization of DDO with traps, puzzles and real time combat.  Probably the closest competitors to DDO in terms of character customization are City of Heroes, Champions Online, Star Trek Online and Project Gorgon.  Most of those are in a completely different genre, and the combat and gameplay loops of Project Gorgon are completely different from those of DDO. 

LoTRO is another game that for me has no real competition.  There isn't any other fantasy property I'm as invested in as Tolkien's Middle Earth.  Even if there was, LoTRO is an amazingly faithful realization of the source material that I seriously doubt will soon be equaled for Middle Earth, the Harry Potterverse, or any other property.  While you can quibble about some of the MMO mechanics, the world itself is a damn near perfect reproduction of the areas of Middle Earth that Tolkien described in detail.  Other areas that SSG has filled in itself, such as the depths of Moria, are very logically and respectfully extrapolated from the limited descriptions Tolkien did give.

SSG has a small, but essentially captive audience with these two games, and they act as if they know it.  The utter lack of functioning CS is part of a larger pattern where it's pretty clear that very little of the income of either game gets folded back into development or support staff.  That isn't to say that they don't put out new content.  In the grand scheme of things, SSG is actually better than average at putting out decent sized hunks of new content for their MMOs. 

The problem is that they appear to have no internal testing department.  They also tend to completely ignore player feedback on the test servers, to the extent that expansions get put out with bugs and balance issues that players have already documented.  They seemingly have the bandwidth to either create content or maintain it, but not both at the same time.  For example, the last big expansion of DDO, Isle of Dread, actually broke the reincarnation system for nearly two weeks.  That's a central gameplay loop in DDO. It would be analogous to the Alternate Advancement system broken in a way that prevents you from earning new AA points for a couple of weeks in Everquest, or all the raid dungeons at the cap being closed for maintenance in WoW.

All in all, the studio seems more and more focused on figuring out how to get the most money possible out of their big spenders.  For example, to celebrate the holidays they currently have a deal going where you get a free mount if you buy the $200 package for DDO points for the item shop.  However the mount can only be added to your stable on one server, it isn't account wide. Even their end of the year holiday sales this year only offered a 25% discount on their two most recent expansions, one of which came out more than a year ago.  Even giving the studio the fact that the total amount of content they put out in a year is usually pretty good, the quality control on it tends to be abysmal.  Recently the single most well known DDO content creator***, Strimtom, has even started begging the studio to slow down and take more time for quality control. 

Yet despite all that, I keep handing SSG my money.  DDO is by far my most played MMO this year.  LoTRO also remains likely my most played MMO of all time by a wide margin.  I do keep trying new-to-me MMOs and revisiting old favorites.  This year alone I have ventured forth into Everquest, Everquest 2, Guild Wars (the original), Phantasy Star Online 2, Terra Online, Destiny (also the original), Warframe and probably some others I am forgetting.  Yet it is the two SSG games that I always come back to.  Analogies to bad relationships certainly suggest themselves  . . .  

I don't mean to imply by all this that DDO and LoTRO are bad games, or you shouldn't check them out.  To my tastes they are both amazing games, which is why I have spent so much time in them.  I just wish that the studio seemed more committed to giving them the resources they need to flourish instead of constantly doubling down on milking the current player base.

*The issue I had is that one of the expansion bundles comes with a new pet, a pseudo dragon vanity pet,  and a cosmetic wizard hat that you can use once, and only once, for the pet of your choice.  One would naturally assume that the hat would work with the pet that it comes with, but that is not the case.  In fact, the hat is completely invisible on that pet. If you use it on an pseudodragon, you have essentially set the item on fire.  Keep in mind, this hat comes as part of an expansion bundle that was originally roughly $100.  Supposedly CS can give you a new copy of the hat if you make that common mistake.  However,  I was never able to get whatever random janitor they have going through tickets to even understand what my issue was, much less help me with it. 

**Based on 22% of 63 million in "net revenue" (= 13.8 million), which I assume means profit or I am not sure why they would have the term "net" in there.  Regardless, it's very hard to crunch the numbers that we have available and come up with a financial picture of a company that couldn't afford to pay a CS team of a dozen people 30K a year.

***That's admittedly a lot like saying the most well know species of kinorhynchan sea worm, or the perhaps most well known Czech silent film, but he does feature prominently in the tiny DDO community :-)

Why I like blogs and blogging better (it's not just because I'm old)

Bhagpuss put up a really thought provoking piece about blogging the other day.  I typed out a response and realized I had most of a blog post.  Given my spare time quotient, and since I am not ready to turn all my blogging over to an AI just yet, I can't really afford to waste a 90% written post these days :-) So here we are.

I think everyone that follows blogs knows that the form is in the middle of a slow decline in popularity.  However, I don't think anything that's come along to replace it really will or even can.  There are things I like about prose communication that podcasts or videos are not good substitutes for.  For example, there are a lot of blogs like Inventory Full (and everyone else listed off to the right if you are viewing this on a PC) on which I will at least check out almost every post that goes up.  There are exactly zero YouTubers or podcasters that I follow closely enough to watch/ listen to everything they put out.  Even my absolute favorite YouTube channels like  Kurzgesagt and Eons have a lot of videos out I have never watched.  

Why is that?  Am I a cranky old person?  Well yes, obviously, since I wasn't playing EQ as a toddler in 1999 and I blog about it a lot.  I also have a lawn, but the last person I had to chase off of it was around my age.  However, there is more to it than that!

For me personally, a really big part of it is that I can suck down prose at my own pace instead of having to set aside whatever hunk of time the person making content has decided I need to invest.  Guides to games especially, I absolutely hate having to sit through a video to get past one thing I am stuck on.  I am absolutely amazed at how many people prefer a ten hour video walkthrough to a prose guide where they can just look up exactly what they need.  You know there are indexed text guides to damn near everything right here, don't you? **Waves cane around wildly**

I also don't find that many opinions are worth sitting through a 20+ minute video to experience.  Obviously an insightful opinion can be thought provoking in any format.  I have become a big fan of Josh Strife Hayes for example, just like everyone else in this corner of the blogosphere.  Not a big enough fan to watch everything he puts out of course.  If I have a solid damn hour to fart away I will almost certainly spend it in a game.  But what I have watched is great, entertaining and often insightful.

In contrast, there are bloggers I almost never agree with, yet who I will still read everything they put up.  The risk you take when you decide read through a blog post is a lot less than when you commit to a video.  If some blogger that I follow posts something that strikes me as patently myopic or cranky, I can still engage with it and not be upset that I read it.  I'll even consider their opinion and occasionally change my own as a result.

For example, it's worth sitting through one blogger's somewhat disconnected-from-reality screeds because there are still occasional posts I enjoy, and sometimes even ideas embedded in the screeds that are interesting to consider.  If I sit through an hour long video to get to a punchline that I think is idiotic, I am generally quite upset over the time I wasted.  Five minutes or less spent reading a blog post to get there, not so much.

There is also something a bit more honest about prose.  It has to get by on what is there, the ideas being presented, much more than a video does.   To me an audience of even a few hundred steady readers feels like a badge of honor.  A few hundred or a few thousand views on YouTube is all but meaningless. 

Finally, I have the feeling that bloggers are more often motivated by the pure love of what they are writing about than other sorts of content creators.  These days blogging is a terrible way to even become internet famous, much less attain actual fame and fortune.  This news story went around recently saying that more than 80% of young people want to be social media stars.  Now I am sure if you dig into that the number it's exaggerated, really shocking headlines like that often are.  Regardless, I really doubt that any of those hopeful youngsters are firing up a blog!  

No-one does this for any reason at all any more save that they simply enjoy it.  It's nice to be able to settle into a chair and engage with a community united by a love of what they are doing, and not by any delusions of grandeur, fame or fortune.  I like the honesty and the (general) lack of pretension that comes with that. 

History of the Erudites Part III: Everquest 2

This is the final post in a series about the Erudite race across three games.  You can find part one here, which covers Erudites during the time of EQOA 500 years before Everquest.  Part two here covers Erudites dring the time of the original Everquest.  This final post covers them during the time of Everquest II, set 500 years after the original game.  

A male Erudite from EQ II. The race has been altered so much by years of close association with magic that they are beginning to take on a rather alien appearance. Erudites of this era are completely hairless, and have skin and eye coloration far outside the human norm. They also still have the highest starting intelligence of any race, expanded cranial volume apparently no longer being necessary for this heightened mental capacity.   

Erudites began as a regal race of dark skinned but fairly normal looking  humans based out of the city of Highborn, on the shores of Antonica south of Quenyos.  During the time of EQOA they colonized the Isle of Odus to the west.  Always a race of mages and magic using warriors, by the time of Everquest  their long association with magic had begun to alter them on a physical level.  Members of both genders showed greatly expanded craniums and foreheads, indicating a vast expansion of the brain areas responsible for language and reason. By the time of Everquest II this process has gone much further.  They no longer have expanded craniums, but in other ways Erudites of this era have begun to look positively alien.  Now completely hairless, their skin tones tend towards towards shades of gray or bone white, their eyes no longer appear wholly human, and under certain lighting their skin now glistens with a faint metallic sheen.  Tattoos have also become extremely commonplace.  However they mark themselves with magical glyphs rather than ink, and the designs can only be clearly seen under bright light.

The city of Paineel, near where you first arrive.

The history of the race since the time of EQ has also been eventful. EQ II is set after a mysterious cataclysm that destroyed much of Norrath and reduced former continents to a series of archipelagos.  When EQ II launched the homeland of the Erudites on Isle of Odus had apparently been completely destroyed, and Erudite players were forced to start in one of two primarily human cities.  However, during the 6th expansion of EQII, Sentinels of Fate, it was revealed that Odus had not been completely destroyed.  Instead, a disaster involving teleportation spires transported the island into a pocket dimension.   For decades or centuries the inhabitants of this dimension were isolated from the rest of Norrath.  However at the beginning of Sentinels of Fate the Erudites inhabiting the ruins of Odus were able to reactivate a dormant teleportation spire in the city of Paineel.  

The Sundered Frontier, one of the two major landmasses that remains after most of Odus was destroyed in yet another magical accident that the Erudites caused.  Like most zones released during this era of EQ II, this "zone" is actually a large region containing many different areas with distinct biomes and separate quest lines.

During the time of EQ Paineel was inhabited solely by Necromancers, Shadowknights and Clerics of Cazic-Thule (god of fear).  However,  when you are able to travel there 500 years later you find a city that is also inhabited by wizards, enchanters, and even paladins.  As during the time of EQOA, practitioners of all forms of magic and worshipers of both Cazic-Thule and Quellious (goddess of peace) now once again live and work side-by-side as a single people. At first no explanation for this state of affairs is given.  However, after questing for several evenings, a NPC reveals the story of the final cataclysm of Odus.  The Paineel of EQ II is the third city to bear the name.  It was rebuilt after an accident involving teleportation spires built by the Erudites transported Odus into a pocket dimension called Ultera. Ultera exists between the prime plane, where most of Norath still lies, and a plane of void.   Though most of Odus and the surrounding islands were unstable in this new area of extraplanar space, the connection to the Plane of Underfoot beneath the ruins of Paineel created a large stable area of land. Here, under the leadership of necromancers, Paineel was rebuilt for a third time.  

The character I played through Sentinels of Fate with, a Necromancer now in the mid 90s. I did finally figure out what familiars are about, that space octopus boosts all of my stats by 12% and will grow stronger as I level it.  

At first the rivalry and isolation of the two factions of Erudites seems to have continued in Ultera.  However, this was disrupted by intelligent beings from the realm of void.  They appeared to the leaders of Erudin, and at first seemed friendly.  However, one-by-one the leaders of Erudin became possessed by these evil beings. By the time anyone outside the inner circle of Erudin elites realized what was happening, it was too late to save the city.   Erudin was captured without so much as a battle, and those few followers of Quellious that remained untainted were forced to flee.  The inhabitants of Paineel, showing remarkable kindness of a city full of "evil necromancers", took in the refugees. Though the Erudite race is now in exile from their greatest city, it is once again united.

It took me more than a week of evenings to make it far enough in the Sentinels of Fate questlines that any NPCs would explain to me what happened to Odus since the time of EQ.  Here, one of these NPCs is describing how the remnants of Odus were sucked into a pocket dimension called Ultera, which is connected to the Void.

The Erudites that you encounter in the shattered remains of Odus are truly neutral, caring for little but knowledge.  They do have their own odd sense of honor.  For example self sacrifice, even dying, to preserve knowledge is considered a noble and necessary act under certain circumstances.  However, in most ways that count the Erudites of EQ II are completely amoral.  They place almost no value on the lives of most humanoid races, and those few Erudites that are even aware of the other races that inhabit the Sundered Frontier seem to consider them of little importance.  Though they don't go out of their way to persecute outsiders, the inhabitants of Paineel will kill anyone that seems to threaten their society or their individual scholarly pursuits without the slightest regret.  Many of the experiments they conduct, especially into the inner workings of death and resurrection, would be considered depraved by members of races such as men and elves.  Even the deaths of other Erudites involved in this work are taken completely in stride.*

 

This village of Kerrans lies on a small island isolated from the larger landmass that contains Paineel.

Because of their moral ambivalence, the other two humanoid races that share the remains of Odus with with the Erudites avoid all direct contact with Paineel.  The cat like Kerrans confine themselves to an island which they only leave occasionally to gather supplies.  They also keep a small force of spies near Paineel to make certain that no threats issue forth from it.  Another race of humanoid pandas have a small community in the village of Hua Mein.  It lies in a valley which is hidden from the rest of Odus by powerful magic. The Erudites of Paineel seem to believe they succeeded in a war of extermination against the race of Hua Mein several hundred years ago, and the modern villagers are careful to maintain this fiction.  In order to enter the valley you need to perform a series of tasks proving that you are willing to lie to the inhabitants of Paineel and help the Hua Mein avoid discovery.

The island is protected by these magical devices, which also maintain the same physical conditions on the island that it experienced before yet another magical accident caused by the Erudites transported Odus and the surrounding islands into the Ultera.  The Kerran's have little direct contact with the Erudites of Paineel, who in turn completely ignore the Kerrans.

In the Erudites of EQ II we see a race completely transformed by the reckless pursuit of knowledge.  Both physically and philosophically, they are now quite alien from the other human races.   Their resilience is admirable in a way.  After each cataclysm they rebuild and continue to gather ever greater knowledge as they always have.  However, this quest for knowledge is so single minded and so heedless of the damage that it causes that Erudites as a race are only a step removed from truly selfish and sadistic races such as the Trolls and Dark Elves.  Though not truly evil, no-one could mistake them for a force of good.

The inhabitants of Hua Mein, another humanoid race that was nearly destroyed by the Erudites centuries ago.  It is unclear what the two races were in conflict over.  However, the Erudites clearly believe they completely destroyed this race, a fiction which the villagers of Hua Mein are eager to maintain. As an aside, whether this race was "inspired" by the Pandaran's of World of Warcraft is unclear. Mists of Pandaria was also not even announced until 2011, so it seems unlikely to have been a direct inspiration. Kung Fu Panda came out about the time development of this expansion likely got underway.  The movie came out in 2008 and the expansion was released on 2010, but my guess is that too is a coincidence.  Trying to appeal to the same demographics as a children's movie seems as though it would have been an odd choice for this rather complex MMO.  

Perhaps more than any other race, Erudites have often proven themselves a dire threat to all of Norrath.  When they colonized Odus in the time of EQOA, they pushed aside the native races that inhabited the area without a thought, treating them no better than wild beasts.  Some time after, a magical war between two factions of Erudites nearly destroyed the world.  Finally, in between the events of EQ and EQII they again caused a major cataclysm, this time involving experiments with the teleportation spires.  Odus was ripped from the world into another dimension, and  whether this played any role in the wider cataclysm that so drastically transformed the rest of Norrath is unclear. However, even if the Erudites knew for a fact that they had caused this devastating event, seemingly very few would regret it. Knowledge is the only master they truly revere.  This is a race that would have been delighted to discover the atom bomb, or something even worse.  

Series Wrap Up

Erudites are an interesting fantasy race in a game where every other playable race in launch EQ was "borrowed" from first edition AD&D.**  Even Barbarians were a class in AD&D Unearthed Arcana. It's mainly in the Erudites where we get a truly original fantasy race. They have few analogues in other games or fantasy fiction in general that I am aware of.  Their accelerated physical evolution due to connections with magic is especially unusual, and I find the fact that it is an Easter egg you can only experience by playing three completely separate MMOs delightful.  

I can only think of a handful of game series like Star Wars and Elder Scrolls where it's possible to time travel by moving back and forth between different games, and in most of them the changes from one time period to the next are mainly cosmetic.  Not so Everquest.  In only 1000 years we see a world radically transformed by a series of magical cataclysms.  The world map of EQOA is completely unrecognizable by the time of EQ II, much like a map of planet earth during the Triassic era bears almost no landmarks recognizable to modern eyes.  The races and classes you can play also change a good bit from one game to the next. Deeply associated with magic, and themselves responsible for many world shaking events, no race has been transformed during the history of Norrath as much as the Erudites.  Though they have friendly relations with many "good" races such as the humans and elves, for those races that live near them such as the Kerrans Erudites have also embodied the worst aspects of humanity.  The Erudite legacy is one of towering achievements in the magical arts, particularly the construction of the spires linking Norrath, Luclin and planes beyond.  But it is also a legacy of colonialism and perhaps even attempted genocide in the case of the Hua Mein.  

The singular focus of Erudites on the pursuit of knowledge above all else also is both admirable and tragic. It's an admirable fictional counter example to our world, where where members of different political parties have stopped even agreeing on fundamental reality.  But Erudite history also reflects how badly things can go when the pursuit of knowledge and the power than comes with it is not balanced by any sense of morality. Even the banning of "evil" necromantic arts from the city of Erudin during the time of EQ comes across as hypocritical.  Time and time again it was the practitioners of other forms of magic that truly threatened the world. In the end it was the city of Paineel that was the last major refuge of the race and all the knowledge they collected.

*I don't mean to convey that Sentinels of Fate is some sort of grimdark expansion.  These deaths are very much played for darkly humorous laughs in the questlines that involve them.

**Undoubtedly this is because DikuMUD also drew so heavily on AD&D.  AD&D in turn borrowed heavily from Tolkien of course, but the precise collection of races and classes in launch EQ is very much 1st Edition AD&D.  For example, Dark Elves first appeared in the AD&D Fiend Folio. Races and classes added in expansions, starting with Kunark, were much more likely to be original to the setting.  For example Iskar and Beastmasters don't closely resemble anything in AD&D I can think of.

On difficulty, accessibility and Elden Ring

Bahgpuss has a great post up that does a really good job of articulating the of issues that have been floating around the blogosphere about game difficulty since Elden Ring came out.  Having been both both sides of the debate, both a kid that was a hardcore gamer and an adult that gives truly difficult games a wide berth, I had a really immediate response to it.  The core issue that really resonated with me is whether developers should feel obligated to put in difficulty settings that make their games clearable by anyone that is physically able to play them.  

I have been playing video games since the Atari era, so my thoughts on whether a game is obligated to include different difficulty settings for users of different skill levels is pretty simple: absolutely not. The original conception of video games was that they were kind of like any game: some of them were hard enough that not everyone could do very well in them.  I used to play insanely difficult games when I was younger. For example, I actually beat the game that is right at the top of this list.

I had to dump a solid month of my spare time into it to get good enough to do that, and I had the reflexes of a cat on amphetamines back then.  I absolutely could not do that these days.  I have neither the reflexes needed nor the spare time necessary to commit an entire game to muscle memory. However, the fact that it was so brutally difficult, and that getting really good at it was the only way to see the whole game was kind of the entire point of the experience.  Every time I was finally able to see a new level, it was elating.  Hell, sometimes getting to see a new six inches of a level I was working on was elating.  Absolutely, developers should be able to sell those kinds of experiences if they want to. The world would be a smaller less rich place without them.

A common counter argument is "Well if you want it more difficult, just crank up the difficulty. Why do you care what other people do?"  Once difficulty settings became the norm, I sometimes did just that.  For example I beat the N64 Goldeneye on "007" difficulty, and it felt like an accomplishment.  The absolute zen focus needed to do and the adrenaline rush when I finally did was similar to beating Super Ghouls and Ghosts.  But it wasn't exactly the same.  Knowing that literally the only way to see the next level was to buck up and get good enough to do it gave Super Ghouls and Ghosts a psychological layer that just wasn't there when I was playing through GoldenEye on "Holy crap, you must have a hell of a lot of spare time" difficulty. The closest thing I can compare it to is the difference between the view from a mountain where you can choose to either hike up or ride in gondola, and hiking out to a spot that you simply can't see without serious physical exertion.  

I don't think I have ever hiked a mountain when I could ride ride a gondola up.  However, I have taken 40 flights of stairs to the top of a tall building when I could have taken the elevator.  It was very much the Goldeneye "007" experience.  It was fun, it was elating to finish, the view at the end was nice, and I'm glad I did it.  But it was not the same as slogging my way down into a cave that most people will never see, or hiking out to some obscure waterfall most people don't know about.  The latter just feels more special.  I really think some developers are trying to let us have a tiny bit of that special "most people will never be here and see this" feeling in our living rooms.  That is not to say that that is a financially sane strategy for most developers in the modern market.  However, I really feel like that is what the Dark Souls games are trying to tap into.

Another aspect of the debate is whether developers need to be clear about what they are selling, and my answer to that is absolutely yes.  In fact, if a studio is creating a game for the tiny niche audience of "teenagers and 20-somethings with absurd amounts of spare time" they need to go out of their way to be crystal clear about it.  In 1990 it was expected that roughly 30% of games were hard enough that most people would never beat them.  That is very much not the norm now, and selling people a product they probably can't use without warning them is incredibly irresponsible.

There is also the issue of accessibility for people with physical disabilities.  I think developers should do their best within the constraints of their budget to support peripherals that allow people with various types of physical disabilities to play.  Some of the peripherals designed for people with neurological disorders that affect manual dexterity might also allow feeble old people like me to play some games as a side effect, so I'll admit this is a gray area.  However, I don't think of being older than 29 or fully employed as physical disabilities, and claiming that developers are morally obligated to cater to those demographics pretty absurd in my mind.  Admittedly,  since those are by and large the people with money to spend, it's generally pretty stupid not to. Nonetheless that is a different issue.

In the end I feel that the one clear moral obligation that developers have in this area is to be upfront about what they are trying to sell us.  Don't steal my money by tricking me into thinking I might be able to fully experience your game when I clearly will not be able to.  If a developer is dead honest about what they are selling, and someone that clearly cannot get full use out of it decides to buy it anyway, that is on the buyer.  If I bought a Formula 1 car, no one would get mad at the manufacturer when I couldn't get it out of my driveway.  They would think I was an idiot, and rightfully so. 

I will probably never see Elden Ring .  And that's perfectly ok with me, because I know it isn't for me.  That's also the exact reason I won't be buying the game.  They aimed their game directly at a market segment I'm just not part of any more.  Regardless, I'm not mad at FromSoftware for doing it.  Far from it, I'm excited to see a new RPG subgenre thriving, and I can actually understand why some people would feel that the game was diminished of there was a "story mode" that would let you skate through it. There are more games "for me" than I could possibly play through if all I did between now and my deathbed was sleep, eat, groom and play games. I think that's plenty.  

They don't make expansions like they used to

Per my last post, I have been playing through some of the original EQ II expansions lately.  I remember when they came out they weren't considered particularly large expansions.  However, by modern standards they are quite meaty.  For example, I played through Kingdom of the Sky last month, and I am now in the middle of the Rise of Kunark, the second and fourth expansions for EQ II.  Rise of Kunark consisted of five new zones, a new 1-20 starting area and four new high level adventuring zones.  It was released a few months after Burning Crusade for WoW, which included two new starting zones and seven new high level adventuring zones.  So at first glance, it seems pretty meager for the era.

The Kylong Plains, one of four high level adventuring zones that came with the Rise of Kunark Expansion for EQ II in 2007.  The map is actually a lot bigger than it looks, each of the four main areas is about the same size as a normal MMO zone. For the last month I have been playing through some of the early EQ II expansions, and it's remarkable how much more content they have than some expansions I have been playing in more modern MMOs.  

Now of course this ignores the fact that by this time EQ II had released three previous expansions, to the 0 that WoW had put out.  The zones themselves are also absolutely enormous.  Playing through Kunark took me roughly three weeks weeks of evenings, and by the time I hit 80 and move on to the next expansion there are also still going to be huge areas I haven't yet set foot in.  However, Kunark vs Burning Crusade is really a debate for 2007.  What has really struck me as I have been playing through these expansions from over a decade ago is how much developers have degraded the meaning of the term "expansion" over the years.  

Back in 2007, if a content drop wasn't at least a good solid few weeks of entertainment for most players, you didn't call it an expansion.  For example, in EQ II SOE used the term "adventure packs" to distinguish smaller hunks of content from mainline expansions. They likely did this because (a) they didn't want to confuse their customers and (b) because they would have gotten crucified in the court of public opinion if they had tried to call something like The Fallen Dynasty an expansion. It only contained one new adventuring zone, two new group instances, one solo quest series, one tradeskill quest series, and 20 quest series of trials in the group instances.  Clearly that's not an expansion!

The Fens of Nasthar. This was actually the first zone from Kunark I got going in, and because I didn't know what I was doing I managed to royally jack up my faction here.  I am kill on sight to every NPC in roughly half this map (though the ones in the corners absolutely love me).  Games were a lot less likely to hold your hand in 2007, but at least they didn't skimp on content.  This map  does not remotely convey what a big zone this is.  Just flying from one corner to another on an NPC mount is a "go make a snack or something" moment. 

How much things have changed.  Legacy of the Sith is the ultimate case in point. The latest "expansion" for SWTOR came out last month, and reactions to it were not good.  A lot of the negativity has focused on things that are pretty subjective, like whether the new UI is any good or not or whether changes to classes and gearing have improved the game or made it worse.  However one repeated criticism that I think is a lot less debatable is that Legacy of the Sith doesn't have enough content to be called an expansion, clocking in at about two hours for most players.  It really has me scratching my head and wondering whether this is the smallest update that any MMO publisher has ever had the temerity to call an "expansion." It probably is, but in the modern MMO era it certainly has some competition.

So what even is a proper expansion? First off, if new content doesn't have have any actual new areas where players engage in whatever the normal gameplay loop is, I don't personally think of it as an expansion. New mechanics can help distinguish an expansion from a normal content drop, but if there is nowhere new to go the world hasn't really been expanded. The first MMO that I can think of that tried to get away with calling something that was clearly not one an expansion was Dark Age of Camelot.  The second "expansion" for the game, called Foundations, added nothing but housing and consignment merchants.  I don't consider that an expansion at all because it doesn't really add to the world, it's just a bunch of new mechanics.  Of course even at the time Mythic released Foundation they charged nothing for it, and always referred to it as a "free expansion" to distinguish it from paid expansions like Trials of Atlantis and Catacombs that did actually have a lot of new areas to adventure in.  So if that's not a good comparison, what are some bottom of the barrel examples of actual past expansions?

Kunzar Jungle.  This is definitely the smallest zone that came with Kunark, and it still has at least five quest hubs that I have found so far.  I haven't looked it up, but I think the first hub I did had around 20 or 25 quests.  There were five main NPCs giving them out, each of which had between three and five quests.   By the time I finish out the first two hubs, I will have hit 80 and be ready to move on to the next expansion, Sentinels of Fate.

Standing Stone Games certainly has to make the list.  Recently they have taken to charging for content drops that they would have given away for free with a sub in prior years.  They refer to these as "mini-expansions" rather than full expansions, but when you can pay up to $100 for collectors editions that seems like an inconsequential semantic difference to me.  A paid expansion is a paid expansion, and it needs to have a good bit of content.  The two content releases I am referring to are War of the Three Peaks in Lord of the Rings Online and Saltmarsh in DDO.  Regardless of what you call them and being the start of my list, they were actually both decent sized updates.  War of the Three Peaks has been compared to Evindim, which is a zone that can easily last you a solid week of evenings.    Saltmarsh consisted of  one wilderness area and ten quests.  That doesn't sound like a lot.  However, a quest in DDO is set in an entirely separate instance so in reality it's something like 11 new play areas.  One quest in DDO can take anywhere from five minutes to an hour.  Altogether I would guess that both "mini-expansions" contain roughly 10 or 15 hours of content if you really see everything.  Small, but not egregiously bad.  They only look bad in comparison to what has historically been done in both games.

Another example that comes to mind is the final content released in Secret World Legends.  In a move that many of us are still bitter about, when the original Secret World didn't do as well financially as Funcom hoped, they spent a year revamping the game so that they could re-release it as Secret World Legends.  SWL was designed to be easier to get into compared to TSW, and was released as a free-to-play game.  To help get players to move to SWL, Funcom released a new South African adventuring area. It is the smallest adventuring zone in the game by a wide margin, probably taking about six hours to play through at most.  In consisted of essentially two areas, a prison camp and a mansion.  What was there was good, but it was way too short and ended up being the last major piece of content ever released for the game.  Not a great expansion, but it was also added to the game completely free, whether you subbed or not.  It was also billed as the first content drop for a planned full expansion if SWL did well, which unfortunately never materialized.  

The Jarsath Wastes.  Save to grab this screenshot I will not have set foot in this zone before I move on to the next EQ II expansion.  I would imagine you could take at least three characters through the 70-80 content in EQ II and do very few of the same quests. Both Rise of Kunark and Shadow Odyssey cover this level range, and I have not been to any of the zones from the latter.  Not to mention content packs in this level range I have payed no attention to, each of which SSG or Bioware would refer to as "an expansion" in the modern era.

Another notable modern entry into the "should this really be called an expansion?" subgenre was the previous SWTOR expansion, Onslaught.  There was a lot of grumbling at the time about how short it was.  Despite this, it was still a good 3-6 hours per faction, and well worth playing through twice to see both sides of the story.  It also launched with two new sets of daily areas that were pretty entertaining, so on the whole I was ok with it being called an expansion.  Six hours for an initial play through plus new dailies for gear was not bad, and certainly larger than a normal update for the game.  However, clearly we can also see a the bar for "expansion" getting ever lower. 

Which of brings us back SWTOR's latest expansion, Legacy of the Sith.  For me personally this release has finally crossed a line that I think is pretty absurd.  Calling one zone that takes two hours to see an expansion is unprecedented as far as I know.  If they had called it a "10th Anniversary Update" or "The Legacy of the Sith Adventure Pack" I suspect they would be getting a lot less flack.  But they didn't, and they are not being called out purely on semantics. Bioware called LotS an expansion, they paid some inordinate amount money for a trailer for it, and chose to hype the hell out of it for months leading up to the release.  That really comes across as conscious effort at deception.   I know a lot of players subbed before it even came out in anticipation of it, and I feel bad for them if that is really the only thing they subbed up to see.

In addition to the new high level zones, Kunark had this new 1-20 levelling area, a new race (Sarnak) and a new capitol city.  I recall there being a bit of back and forth between EQ II and WoW players, because Burning Crusade launched around the same time.  It had two new races, two new starting areas, and seven new high level zones.  I think the days when we will be arguing about which of two competing MMO expansions with weeks of content is really bigger are well behind us.

In my mind the absolute extreme lower limit for something to reasonably be called an expansion is at least a few evenings of new content for an average player.  If almost anyone can get home from work and play through a content update in a single sitting, it is absolutely not an "expansion."  Calling a content drop that small an expansion is like calling a pair of socks a new wardrobe, or a large refrigerator box a house.  At that point you are so far outside of the accepted meaning of the term you are using that you are obviously intentionally deceiving potential buyers.   The entire debacle with LotS has really shaken my faith in Bioware.* 

So how did we get to the point that a major developer of a highly visible game feels justified hyping up two hours of content for several straight months as an "Anniversary Expansion."  We got here the same way we almost always start in a good place and end up somewhere that nobody likes.  Someone pushes commonly accepted polite boundaries a little, gets away with it, and then the next person pushes them a little more.  Since there is no clear line in the sand that upsets everyone, eventually we end up in a place that almost everyone agrees is terrible.  But at that point it's too late to go back.**  

Overall Rise of Kunark added an entire new continent to EQ II (Kunark  in the lower right hand corner).  On argument I have seen floated for the disparity between modern expansions and expansions of this era is that new content was easier to make back then.  While I am sure that costs have gone up, I am extremely skeptical that's the primary explanation.  As an example, Rise of Kunark has a ton of new art assets and new geography, all of which were built by hand.  It also has an absurd  number of snippets of voice acting, and two versions of it.  One that is gibberish (before you can understand NPCs), and the other is all in English (for after you have deciphered the language of a given NPC race).  I can't find hard numbers for RoK, but EQ II launched with 130 hours of spoken dialogue (that's 5.4 straight days) recorded by 266 voice actors.  RoK is not something that a small team could have whipped up in a few months, it represents a substantial investment of resources in any era. It's also not as if EQ II has ever made insane amounts of money.  I firmly believe that MMO studios simply aren't folding as much of their income back into new content development as they used to in the 2000s.  

Over the years a lot of developers wanted to have all the hype and free press that comes with calling a new piece of content an expansion, without having to actually make an expansion.  But this whole thing isn't just their fault.  We the players have let MMO developers get away with calling smaller and smaller content updates expansions, so it was inevitable that they would keep pushing the trend.  In a way I can't be mad at SSG and Bioware for doing what almost anyone would be tempted to do in their shoes. The reason that this trend bothers me is not that I think the English language should never change.  Nor am I really upset over the semantic distinction between "expansion" and "content pack."  I am upset over the the implication that a lot of developers seem to think their players are naïve children that will believe anything they are told, all facts to the contrary.  "It's an Expansion, no really!"  

In 2007 SOE was afraid to call a mere week or two of content, Fallen Dynasty, an expansion.  In 2022 EA/ Bioware released a mid-sized content patch, called it an expansion***, and the thing that players got most upset about overall was the UI changes that came with it. Now that Bioware has seemingly gotten away with calling one evening of new content an expansion, I imagine other developers will feel free to do the same. We have now firmly reached the point where you can't believe anything a developer tells you about a content release until after it's out.  Now that's not exactly a new trend.  If I'm honest,  we've been here for a few years already.  For me Legacy of the Sith just happens to be a particularly absurd case-in-point from a developer I used to have a lot of affection for. 

*Not that they have the most amazing track record.  

**Edward J Watts has argued convincingly that this was how the Roman Republic fell.  However, I do not mean to imply that the inspiration for this whiny post is in any way comparable ;-)

***I think it's worth noting that Bioware claims that they will be steadily expanding their "expansion" over the course of the year.  Some commentators have even given them a bit of a pass on LoTS being so tiny based on that claim.  I'm no phone psychic, but I am skeptical.  If Bioware really was sitting on an ambitious planned release schedule for the rest of 2022, they would be pretty daft to have told us absolutely nothing about it after the backlash that LoTS got.  

EQ II in 2022

Roughly a month ago I got going on EQ II again to research my last post in the series series on Erudite lore.  My highest character was only level 60, having just finished out Desert of Flames* the last time I was seriously playing.  My goal for this run is to play through the past mainline expansions of EQ II in the order that they were released.  To get a better feel for what they were like to play through back in the 2000s, instead of using a level boost (and I have at least several available)  I have been levelling my character the old fashioned way, one quest hub at a time.  

This is the main character I have been playing for the last month.  He is a level 75 tailor, 76 necromancer as I type this. He actually has a ton of much fancier mounts, but I have taken to this lizard mount that I got from one of the early quests in the Kingdom of the Sky expansions zones.

One thing that's always a challenge about picking up a mid-level character in a MMO you haven't looked at in years, is figuring out what all the abilities do.  Oddly, in this instance having forgotten some of the really basic controls turned out to be a boon. The first week I was playing I couldn't figure out how to activate more than one hotbar.  Instead I just made do with the one bar that was up by default.  That bar turned out to have a solid three-spell single-target attack rotation on it that was really easy to figure out.  Even when I figured out how to get my other hotbars up, abilities on the other four I had set up the last time I played turned out to be for less common situations like wanting to travel while invisible, or needing a strong AoE rotation. 

This is the crew he normally hangs out with. From left to right: (1) a nightshade pet that does absolutely absurd damage. I cast spells mainly to aim him at targets via assist. (2) another non combat pet that follows us around and keeps the whole party buffed, and perhaps debuffs mobs as well (I'm not 100% sure what he does). (3) A mercenary.  He costs me four gold an hour to keep running, which is nothing in the modern game.  He can tank entire groups of mobs and hits pretty hard, but probably doesn't even do half the damage of the nightshade.  

Another  initial difficulty I faced was that as I levelled I was  earning new abilities. That doesn't sound like a problem unless you know a bit about the game.  EQ II has an interesting character development system where every ability in the game can be upgraded.  When you gain a level all the new spells you can cast are granted to you at the lowest possible power level, Apprentice (LV1).  From there they can be upgraded to better and better versions, all the way through Ancient (LV7).  However, in practice Expert  (LV4) or Master (LV5) is more than strong enough for nearly any purpose. Regardless, I needed a strategy to upgrade all of the new abilities I was learning at Apprentice level.

This is the zone I have been adventuring in lately. Every one of the biomes you see there is functionally as large as a typical MMO zone, and this "zone" functions more like a region.  It's one of five zones that came with the third annual expansion for EQ II.  It's remarkable how much meatier expansions were back in 2007.  However, that's a whole post . . .

There are a number of different ways you can upgrade your abilities.  One method is to study them over time, using an upgrade menu built in to your spellbook.  You select a spell, and after a certain amount of real-time (outside of the game) passes it will get trained to the next level up.  In some ways it's like the way all skills work in EVE.  This method works really well at low levels, when an upgrade can take only a few hours.   However by level 60, this method starts to takes an inordinate amount of time.  I was getting a up to three new abilities every time I levelled, and taking one spell from Apprentice (LV1) to Journeman (LV2) takes about four or five days of real time training.  To upgrade even a single spell from even to Expert  (LV4) would take the better part of a month. That would obviously not be a viable strategy for dozens of spells. 

Flying through part of the snow area on a "taxi-cab"  NPC mount that makes navigating the zone faster.  DAoC did these first, but EQ II and WoW were really the games that popularized them.  They have since become nearly universal.

You can also pay Daybreak points to upgrade abilities instantly, but that soon becomes pretty expensive. To "instant upgrade" one spell to Expert would be about $10 at current conversion rates.  Books that can upgrade your spells to Adept (LV3) do drop randomly, but with so many classes and abilities the odds of you finding one yourself for any given spell are abysmally low.  Due to inflation I also didn't have anywhere near the platinum I would have needed to buy one on the auction house.  This left me in a bit of a bind.  Fortunately, my second highest level character was a level 40 sage, the crafting class that makes spell upgrades.  You can very easily get all your spells to Journeyman (LV2) with one, which is nothing to sneeze at when you need to upgrade 2-4 spells every other evening you play.  With the right recipes and ingredients, you can even get them up to Expert (LV4). 

Here is my support crafter, making scrolls at a scholar's table.  He is up to 77 sage, and provides spell upgrades for my main. Levelling a sage from 40 to the mid 70s actually turned out the be the most efficient way to get my Necromancer's spells a slight boost.  Most of the time I play this character, a crafting table in Neriak is where you will find him.

Crazily enough, the quickest way to upgrade all my spells turned out to be to gain 20 levels on my sage.  A nice side effect of this was that I got to see what it is like to play a pure crafter, as my sage class (now level 75) quickly outstripped my adventuring class (Warlock level 40).   I had never seen the game from the perspective of a pure crafter.  It's not quite as well done as in FFXIV, where you can essentially turn mob aggro off when you are playing a crafter.  However there are quite a few crafting quest chains, and levelling as a crafter alone is eminently doable.  Because of all this, I am seeing both the adventuring side and the crafting side of each past expansion as I go.  On the crafting side, I see things both from the perspective of a tailor (level 75 so far) that is also quite strong in a fight (level 75 Necromancer) and from the perspective of a crafter that has to run for his life if he gets any aggro at all.

EQ II has a really great gathering system, where any character can gather everything, you can harvest the same node up to three times, and can get up to 13 items per harvest (for a range of 6 to 29 per node).  This all keeps the price of crafting materials down in the in game economy, and means that one high level character can very easily keep every crafter on your account in supplies. The wood I am gather here will be used by my sage to make spell scrolls for this character.

Once I got my sea legs back, how was the actual game?  In 2022 terms, EQ II is showing its age in a lot of areas.  However, it is also remarkable how many things it does better than almost any other MMO on the market. For example, character advancement.  In most modern MMOs there are a lot of empty levels, where advancing yields absolutely nothing except for an increment of one for the number next to your name.  Levels where neither your gear or ability loadout changes at all feel especially anti-climatic.  In EQ II, every time you level you will gain at least one new ability, even if it's only an upgrade of one you already have.  It also grants you the base level of all your new spells without having to hit a trainer, so if you are out in the middle of nowhere and gain a level it still feels immediately rewarding.  Finally, the myriad paths for upgrading abilities from the base power level gives the whole experience some real meat to dig into.  I have really enjoyed levelling my support crafter, and checking the auction house for bargains on the tomes that let me produce expert level spells for my main.

Very often, the best way to navigate the absurdly large zones is to turn invisible and sneak past all the mobs.  I don't know if every character can do this, but all of the cloth casters get an invisibility spell. The spell also affects my nightshade, and the other pet does not generate aggro.  My mercenary had to be dismissed before I could cross the river into hostile territory, since I have no way to make him stealthy.

The housing and crafting systems are also well above average. Crafting is not remotely hard, but it does have just enough interaction to it that you feel like you are really making something.   The items that you can make are also quite useful.  I already talked about needing to level up a support sage for my necromancer.  The necromancer is also a tailor.  Roughly every ten levels new sets of crafted gear  become available.  They are not quite as good as the gear that you will get questing.  But you can replace an entire set all at once.  For example at level 60 I immediately replaced all of my armor with crafted gear that was a huge upgrade.  By level 69 I had replaced all of it with gear from quests.  But a that gear was only a few points stronger than what I had crafted, and I couldn't even wear a lot of it until the high 60s.  It makes you happy to be able to craft, while still leaving a little bit of room for improvement so that you will also be happy with many quest rewards.  EQ II often splits the difference between competing design goals with unusual skill.

Even on my pure crafter, I need to leave the crafting hall occasionally to pick up crafting quests.  The gnome that no longer has a feather started a long chain that netted me three or four crafting levels, but involved a lot of flying around on gnomish airships.  EQ II was the first MMO I know of to offer full series of quests for crafters parallel to the ones for adventurers, and it's still fairly uncommon.   

The housing system is likewise really easy to understand, while still giving you tons of flexibility.  Unlike many modern MMOs, it doesn't force you to use hook points, you place place items anywhere you like.  It also largely lacks arbitrary limits on what you can place.  For example, in my apartment in ESO I found that by the time I had filled roughly half the space it looked like I had, my one bedroom apartment was "full" and I could place no more items.  Almost certainly the system in ESO is designed to get you to buy a bigger house in the item shop.  The housing system in EQ II will let you do pretty much anything you want right from the start.  The cheapest house you can buy has space for 200 objects, and a lot of items you can place are considered decorations and don't count towards that limit. 

My Sage on the mount he uses when he needs to actually leave Neriak. I think it came as a bonus with some expansion, or maybe a collector's edition, back in the day.

So many of the systems in EQ II are simply really solid.  You can tell that EQ II was designed by people that have played a lot of other MMOs, and know what works well and why.  I honestly can't think of anything else I have played recently that doesn't fall completely on it's face with respect to at least one core PvE system: combat, crafting, housing, character advancement.  For example, among all of the big five at least one of these things is true: (1) combat is way too easy or actively annoying to me, (2) crafting is completely pointless, (3) either there is no housing or the housing is way too restrictive, (4) gaining a level often does not change your character in any meaningful way.  I am not sure I would say EQ II exactly knocks any of this stuff out of the park.  But all of them work really well, and skillfully split the difference between conflicting design goals.  

This ghost wolf thing was hanging out on one of the adventuring zones I played through last week.  I have no idea what his purpose is, no quests directed me to interact with him.  As with nearly any older MMO, I often encounter things that are a bit mysterious to me.

The game isn't perfect of course.  The graphics are often dated, though for a game that game out in 2005 and tried for hyper realism they are also better than you would expect.  It has so many systems that it's often hard to get your bearings.  For example, I've been playing for a month and I still don't know what familiars are about, how to get one or exactly what they do.  The game itself is also often hard to navigate. When you finish questing in one area, it's sometimes next to impossible to figure out where to go next without consulting a guide.  Quests are often also quite old-school.  In some zones there are no in game markers, and the written instructions on the quests are vague.  You will often get stuck and need to consult a wiki. However, to my tastes these are mostly nitpicks.  I like exploring, and all that "cruft" that's accreted over the years actually gives me a lot to dig into.  I even like that I can pick whether to work through a zone that holds my hand with quest blobs on the map, or head to an older one where I will actually have to explore. 

My character's tiny apartment.  This is one of the cheapest ones you can get, and it allows you to place more than 200 objects anywhere you like.  The housing items also have a lot of neat little details.  For example, the books on the table on the left are individual books, any of which you can pick up and read.

If you can get past the slightly dated graphics and gameplay that is at times arcane, you will find a real gem of an MMO with months of content in every direction.  The core systems, when you finally understand them, are also really well designed.   "None of the core systems are completely broken" is so rare in modern MMOs** that it's practically a revelation. That this is true of a game that came out nearly 20 years ago, but not of so many more modern MMOs with budgets comparable to 100 EQ IIs is absolutely baffling.  

*Desert of Flames was the game's first expansion, released in September 2005.

**FFXIV perhaps excepted, and even there you have the issue where advancing a level often has almost no affect on  your character. 

The future of LoTRO

Via Massively, the video game rights to the Lord of the Rings owned by the  Paul Zaentz Company are going up for auction.  This is the company that licensed Lord of the Rings to Standing Stone Games.  Unfortunately, I doubt that bodes well for Lord of the Rings Online. A MMO is simply too obvious of a game to make with the license.  I find it hard to believe that any company would acquire the rights and not at least contemplate creating a new one of their own, and there is a good chance that LoTRO would be seen as unwanted competition.

That isn't to say LoTRO would be in real competition with any new MMO.  A new MMO, Tolkien themed metaverse, online survival RPG or whatever would likely have little in common with Lord of The Rings Online save the names of characters and places.  LoTRO is a sprawling old school MMO with a lot of design elements that are clunky and quant by modern standards.  It's a deep game that focuses on accurately reproducing Middle Earth from the books as a core design goal, and executes on it amazingly well.  In many ways, the development priority of the game is seemingly (1) accurately portray the setting (2) anything else, including compelling gameplay loops.  However, for a certain bent of player that is delightful.  

Walking around in such a well realized depiction of the books is so inherently fun to me that I honestly don't care that the gameplay set there is sometimes a bit crusty.  In some ways, that even adds to the charm.  I like harvesting wood for hours, and then sitting in a crafting hall processing logs into boards.  I like all the quests in the Shire where you are asked do do some of the most inane quests imaginable (deliver pies!).  I think it's awesome when I arrive at some new village where, despite having saved Middle Earth more than once, no-one has never heard of me and a farmer asks me if I can help him round up farming equipment.  The admixture of big story arcs where you are an important hero and more mundane sets of concerns makes the setting feel more grounded and real to me.  The very things that turn off a lot of new players in LoTRO are some of  the exact gameplay elements I find charming.  Hell, my first post here that anyone actually read was basically about that.

Whatever new game gets cooked up by Amazon, EA, Microsoft or whoever ends up buying the Lord of the Rings license will almost certainly invert those priorities.  The priorities won't be "get the setting right first, everything else second." The studio assigned to create a new Lord of the Rings RPG or MMO will likely start by thinking about gameplay and systems, and then shoehorn the game they want to create into the setting of Middle Earth.  Because of that the game won't actually resemble LoTRO all that much, and the two games will not really be competing for the same audience in a significant way.  LoTRO and whatever new MMOish product gets released in the next few years could quite happily coexists.

However, much like EA, SWTOR and Star Wars Galaxies, I don't expect that will matter much.  Back in 2011 SWG was shuttered right before EA's new Star Wars MMO, Star Wars: the Old Republic, came online, despite the games having very little potential audience overlap.  That is not to say that the shut down was caused directly by EA.  The game had already shot itself in the foot long before EA bought Bioware.  You can find a lot of post mortems about how the "New Game Experience" doomed SWG by chasing off the existing audience in the hopes of attracting a different audience that never materialized. I don't debate that, the NGE was the first step on the road to doom for sure.*  However back in 2011 I also heard rumors that the final nail in the coffin of SWG was that SOE was not willing to pay for the license any more, and didn't even try to negotiate to keep the game going once EA and Bioware started working on SWTOR.  SOE would have had trouble even breaking even if they had needed to keep paying for the license, the price of which presumably went up once EA acquired the video game rights to Star Wars.

I fully expect the exact same thing to happen with SSG and LoTRO.  LoTRO will be safe for at least a few more years while the agreement that Standing Stone Games has right now with Zaentz still holds.  However, I will be moderately surprised if SSG (or Endad Global 7)  is able to afford to keep the license whenever it come up for renewal.  Whatever company ends up paying north of 2 billion for the Lord of the Rings License is going to be pretty jealous of it.  Even if that company is willing to let LoTRO keep going in principle, which seems somewhat unlikely to begin with, they will almost certainly want to charge a lot more for the Lord of the Rings license than SSG can afford.  LoTRO is solidly successful niche title, reportedly bringing in about 10 million a year.  However, a company that pays 2 billion for the license to Lord of the Rings is not going to happy with less than pretty much all of that in licensing fees. 

That said, the example of SWG also offers a ray of hope.  Pretty much from the NGE on, attempts to emulate Star Wars Galaxies began.  Once SOE shuttered the game a flood of projects got underway and existing teams redoubled their efforts.  The end result was in subsequent years a number of EMUs came online, some of which are thriving.  For fans of the original Star Wars Galaxies we have arguably entered a golden era with numerous successful variants of the game available to play 100% for free.  Some shards of the game are now arguably better supported than the commercial game was the last few years SOE was running it, with EMUs even developing and releasing new content. 

So will LotRO be able to follow the EMU route if SSG/ EG7 loses the license?   It's hard to say. I'm frankly astounded that Disney has let all the unauthorized SWG servers keep going as long as it has.  I am also skeptical that Amazon, EA or Microsoft would be as benevolent towards unauthorized LotRO shards.  However, I could also easily be wrong.  So far I can't think of a single major fan server that has been shut down by anyone besides Blizzard.  Servers for COH, WAR, and SWG are some of the more visible examples of shuttered MMOs you can play for free now, and at least one (the EQ server Project 1999) is actually officially sanctioned by Daybreak.  So perhaps it's not too farfetched to think that if SSG loses the rights it needs to keep LotRO going, a series of  semi-legal free shards will be able to launch.  In that ecosystem I can think of a lot of cool variants of the game that could spring up.  Another strong possibility is that SSG has a lot more clever agreement with the Zaentz Company than anyone outside SSG knows, and they have the option to renew once or twice at their current price.  

Regardless, we'll see how it works out the in next few years.  Commentators including myself have been saying for a while now that LoTRO needs to shake things up.  One way or another, that seems likely to happen soon.

*Or maybe not, see the discussion in the comments :-)