Frankenstein’s MMO

Many people have written posts about their perfect game. I’m not going to try and write up all the features in my perfect game, but I am going to start sewing a few pieces together into my MMO Monster.  Tis the season for making horrific creatures after all.

As I’ve been playing a few different games lately, I have come up with a long list of “man I miss X feature” as I play them. So here is a mish-mash of features that I’ve been missing and some things I’ve had to get used to doing again. I do wish games would borrow some ideas from each other more often, (ok, a lot of ideas), while still remaining unique in their own ways.

Favorite flying horse!

World of Warcraft has moved a lot of the acquisitions such as unique pets and unique mounts to be account wide. I really love that all the hard work I put into grinding for some of these fluff items can now be enjoyed on any character I play. No longer is the lucky drop of the Headless Horseman’s mount stuck on a character I don’t play very often. Instead, all of my characters can now benefit from it. WoW also has some amazingly clever pets and such a plethora that you can collect. Some of my latest favorites have been pretty easy to come by with just a few steps in a quest chain rather than a grind for reputation and a purchase, well done Blizzard.

Such creative pets!

Rift has a really smart auction house interface. As I was selling off some extra artifacts I’d collected, I noticed that one of my characters had put the same artifact up for sale earlier. The AH was smart enough to realize this and automatically matched prices for me. Both Rift and WoW allow you to fill in the search box for items you are selling by clicking on the items from your bags. SWTOR’s auction house is primitive by comparison to these two games.

I really like being able to quickly see how many people from my guild are online when I log in. Both Rift and SWTOR show a guild count in your UI. With how heavily into guilds WoW is, I’m very surprised that I have to open my guild, then click on a separate roster tab to see if anyone is online. Both Rift and WoW are miles ahead of SWTOR in the kind of information you can see about your guild, but that one little feature of seeing quickly and easily if anyone is online turns out to be a big deal for me.

WoW’s new monk class and Pandaran race

WoW having each race start in its own unique “training ground” for brand new characters is pretty nice. I played their new Pandaran area and it gives a real flavor and sense of character to this new race. I really wish SWTOR hadn’t decided to share a starting planet with two classes. It makes trying to play every class in their game a bit more boring after a while. Rift is even worse in having only two different starting areas, in terms of a lack of support for my altitis. Another thing WoW has done with their latest expansion is to not make you visit a trainer to learn new skills as you level up. I really like this feature.

Rift souls are such a smart idea, especially the new souls that they are adding with their upcoming expansion. While it can be harder to learn and build your roles up, the flexibility of play in a single character is fantastic. With their new souls, they are giving classes a completely different type of game play to try out without making people re-level a character. As I was beta testing, I tried out the melee combat role for my cloth wearing Mage. It was fun and a real change up for the class. I love that my mage can switch from a fully built set of bars and abilities for healing, to a fully built set of bars for ranged DPS, and soon to a fully built set of bars for melee DPS, on the fly.

I have had to force myself to read quest text a lot lately. I tend to skim through it and just accept quests and move on, and that loses a lot of the story. It is a real struggle for me to balance listening to the voice acting in WoW and Rift and reading their quests in order to make up for the easy richness of the story you get in SWTOR. Picking up quests in SWTOR is much more entertaining. Oddly enough, I really had to get used to picking up and turning in quests solo again in Rift and WoW. I’m so used to waiting to talk to NPCs until my husband is ready to talk to them with me when picking up and dropping off quests in SWTOR. I’m not sure which I prefer. Sometimes it is nice to just get and turn things in at my own pace, but I do like feeling like a party when everyone in my group in SWTOR is represented.

Just needs a little paint and some furniture

Much more homey with a deck overlooking the sea

Having a place to call home is a surprisingly nice feature in a game. While I’ve never considered myself a big player housing advocate, seeing the potential in Rift’s upcoming customized dimensions has opened my eyes to why this feature is so popular. I got to play around with customization options in their beta and I spent hours enjoying myself doing so. It was great to be able to express my creativity so fully. I’m not sure how much time I’ll spend hanging out in my nifty dimension, but making it nifty will certainly be fun. I enjoy having my ship in SWTOR, but it isn’t really mine to customize. My female trooper is stuck with stupid girlie posters on her locker, and that just doesn’t feel quite right. I’d love to be able to change some of the features of my SWTOR ship and customize the interior. I do like that I’ve been allowed to unlock features on my ship such as a mailbox though. I can’t believe how much I dislike the capital cities in WoW or how much I dislike not having my own private retreat in that game.

Quinn hard at work.

Crafting is another area where I have been missing features from other games. I really like sending my sidekick in SWTOR off to pick stuff up for me, or having my crew busily getting me needed materials while I adventure. Crew missions rock. I also LOVE being able to put all my crafting stuff in a cargo hold and still be able to make things from anywhere I happen to be standing. Having to go to the bank in WoW and pull things out into my overflowing bags has been driving me bonkers lately. Rift also tracks crafting components that are in your bank and lets you craft from bank stock. However, Rift makes you stand at workstations to build various items rather than just allowing crafting on the fly.

Mod-able gear in SWTOR is one of my favorite things about the game. I can customize my look while keeping the same stats, at least until end game. I love the variety you find among people playing the same classes, at least until end game. You still get a lot of cookie cutter max level characters running around, but it is getting better with some of the newer sets of gear. Rift’s wardrobe feature takes customizing the look of your character to a whole other level. I love wearing a certain set of gear for the stats, but looking completely different. I just wish they didn’t make additional wardrobe slots so dang expensive. WoW’s gear is still cartoonish and annoying to me. Even their attempts to let you reforge and customize aren’t implemented very well. Being able to wear pants if I want to on class that typically is stuck with dresses/robes by default is pretty important to me. What I do miss gear-wise from WoW is how they have pieces of heirloom gear that are account wide and scale to your level. Now if I could just hide how they look by putting on wardrobe overlays, I’d be a happy camper.

custom looks, same stats

Travel is another really big part of MMOs and is handled so differently in Rift, WoW and SWTOR. SWTOR giving me sprint at level 1 and letting me unlock faster riding on my speeder at level 10 is fantastic. Their quick travel options are also something I really love. Once you visit a place and learn its travel point, you can get back to it every 30 minutes (or faster with unlocks) with a button click. WoW has portals and you can fly around once you get high enough level, but they still make you slog around by inconvenient means for a good portion of your play time. Rift is my least favorite overland travel game, but I do like their porticulum system where you can fairly quickly get to an instant transporter. SWTOR’s is by far the most convenient in letting you travel from anyplace you are to anyplace you’ve been on the same planet. A lot of people don’t like SWTOR’s galaxy travel and having to get to your ship to leave a planet, but I find it one of those important distinction building features. I do love my flying mounts and having the option to avoid a lot of annoying monsters in WoW. If SWTOR decided to add some atmospheric travel options, or just stopped knocking me off my speeder after a while, I’d love it. I do enjoy being able to bypass terrain features in WoW.

And lets not forget SWTOR and Rift letting you revive in place. I really don’t like running back to my corpse in WoW. SWTOR giving every class an out of combat energy and health renewal option is fabulous.

This is a pretty big MMO Monster by now. As you can see, there are a lot of features I’d mosh together if I had the chance, and I’ve only been talking about 3 of the games I’ve played most often lately. What are your favorite features if you were building your own Frankenstein’s MMO?

Hype and Fun and Games

Maybe we should go back to the harbor

I love thought-provoking talks via Twitter. They make me want to write and they help me put my thoughts in order about things percolating in my mind. Today’s brain brew is all about game hype, game expectations, why we love some games but don’t love their successors as much, game success and failure, and what I’m thinking of as the perfect storm for failure that has plagued several games lately.

I’ve come to one conclusion that MMOs that are based off of very popular single-player games or popular books are probably doomed to failure. I can’t say that for sure because the future remains unwritten, but it seems very possible. You can’t recapture in an MMO the same arc and satisfaction that you got from a single-player RPG or a well-written series. It is like having a book that you love so much that you re-read it, then turning that book into a story that has a start, a middle, but NO END. You can’t recapture the hero’s journey in an MMO because the journey never ends and no one is a unique flower.

Why did people love Knights of the Old Republic so  much, but those same people don’t love the game that expands upon its world, Star Wars: The Old Republic? Maybe because by its very nature as an MMO, the SWTOR story/world can’t take you on the same journey. It is the song that never ends. It is played by people with MMO expectations. It is also played by Star Wars fans and while it captures the adventure, humor, flavor, and much of the essence of the IP, it doesn’t have a happy ending because it doesn’t have an ending. I wonder if that makes sense to others the way it does to me. The game is unsatisfying to the Star Wars movie fans in the same way that a book or movie without a definitive end is. We finish up our epic journey and then we putter around at loose ends. I don’t think people’s excitement over the game was unfounded, I just think their excitement over existing  within it as an MMO was. It has much better re-playability than most MMOs, but a surprising number of people don’t want to play more than their one archetype.

Now on to that whole “perfect storm” concept. The current environment for the games I love is full of storm clouds of turmoil, social media challenges, financially strapped customers, a likely aging player base with more real life responsibilities (I don’t know if younger gamers are a big demographic or if they are too busy playing social games on their smart phones), emerging technologies, trolls who ruin reputations without a care, heavy competition, and long-standing games that their loyal customers refuse to leave. It seems to be more than the usual environment of heavy competition. Players have very high expectations and a thunderously loud voice in which to share them. Production costs versus what people are willing or able to pay just don’t seem to mesh. In general, it is more turbulence than most companies could have foreseen a few years ago. Gale force winds have come upon them rather quickly it seems and I wonder if they saw any red skies at night.

There are evolving social issues that players grapple with in their daily lives, pitfalls in the social media revolution that topple companies and even political regimes, and those social challenges hit game developers too. People have billowing expectations and surprisingly broad reach and the skies the limit in their potential sphere of influence. Players are connected to each other and to the companies that build games in ways that didn’t exist just a few years ago.

Blizz and WoW built their massive player base during calm skies and they’ve managed to hold onto it so far. Their giant cruise ship has been able to weather the rogue waves that have swamped some of the younger games trying to ride the storm in much smaller boats.  Years ago developers saw what WoW was doing and thought, we can be successful too, we can bring that kind of fun to our players, and we can give them more/different/better. Sure, assuming the players they seek are willing to allow them to do more/different/better instead of clinging to their comfort zones. And assuming we didn’t all start to spiral into a cycle of long term unemployment, high gas prices, high food prices, and all the other pressures that compete for increasingly limited resources.

While I’m grateful we have so many fantastic ways to escape from reality, I’m almost overwhelmed by them. I never keep up with all the things I’d like to do and see. Some really entertaining things never get my attention, no matter how good they might be.

I really enjoy cooperative game play and some of the mechanics of MMOs. (I also almost equally dislike some of the mechanics of MMOs and some of the side effects of massively multiplayer environments. I don’t like being reminded that the world is full of rude people, especially when that happens during my fun time.) But despite some really stellar moments in several of the MMOs I play, most especially in SWTOR, I’ve never enjoyed story in my MMOs the way I’ve enjoyed it in my single player RPGs. I’ve never “read” my game story content the way I enjoy reading books, even though most of the games I play have a wealth of written information. SWTOR tries very hard to blend the awesome elements of a good book or a good RPG, but I wonder if by its very nature as an MMO, it won’t be able to fully satisfy its readers, viewers or its RPGers who are trying to recapture a very different experience.

Deciding on the quality of games that exist in this highly complex environment isn’t easy. I think people judge games on criteria that are overly simplistic at times. And really, the future of several  of our games, both the highly successful and those in their infancy, still remains unwritten. I don’t envy them being born under such stormy skies.

Shrinking Pains

Change, oh how we loathe it sometimes. I’m writing this to say farewell to the glory days of SWTOR’s endless servers and the concept I had of how my legacies and character concepts would work, and to grumble about it.

Farewell to Z’ha’dum and Krath

In the early days of long queues and many servers, we had this idea of splitting Imperial and Republic between multiple servers. Thus began my orderly Vorlonn and strength-through-adversity Z’ha’dum legacies. It made sense for my fierce red-skinned Sith Warrior to go by Z’ha’dum from Babylon 5. My cooperative but manipulative and secretive Smuggler made sense to go by the inscrutable Vorlon name and thus was born my two primary servers. One would focus mainly on Republic goals and characters while the other would explore the Empire side of things. Each would give me the option to try two versions of each class in each faction, one dedicated to the dark side and one dedicated to the light side. That was then…

This is now… With shrinking populations and a much smaller player base, decisions were made that didn’t take my concepts into consideration. My thought processes weren’t shared by the game decision makers. Someone decided, hey, lets give people more slots and then smoosh them all together onto crowded servers where they get to fight each other over daily quests and world bosses like children squabbling over pinyata candy. But, rather than smooshing them in such a way that they could play light side dark side of every class, lets only give them 12 slots instead of 16. And rather than letting them pick which servers they get squished onto, lets just take that pesky choice  out of their hands and only make it to suit our own needs and desires.

Time and energy invested here

The initial step to consolidation left me with characters stranded for months on a dead server. I deleted characters and moved Imperials over as I could, but still had some remnants of my Imperial glory left behind. That would have been the perfect time to give me options. Instead, I was given a carrot on a stick, which I couldn’t fully take advantage of due to a lack of available character slots, and then left to wonder what would become of my hard work and legacy? What would become of the crafting skills I laboriously built to support my characters?  I still wonder what will become of the XP bars for each of my Legacies when one is forced to consume the other later today.

It would have been nice to be able to preserve my legacy by moving it to a RP server, thus giving me the freedom to pursue my idea of seeing the classes from both sides. If I want to explore new options, I have to start over on a RP server. Now I’m stuck without legacy perks or crafting skills that are duplicated and wasted on my brave new mega server, because I wasn’t given choice or options. That more than anything else makes me mad. I’m a victim of the MMO market overflood, but have been a loyal paying customer from the day the servers opened. I sure don’t feel like that now.

So farewell Krath and Z’ha’dum. I suppose I went there and died.

(Update: post merger, my level 23 legacy still has the same XP as before, so none of the merged legacy XP was added in.)

Gaming is Not A Long-term Commitment

I’ve come to a realization recently that I am an old-fashioned gamer. Not the tasty cocktail or ice-cream sundae kind of Old-Fashioned either, but the stodgy get-these-kids-off-my-lawn kind. I’ve been watching people game-hop and finding myself annoyed at those pesky kids and their wanton gaming ways. And then it hit me, we’re talking about games here. Yep folks, I have fallen into the trap of equating fun, leisure activities with real world morality and considerate behavior. Ouch, what have I been thinking and where did it all start?!

Granted, the games I care most about are highly social MMOs that rely heavily on groups and people working together in teams. But when did I start thinking that these games required some kind of long-term commitment or monogamy from me and everyone else I know who plays them? When did I start having this sense of superiority or being the adult in the room for sticking to my guns and staying faithful? It has been subtle and built up over time, especially by my own desire to support guilds and communities, but it is unrealistic and silly to expect long-term commitment from people playing games.

So all of you free-spirited early-adopters, you mavericks willing to put up with bugs, lag, growing pains, and all the other bumps in the road to experience the new hotness, I salute you! Maybe I’ll even get up the gumption to get out of my rocker, off the porch, and join you in a few of them. Then again, I expect you’ll be miles ahead of me, running free in the wind to the next new thing by the time I get there.

Maybe there is a bit of Rift in my near future

Let’s face it folks, even MMOs can only hold our attention for so long before we start to get restless and bored. And there are always new (or old-familiar) vistas to experience.

It will mean a pretty serious paradigm shift for me though. I’m not a dabbler, but in order to play a lot of different games, I think I need to dabble more and end-game less. This means giving up crafting and being pretty penniless. I think I can live with that if I’m not trying to support the raiding habit. It means spending time on walkabout again. I’ve done that in the past, headed off in a direction and just travelled as far the game map would let me. Maybe with enough variety I will even keep myself from getting too stir-crazy over repetitive mechanics or behavior. Whew, I’m getting tired just thinking about it, think I’ll go back and take a little ol’ fashioned nap first.

SWTOR Event Goodies

I hope to update this over the next few days to share a few of the goodies from doing the latest Star Wars: The Old Republic’s live event. For now, I had to share a picture of my good fortune from yesterday’s kick off day. I’m not sure how often these little guys will drop from quest objects, but I got this one out of a smuggler’s crate while hunting for pieces of the Vandrayk’s Tuning Apparatus on Nar Shaddaa. They  normally cost 250 of the event tokens, so I’m really excited to get one as a random drop.

I’m not much of a social gear person, but I may link some of the sand people gear later. I didn’t get a full set for anyone, just bits and pieces that I’m waiting to equip once I mod them up. I’m not of a level to use the bowcaster yet, but I’m looking forward to using that on my Trooper later.

Think it might explode?

And then we come to the vehicle that you could buy for 120 tokens. I rushed to complete the quests on the last day with my Jedi Knight and since I had enough tokens to buy one, I got the speeder. I think I got a lemon. This bucket of bolts looks like they pulled it from the hidden transit system, and in fact they did. This is the speeder that you ride for one of the quests and take a leap of faith off a high platform while riding;  Smoke, sparks, bent stabilizers and all. This kind person tried to fix it up for me, but as you can see, there is no hope for this beat up fossil. I just hope its tougher than it looks.

It Is The Little Things That Count

Never did figure out how to get or set these off during my trial

I took advantage of the chance to try out The Secret World MMO during its free weekend event. While I hadn’t intended to post anything about my trial, I really don’t feel I had enough time to give it a fair chance, I did come away with some general impressions and decided to share them. I will say up front that I don’t think they are entirely fair impressions given my lack of available time in the game. I think a game like this really should give a week to try it out to give people enough time to really get past the initial bumps. I tried to go back and play it some more Sunday night, but sadly I got disconnected in the middle of trying to put vague clues together and couldn’t log back in, so I called it done for this trial event.

Those bumps I mentioned… there are many of them. The learning curve on the game is steep and for someone like me, who came into it without doing any research into the game systems or features, it was playable but I found it sorely lacking in many ways. I’ll admit, I may have only thought it was lacking features when I just didn’t find time to figure out if those features existed. For example, does the game have any method of sending notes or items between characters? I never found one, it was never mentioned, and I couldn’t figure it out on my own.

I’ve basically decided that I won’t buy the game based on my latest trial, but if I get the chance to give it more of a trial, I will go back and try it again later. My overall impression is of a rich set of players, some excellent concepts, an intriguing travel system, but a high annoyance factor that I just couldn’t move past. I was left with the feeling that the game is only half finished. The structure is there, the stained glass windows are pretty, but there is no where to sit inside except the floor and the floor plan is confusing. First impressions are really important, and I don’t have enough favorable ones to feel this game is worth my money yet. I’m pretty tired of new MMOs and figure I’ll wait on this one until it has had some time to mature.

Combat felt off and even turning on options to highlight nameplates and targets didn’t make it easier to tell exactly what I was targeting. This didn’t bother me with shotgun attacks, but with single target attacks, it never clicked for me. Combat turned my husband off so fully that he didn’t even go back and play with me later on when I went back for more questing. I generally don’t let combat bother me that much, but in this game where you are exploring and wandering around among unseen dangers, combat got shoved in my face pretty frequently.

Playing with a partner, while much more survivable, wasn’t fully supported. This was starting area and introductory content, so I wasn’t expecting it to be fully duo-able, but it raised a few concerns for me.

Little things, like the crafting system and splitting items, or trying to sell “trash” items to get them out of my inventory, added a level of frustration that you just don’t want to subject your players to in a game. Little things like that should be seamless and not detract from the game experience. Instead, they left me with the impression of being half-baked and awkward. I would like to have shared the screen shot I took of my character, but sadly this is another area where you needed a guide to figure out how it worked, and my lack of research left me hanging.

The game is all about investigation and exploration, and yet the clues in many cases were so vague that, in my admittedly very limited time, I ended up “cheating” them to just go find the answers. That left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I’m willing to do a bit of trial and error, but I expect to be met more than half way when it comes to providing enough details to make things solvable without being too easy. Just don’t make them so vague that they are more frustrating than satisfying to solve. Give me some suggested authoritative sources, not just open Google and try to guess what sources our developers used. I would probably have been a lot more patient about this if I hadn’t been under the gun time-wise, but since this is one of the biggest draws to the game, I would have expected a lot more care to go into it for the starting zone.

I’m not into PVP in general, and since I had already read some reviews of PVP in the game, I didn’t waste any of my precious time trying it out.

I wasn’t fond of the fact that I didn’t realize that NPCs had a lot more to say about topics than I got selecting the topic from their list once. You had to keep clicking it to get them to tell you everything. I really wish I’d known that sooner, I had to go back and click multiple times for multiple folks, another annoyance that just added to the list.

I won’t say this was “death by a thousand cuts,” the game isn’t dead to me yet, but I will say that the little things added up into a generally unfavorable impression for me so far. I will also say that after suffering through a few game releases, I’m a lot more picky about which games I’m willing to buy brand new. For MMOs, I think I’m going to let them mature a lot before I really dive into them. Sure, I’ll miss that initial rush of enthusiasm and adventure, but quality is important and I don’t want to judge a game as bad when it is only half-finished. I’d like to judge it once it has reached its full potential, so I’m sure it is working as intended.

What Else Should I Do When I Can’t Sleep, But Blog?

It has been a while since I’ve felt like writing. I couldn’t sleep and have been chatting about MMO content in Twitter this morning. Twitter is often a good source of blog fodder, since it is hard to hold a long meaningful discussion in bits and pieces, but often thought provoking.

Yawn!

This (early!) morning’s contemplation has been about sticking with an MMO. Another large guild that was very active during the build up to the release of SWTOR is shutting down. I see a lot of other people that had been very enthusiastic about the game for a long time leading up to it, and during early game, starting to stray into other games. Fan sites and podcasts are becoming less active or looking toward the next “big thing.”  My husband has started to question how much longer he might want to sub for SWTOR. In essence, the natives are getting restless.

It got me thinking about game hopping and why I don’t just go for it and hop about. I spend a lot of time building up a character and the support skills for it, which makes it much harder to walk away and start investing in another one. And yet I enjoy playing alts if there is enough to make a game re-playable for them. The alts often support higher level characters and they all support the guild I am in, so they are all part of the bigger picture. I think my gaming family/guild is the second big piece of why I am averse to MMO hopping.

We build up relationships while we build up characters if we are really doing the MMO vibe. Having those become very transitory or seeing people just walk away when you’ve built up a team with them, either questing or doing end game, can get very frustrating for me. I’ve had it happen in several MMOs now, and it is the main reason I hate seeing people rush through content, then get bored and walk away. It is the main reason why I want to find a game that keeps people engaged for a longer time.

I never seem to consume content at the same pace as others have in past guilds. I get there fairly quickly, but I’m usually several weeks behind the sprinters. To have them already decide they are done and stop playing, to not be able to count on people when you’ve built up a solid team for end game or harder group content, gets old after a while. And yet having people become grouchy because they are burned out is no fun either. It would be nice to find a happy medium.

Game hopping together might be one way, but because I tend to have less marathon game time as others, I feel like I’m always just a few steps behind in being ready to move on. I also find transitory play is not conducive to supporting games and helping them thrive enough to give me all the new content that I want. I do have a harder time justifying paying for multiple subs at a time, but it isn’t the money cost as much as the time cost involved with multiple subs. I really only have the time and energy to focus on one game at a time. I also worry that game hopping builds smaller cliques within guilds as people who group together a lot tend to hop together more. Most games never support the perfect size of team, there always seem to be those few who are left on the sidelines. That dynamic has led to a lot of guild drama in the past. It seems nearly impossible to move a viably large group of people through many games.

Finding that perfect MMO that encompasses a variety of gaming styles, supports people who can game non-stop, supports casual players with limited time, the PVPers, the crafters, those who love grind and those who hate it, people happy to farm, kill festers, quest lovers, those with only a main, altaholics, etc., seems like an impossible dream. People never seem to agree on the level of difficulty they should find in end game. Some want really hard content requiring precision execution and a really solid team. Others want very accessible content that anyone can play and enjoy. I find myself wanting an MMO that can keep a decent sized group of people engaged for long enough to make all the investment in play time and relationship building worth it. There are plenty of single player games out there I can go off and play by myself that have some really fun and intriguing content, but they aren’t an MMO. When I play an MMO, I want the group dynamics to be really solid. Truthfully, I just don’t see any of the emerging games fitting the impossible dream.

Maybe my problem is that I’ve played a lot of really young games lately. I lasted in WoW for a long time before I couldn’t stand the game anymore, but it was several years into existence before I started playing it. Maybe MMOs are like a fine wine. You have to start out with a really solid foundation, but they are only really exceptional once they’ve aged a bit. Assuming one of this year’s MMO contenders lasts long enough, maybe eventually I will get my “fine wine” game with a guild that lasts for a while. In the meantime, I either need to change my willingness to game hop, or find some other way to cope with the revolving door that exists with MMOs lately.