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SOE Unveils In-Game EverQuest TCG
Sony Online Entertainment this week stated they'd have a 'new announcement' on Friday at their annual Fan Faire player event. SOE President John Smedley addressed the assembled players, revealing an in-game trading card game that's to be rolled out to players of EverQuest and EverQuest 2 sometime before the end of the month. The game was developed by the SOE-Denver studio, the same folks who made online TCGs out of Pirates! and Stargate. Gamespot reports: "All current EQ and EQ2 players will initially receive a starter deck, and additional booster packs can be purchased with real-world cash. However, those wishing not to spend any extra money will be happy to know that booster packs can also be acquired as loot off of boss mobs in both games, and the game will be free of charge to play. Of further note, the game will feature loot cards that can be redeemed for in-game items for players' characters. SOE plans to offer substantial support for the product, including in-game tournaments, card trading, a unique user interface, and deck-building functionality."
Oh yes, because Everquest needs something to make it more addictive lol. Obviously they don't think their players are playing enough lol. I think since a lot of the players are older, it won't work as well as with kid games because I'd much prefer collecting rare armor and other viewable wearables in any game I play and I'm 20
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After all, you need something to do with your time when you're bored with grinding. In all serious though, RPG players like TCGs. I remember Magic the Gathering being marketed in magazines that catered to RPG players.
God spoke to me.
Actually, it does need more players. Badly. And, no, not enough people play it. World Of Warcraft is currently at around 20 times more subscribers than EQ1 at its peak, and rising. (Whereas by definition EQ1 went downwards after the peak.) And EQ2 actually peaked lower than EQ1, and even giving away the base game didn't save it.
EQ2 actually had to merge pairs of servers into a single server pretty quickly, because the populations on each was ridiculously low. It was starting to get the reputation of being, I quote loosely from memory, "like Morrowind, except you occasionally see another player." Of course, Sony's PR hacks worded it like it was some great innovation to improve gameplay experience... which technically it was, but only because it reduced a _problem_ they were having.
Add the fact that WoW subscriptions are slightly more expensive, and you're looking at Blizzard making some 25 times more money than EQ1 at its peak. And, you know, EQ1 used to be called a money printing license.
Add to that a bit of hubris too. Sony used to own the MMO market, and now they went to being an also-ran, fighting to keep a single-digit market share percentage. I'm betting that a lot of people at Sony took that as an insult.
From a more pragmatic thing, there's the image and word-of-mouth factor too. At one point Sony used to be _the_ name in MMOs and EQ was almost a synonim for MMOs. Anyone you knew who was playing an MMO, chances are they played EQ. That's free marketting. Nowadays, if you think "MMO", you think "WoW". And if you hear of someone who plays any Sony MMO, you don't ask, "how much does it cost?", you ask, "why?" (Planetside almost bombed, Matrix Online was a major dud, EQ2 we already discussed, and SWG managed to allienate even its die-hard fanboys without bringing any new customers in the process.)
Heck, even if you talk to someone who's sick and tired of WoW, chances are they won't say, "I'm gonna try EQ2 then", they'll say something like, "I'm gonna try LOTRO, 'cause it's like WoW with a Tolkien theme."
Add to that the awful lot of bad PR that Sony managed to get itself into lately, and you can see how it would only amplify the existing problems.
Basically, Sony has all the reasons to fight for more players, and you could watch them getting in a panic to copy WoW ever since it got launched and their EQ2 barely survived. There are a lot of disjointed, poorly planned, uninspired changes that their games went through precisely to try to copy WoW. The history of the last couple of years at Sony has been almost 100% trying to play catch with WoW.
The problem is that they don't have any designer who even understands _why_ WoW did well, or what actually worked. So they're taking random guesses, managing at most to annoy the players whose characters just got massively changed, but not quite to hit the mark. Or come even within 1 mile of it. It's like watching a (piss-poor) cook trying to copy someone else's dish that sells better, and going, "Oh, they used salt too. I get it! People love salt. I'll put 10 times more salt in mine!" But I digress.
On the bright side, this sounds like the kind of a change which, if done even half-way sane, at least doesn't mess anyone's existing character or annoy the existing players in any other way. Then again, it's Sony. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to screw up even this.
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This is pretty cool, if you get past the fact that you are going to play a game... to play another game.
It's kind of sad state of SOE. They have such a small base that they probably couldn't get anybody to produce a physical card set for them.
Instead they just try to detract from the actual game to keep people playing instead of trying out the massive breadth of MMOs available to them.
Let's make a niche product and try to sell it to people who use our already existing niche product!
Sounds like a recipe for failure to me.
you guys sit around talking about card games so much that it requires an acronym now? lame.
The most disturbing part of this story is the new link between having stacks of cash at your disposal and specific success in the game. That is, if you can afford to collect all the best cards due to your RL wealth, you get special bonus prizes in the game. And apparently, not some dinky thing like you get when you fork over the extra $20 for the collector's edition of a MMOG, but actual worthwhile items.
This further weakens the barrier between RL wealth and in-game property, and sadly, bolsters the position of the RMTers. Of course, SOE has always been happy to sacrifice integrity to make an extra buck (such as EQ Legends, the EQ2Bay server, and about three times as many $25 expansions released as they really needed to).
Moraelin,
Sorry for the bizarre OT Slashdot comment, but I came across a post of yours here on sword fighting (link) and was impressed by your in-depth knowledge of the subject. I'd be interested to know how you came to be so knowledgeable on the subject, so that I might follow the same path. Please email me or let me know where I can email you. My email address is (obfuscated):
user: cmindrum
domain: gmail.com
-Chris
Support NRA, America's oldest civil rights group.
hm. sanctioned gold buying.
But that's the thing. For a lot of people, possessing an all powerful avatar kind of wipes the mind blank as to how they got there. Perhaps it's the cynic in me, but I feel like this is a cheap attempt to win over current MMO players....no risk of being banned after all.
Well, I'm flattered, but actually I'm not an expert on swords by any kind of reckoning. It's all just extensively googled on the Internet. And, as usually is the case with that source of information, it's probably not all accurate either. At any rate, I wish I could tell you some authoritative source, but other than hitting Google again, I'm a bit at a loss.
Pretty much it all started with a MUD I was playing on. They used to have the regular weaponry and armour mis-conception, namely 10 pound rapiers, 30 pound warhammers and 100 pound gothic breastplates. And we all kinda took it for granted.
So someone gets it into his head to change it to something more realistic, and the MUD pretty quickly got polarized into "noo, 3 pound warhammers are bogus" and "damn right they only weighed 2 to 3 pounds" factions. Being the wisearse you can see here, of course I wanted to jump into the debate and sound like a know-it-all. Also being a complete nerd, I went and googled it first. Much to my unexpected surprise, it turned out that the latter faction was right, and I found a bit more information about those weapons and armours too. Damn, I never would have guessed that a warhammer isn't a giant sledgehammer.
Not much later came a similar debate about katanas vs longswords, with manga fans swearing that a katana should be armour-piercing and how they've read somewhere that in WW2 some japanese bugger with a katana cut straight through a machinegun barrel. More googling, turns out that, damn, I was wrong about that one too.
Fast forward a bit more, and I was pondering making my own MUD. I actually wrote a driver from scratch, and it even worked, now to code the equipment and stuff. Now that was a lot of googling to get each and every piece of armour as historically-accurate described and balanced as possible.
'Course, then I decided I don't want to run a MUD after all.
At any rate, there you go, it's all googled. And from there, I just have a good memory for all sorts of trivia that no sane person would bother with.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I play Everquest, and this doesn't sound like fun. I don't want loot cards that I have interest in. I don't want to play an "in-game" game that players can buy extra cards for. I like the egalitarian idea that everyone pays the same fee and then gets a level playing field ( yes, there are gold farmers, but Sony tries to stop them, not become them). And I don't know how this is supposed to integrate with the world of Norrath. I mean, why would, for example, a skeleton be carrying around a trading game card? Kinda seems out of place.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
I wonder why other games haven't already done this! it's great to have 'sub-games' to play within the larger RPG context. For example why not add Chess and other games as well in Taverns etc. across the world? I was wondering when a company would decide to merge the highly profitable and engaging Trading Card type of game with a MMORPG, and here Sony's gone and done it! Sony of all companies! I was thinking it would have been Blizzard or some new startup! This will start a whole new economy going within Everquest and yet another reason to play. The issue of 'cash for items' is really old school. There's nothing wrong with setting up an economy which allows players to purchase items other than jealousy. Sony has already made the move to support real world trading on certain servers! I am actually downloading the Trial of The Isle right now, I note that gameplay in EQ has changed drastically and it actually seems to be quite interesting from what I am reading!
-Gel214th
ASCII graphics. It's hard. No sound. But, it's fun.
I played EQ, DAoC, etc. And after awhile, they stopped being fun. ADOM hasn't stopped being fun. And, if anything, it's MORE addictive than EQ et al ever was.
Isn't that what a game is supposed to be about?
I started playing Everquest in 2000 with a friend of mine. He quit to play World of Warcraft when it came out but I kept playing Everquest until the last expansion. I didn't like the direction the game was headed and now reading this makes me glad that I quit when I did. SOE needs to unplant their heads out of their butts and fix the problems with Everquest rather than put more stupid crap in the game. There are still many things that are broken in the game that date back to the original old world. Atleast the game is now on an anual expansion schedule now instead of one every 6 months. Maybe that will give the developers more time to go through the existing game and fix the majority of the problems that have been left untouched.
I didn't read through the replies to see if this particular bit of info was posted yet but this would make the 2nd sub-game put into place to try to help pass the time spent out of boredom. The first one was called "Gems" which was a tetris type wannabe using the existing game's spell icons which I thought was silly to begin with. My impression is that SOE is trying to think up ways to keep their already dwindled player base to keep paying their monthly dues. What they need to do instead of prolonging the inevitable demise of Everquest is try to revitalize it and find a way to get new players and bring back some of their old ones but we all know that will never happen. Last count that I heard was Everquest had a little over a hundred thousand subcribers remaining versus World of Warcraft's seven million. How much longer will EQ stay alive?!?
Isn't that just a little extremely antithematic?
It's supposed to be a fantasy game - CCG's are pretty starkly unfantasy.
What next, Coke ads? Nike armour? Toyota mounts?
Talk about ruining the illusion. Even WoW keeps a better grip (barely).
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Magic is old and busted, and the new direction WotC is taking MTG is made of Fail.
play The Spoils instead
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