Free at Last

It has been a while since I sat down and updated my thoughts on AC, AC2 and LOTRO. Actually, I have been a little too busy playing the games.

Summer came and along with it was Turbine's announcement that AC was going Buy to Play. What that broke down to was that if you were playing with a live subscription on July 1st, it became free to play for your account on AC and AC2. No more fees. If you decided that you wanted to activate an inactive account or purchase a new account, the fee was 9.95 and no additional fees.

I wound up taking my 4 accounts live into the new model and also reactivated 5 inactive accounts that I had in the past.

One of the great things about this change is that I am seeing a lot more players in all of the worlds. The counts have almost doubled at any point in time and many, many past players are returning. AC may be almost 15 years old, but there are no games out there that can come close to it in enjoyment.

As people are creating new characters and trying the new weapons and summoning, they are not pushed to get to end game. Sure, they can rush along and get to 275 as soon as possible, but there is little purpose to it anymore. Now a person can try out combinations that they would not have tried in the past, enjoy the scenery that is this world, run dungeons and do any of the many challenges available. This is not only in AC but in AC2. It still has a nice community and its world is so worth travelling.

I just created a Finesse Melee Player last night. I ran him through the Facility Dungeon and got him up to level 43. From there I took him over to get his Jitte Improved. Now I am having him go through all of the Exploration Society Stamp Quests. When he completed the 6 quests, he will be level 50 or 51. He can run through the Evis Dungeon for his pincher and will be shortly ready for the Danby's Outpost Moarsman Dungeon. It has excellent loot and good XP.

I am shaking my head a bit at the number of characters I have to deal with. Nine accounts give me 99 characters per world to manage. Sure, some of them are mules and some are crafters, but that still totals a lot of characters. I am working towards getting cottages for all accounts on all worlds. One of the places I am focused on is a set of 8 cottages where I purchased my first cottage the day that any cottages became available in the worlds. It requires Iron Hearts and they are difficult to acquire. A few years ago, Turbine bumped up the Iron Golems to over level 100 and they are pretty tough. There is one dungeon where a number of them are located and I farm them for hearts.

Many of the worlds now have nightly Paradise Valley Quests. Many players can get a level and a mana forge key at the end. The current problem is that the quest is so popular that portal storms have returned. It becomes a battle just to stay in the Valley to get the reward at the end. That is a good problem.

With the Missile weapon changes, the Devs did not treat Thrown Weapons like the Bow or Crossbow. With TW you need Strength and have to give up Focus. It just delays your Fletching power a bit.

The Tension Builds

Here we are into May 2014 and everyone is eagerly awaiting the next word from Turbine on more details about switching to F2P and Player run Servers.

They did announce last week that anyone that had not moved an account from MSN Zone, had to request and complete that activity before the end of May or they would no longer be able to have that done. That sounds like a very reasonable notice, however, I expect that will be some noise and excuses after the end of May that people have to have the move done. I trust that Turbine will stand fast on that. It has been years and years since we left the Zone.

Hopefully, F2P will come shortly after the end of May. With no updates to AC, outside of bug fixes, the players will start to get restless and look at leaving the game. The populations are fairly busy now, but a delay of several months will cost a lot of interest.

I have actually activated an old account and am bringing the players up to snuff. That makes 5 accounts that I am playing. I need to get better organized.

This time period has given me time to think about what I would like to see in my player run Server. I really enjoyed the earlier days of AC. If the capabilities exist to perform the following changes, I would like to:

1. Return to the Portal System.
2. Not allow for 3rd party Decal.
3. Reduce the magic strength of the higher level critters and bosses.
4. Allow all Quests to be soloable.
5. Bump up the max attributes for players
6. Reduce a number of the timers.
7. Make the FP Salvage an ongoing receiveable item.

I would want the game to continue to be fun to play where you can feel like a hero. Right now, the end game type content is way beyond what most players can touch.

Nothing beats being surrounded by Olthoi in a dungeon and laying waste to the critters wave after wave.

All of this is speculation right now. I am hoping most of the functions are controlled by XML or Database parameters. It doesn't look like we will have access to the source code and I am not sure that is a bad thing. The stories have indicated that the updating of the source code is extremely difficult and often introduced bugs.

There are options available where I could develop a new AC using other source libraries, however, there is way too much work required to get that option operational.

I guess that we will just have to wait and see what is available and if it is worthwhile.

There are also questions about getting existing accounts and characters moved. I know I would only be running my accounts on 1 world. Picking which characters to move would be difficult. I could still have the 10 or 11 characters per account but they would have to come from 1 world. I would expect Leafcull, but maybe not.

Somehow, I think the next 6 months will be rather busy as more information is supplied.