Dark Age of Camelot was the sucessor to EverQuest. A 3D-based medieval-tinged fantasy world for sword and sorcery adventure. Clearly post-EverQuest, though, because it's built to suit adult and casual players. Some good reviews and (inevitable) comparisons are pasted below.
- Dark Age of Camelot -- PC -- Five Stars
- An informed, negative opinion.
- The Amazon page has some solid user reviews.
- More reviews listed on the DAoC page
- An Explicit EQ and DAoC comparison from a dedicated fan, favoring DAoC.
From July 2000, in The Economist, Where there's MUD, there's brass. They examine the phenomenon of harvesting, quitting your day job to make money auctioning off virtual assets online. They wonder over the social impact as well.
Where there’s MUD, there’s brass
Jul 6th 2000
From The Economist print edition
THE growing realism of computer games makes it ever harder for players to tear themselves away from their screens to attend to their daily lives. For some players, however, the distraction of having to earn a living may now be a thing of the past. They have learnt to make real money in the imaginary world of online fantasy games. The demand for treasure in these games is so great that experienced players can sell the fruits of their gaming labour to their less-experienced counterparts.
How did things become so deadly serious? In the early days of networked computing, geeks quickly worked out how to run role-playing “swords-and-sorcery” games online. These multi-player adventures became known as multi-user dungeons (MUDs). Players spent their time killing monsters and collecting treasure. Since the games had no graphics, imagination was at a premium. The high cost of computers and slow speed of networks further limited their appeal.
But as microprocessors and Internet connections have improved, MUDs have evolved in both popularity and sophistication. Everquest, one of the most popular games, boasts over 200,000 players, as well as three-dimensional colour graphics. Since players can interact online, devotees see these games as a social experience as much as a competitive one. This makes them maddeningly addictive. They are also time-consuming. To get the most out of them, players find they have to spend hours every week developing powerful online characters.
And so a commercial opportunity has arisen. Skilled players found they could accumulate hoards of digital treasure. Busy or impatient players wanted a head-start. So imaginary gold, castles and magic swords began to be sold for real money. eBay, an auction website, is the main forum for such transactions: 100,000 gold pieces in a game called Ultima Online currently cost about $40; a well-situated castle might change hands for over $500; Everquest players can buy a “Froglock Bonecaster’s Robe” on eBay for a cool $750.
With that kind of money on offer, it is not surprising that some old hands have decided to turn professional. They have given up their jobs to play full-time, making a living by selling their spoils to other players. They have also started to buy items for resale. Their websites accept credit cards; one even offers an escrow service to guarantee delivery of the virtual treasure before the real money is paid over.
Traditional players have nothing good to say about these entrepreneurs. They are derisively referred to as “campers” or “farmers” because of their formulaic, professional playing style. They are excoriated for commercialising the games they play, and find themselves widely shunned by the true aficionados.
So, although the idea of playing games for a living sounds entrancing, full-time gamers may not be having as good a time as it seems. They miss out on the games’ sociable and problem-solving aspects, which are what make them so addictive in the first place. They face the opprobrium of their fellow players. And the demands of running a business and buying for resale must also seem rather mundane after a day spent slaying dragons. All of which raises a troubling, if not wholly new, question: when you play games for a living, do they stop being fun?
(A Sidebar:)
What are multi-player online role-paying games? Who plays them? The Visitor Center at Ultima Online explains the concept of the games and profiles some of the players. Ultima faces competition from newer rivals such as Sony’s Everquest. If you’re hooked, stock up on virtual gold, magic swords and un-real estate from Avarice Joe or from UltimaGold. But the prime clearing-house for online loot is still eBay: entering “Everquest” or “Ultima Online” will call up scores of imaginary goodies.
The BNETD Project is attempting to emulate the servers for Blizzard games. These are not multiplayer persistent role-playing games, so much as multiplayer online strategy/adventure games like Diablo 1, Starcraft, Warcraft 2, and Diablo 2. In Blizzard's case, users don't pay to subscribe, they buy a packaged copy of the game and then play for free over the net. Blizzard is owned by Vivendi/Universal, and they have sued - arguing that this user-created open server system could eliminate the need for a CD-key, promoting privacy. The website for BNETD argues otherwise.
From Slashdot: Slashdot | EverQuest/Sony Fights Code Wars With Latest Expansion
Perlmonkey has written a summary on the latest Everquest Expansion, and Sony's efforts to thwart those who might wish to to tap into the packets and do things that maybe aren't exactly fair to other players. Or they just want a map that should have been in the first place. In anycase, hit the link below to read his piece on the subject.
The most recent expansion for EverQuest (Planes of Power) adds a lot of problem-solving quests to the game, so Sony beefed up the (long-since broken) encryption that they used for the client protocol. The expansion has been a major hit, pleasing some of the most critical voices in the EverQuest world, but one week later, the anonymous development team of ShowEQ had broken the new encryption. Read on for details of the ongoing battle over keeping secrets in plain sight.
First, the skinny on the latest EverQuest expansion, Planes of Power (PoP). Because this is an expansion chock-full of content for only the highest level characters in the game, Sony added some features that everyone would want (and thus, pay for): the ability to progress to level 65 (60 was the cap before); a new zone called the Plane of Knowledge which allows characters to moved freely to all of the old game areas and a feature that allows large groups to coordinate more easily. That's the carrot for the lower-end users, but really this is the first expansion to lock out even moderately experienced players in favor of large, strong in-game guilds.
Even so, the response has been almost all positive. Some players complain about the last-minute changes (especially the changes that made monks and druids less powerful in the high-end game), but those who are taking advantage of the new game areas are happy with the reduced time required for encounters and the fact that the game rewards strategy more than ever.
Planning, attention to detail and a fanatical focus on getting past every challenge that Sony presents are important in-game, but Sony is less than pleased by programmers who are just as happy to approach those challenges from outside of the game. Using Linux and Qt, ShowEQ is a packet sniffer that watches the EverQuest client protocol and displays a map of everything that the Windows client is privy to, but may not disclose to the player. Years ago, the ShowEQ developers discovered a weakness in the encryption that the client uses, and they have been able to reliably interpret the data ever since.
With the PoP release, Sony improved the encryption so that it used a larger key which was more securely chosen. At first, the talk on the ShowEQ IRC forum was gloomy and the normally secretive developers cloistered themselves off from the the group, returning only rarely to proclaim the difficulty of breaking this new scheme. The protocol is not unlike that used by ssh or SSL. A public key is sent from Sony to the client, and the client uses that key to encrypt a random session key and send it to Sony. Theoretically, this approach is open to only a limited number of attacks, all of which run the risk of being detected by the client.
A former ShowEQ developer who was hired by Sony was reported to have said it's over, "you'll never break this"... One week later, the new version of ShowEQ was available via CVS and was working again. The new keys were vulnerable, it seems, to an even simpler form of analysis and the result was simply that ShowEQ worked significantly faster. In many ways, this seemed to simply be a "bonus quest" that Sony threw into the PoP expansion, and it had been beaten.
On Thursday, October 31 ShowEQ broke once again. The protocol now compresses key data to prevent the analysis that was limiting the keyspace that has to be searched. As of this writing, ShowEQ no longer works passively, but this escalation is not over. The latest version allows a user to input the key directly, and developers are hard at work, trying to find further weaknesses in the key generation and/or exchange. The developers are even starting to question the long-held, unwritten truce that they maintained with Sony. The idea was that if Sony did not make decryption require a Windows-side component, there would never be a Windows version, limiting the use of ShowEQ to those capable of getting ShowEQ working under Linux. Now, the party line is, "there is absolutely, positively no reason not to have a WinSEQ."
The technical details are interesting, but the social and legal details may take center-stage for a while. The seq team is trying to figure out what they could put on the client-side without being detected and that brings into question the legality of Sony scanning running processes and reporting back. There's also the matter of Sony's rather astoundingly harsh EULA that tries to preclude activities like this in every way that it can (though the legality of click-through EULAs is still a hot topic).
One problem with this escalation is that, like another product (TiVo, which is partially backed by Sony) the very people subverting the product and making it more than the creator wants it to be are the best customers. In terms of EverQuest, they are often the ones maintaining several accounts and/or spending extra money for the "Legends" service. How does a company contend with a market where your best customers are also your most resourceful? With the TiVo, there was an uneasy understanding between the company and its modders. Sony has broken that balance with EverQuest.
Now that Sony has crossed this Rubicon, it is quite likely that ShowEQ will be ported to Windows and hundreds if not thousands of new users will be introduced to it. Was that Sony's goal? Certainly Prof. Felton showed us that such a battle is ultimately futile. Why does Sony want to fight it again on yet another front (remember that they are an RIAA member)? Is there any financial justification, here? Does mapping software really threaten the game more than the many in-game exploits that the high-end encounters suffer from?
PoP is a finely crafted fantasy gaming experience, but Sony has once again chosen to spend extra time and money hurting themselves and their market. Perhaps their competition will not make the same mistakes.
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