Trials and Tribble-ations

Something I've come to realise over the past few weeks is how poor the average trial account system is for MMO's.

In WoW, you can get a free 10 day trial, just by clicking a few buttons, and providing your email address. It's simple, it makes sense. Blizzard want people to play and if, by letting 100 people try it out for a week and a bit, it results in 1 more subscriber. Who plays for a year. They'll still make a profit.
I remember buying the original game, and being suprised that there was actually a little flyer inside saying something like "Lend the discs to a freind" and give them one of these voucher codes so they can try it out.

It makes a massive amount of sense in the MMO market, where it isn't how many people 'own' the game, it's about how many 'subscribe' to play it.

For some reason though, it seems that many other MMO developers don't feel the same way. I've looked around at other MMO's recently, and out of the ones that have interested me, only a very few offer trial accounts.

Why?

I'm a working guy, and have the spare cash each month to be able to afford the luxuries like computer games. But that doesn't mean I'm stupid and want to piss that money up the wall by paying for something that I'll never be able to use again.

If I buy a game for my Xbox 360, and think it totally sucked, I could at least take it to the shop and trade it in for something else. I might not make back every penny I spent, but that doesn't bother me. I'm willing to spend money trying things I think I might like.

But if that Xbox game costs £70 (as some have done) and from the minute I play it, it's bound to my console. Then I wouldn't buy it. No matter how much marketing hype there is, or how awesome it looks on the box, I don't like spending my money on something that could be worthless to me within hours.
In the console world, that's where demo's come in. They're obviously the Console version of free-trials.

But in the MMO world, once you've bought that game, it's tied to you. You'll never be able to sell it on (not properly anyway) and, if it sucks, all you're money has been wasted.

With a free trial, you get at least a taste of the game before you lay out your £40+.

So why don't more companies offer a free-trial of their games?

Sure it costs them money, but I'm also sure that if there were more free-trials, they'd also lure more longer-term subscribers.

Or, to cover their costs, why not offer a £5 version of the game?
That way they can cover their costs, and the players can get a slightly longer free-trial. I know there's a lot of MMO's out there that I'd try, if I new it would only cost me a fiver a time.

If it turns out to be trash... *meh*... It's cost me 5 quid, and hasn't cost the Devs anything.
If it turns out to be great, I simply upgrade my account to the full version, and everyones a winner.

StarTrek Online... Atari... StarWars: ToR... BioWare... Take Notes!

Better the Devil I Know

Last night I made my return to the World of Warcraft.

Yet again, I couldn't log on to Allods. They've lost my business now.
I wouldn't have spent any money in the cash-shop at the current pricing model, but apparently they're already looking at fixing that.

In my opinion gPotato / AstrumNival have screwed up their priorities big-time. After an initially great reception from the closed beta, they've managed to destroy almost all of that within the first week of release. I'm not one for trying to find blame, but I garauntee that someones head will be rolling for this mess, and if it's not then the Devs really are living on Planet Zod.
At the end of the day, it might be a game to us, but to the Devs, it's a business. And it needs to make a profit, if it doesn't, it won't survive. No matter how good the game itself is.

So I patched up my client, and logged back in to WoW. As usual, after a break like this, I find it difficult to get straight back in to my main character(s), so I've picked up my level 19 mage 'SmythNuke' and he'll be my centre of attention for now.
I didn't really do much last night, just sorted out the UI layout for him, took him over to Stormwind. And spent some of my level 80 Badges and Stone Keeper Shards on some BoA gear for him.
So he's now got the uber Chest, Shoulders, and Staff which should make his levelling nice and quick.

At the moment, everything he throws a fireball at just rolls over and dies. But I'm guessing that's pretty much the mages 'Glass-Cannon' style anyway.

Unfortunately, my internet connection then went down, and didn't come back up until almost midnight. And by that time everyone else was offline.

I doubt I'll be online as much as I used to be (but who knows). And it looks like it's time for the officer list (and maybe the GM'ship) to be reconsidered. The only question now is, Does anyone suitable want the job?

And it was all going so well

Allods Online seems to have attracted a lot of attention all of a sudden.

Since going Open-Beta, what was expected of the game hasn't changed, but what the game expects of us seems to have changed quite a lot.

Some classes have been nerfed / tweaked, but that's only to be expected. And shouldn't really come as a suprise to anyone. Even if you did consider yourself a hard-core Closed-Beta player, there's no point QQ'ing about it if your favourite class suddenly isn't as over-powered as they were before. I'm sure the balancing will change again.

There are bigger problems though, which are either only just coming to light, or have always been there but there was a feeling they would be rectified soon. It turns out that's not really the case.

The Cash Shop:

The game is going to be funded by Micro-Transactions, the cash shop was inevitable, but it turns out there's nothing very 'Micro' about it.
I've no idea if it's available in the EU shard (server) yet, for the reasons explained later, but in the US it is. And there's a lot of very unhappy bunnies.
A 24 slot bag, currently costs about $20... Ouch.
They've apprently just added a zero to the end of all the original Russian prices. But at those sort of levels I don't think they're going to get many takers.

Server Issues:

I haven't been able to log on for the majority of the weekend. I get a nice little message telling me that I'm at position 1500 in the queue, before eventually timing-out.
Not good.
When I have been able to get online, the lag has been terrible but still playable. I can accept this sort of thing at the beggining of a games life. Everyone being in the same area, at the same time, is bound to have an impact. And it's only on the scale of a busy Dalaran.
They have promised to open more servers soon, but for an opening week. Not being able to log in is very frustrating, and is surely harming their business model.

Fear of Death:

One of the biggest causes of controversy in the game. And the potential straw-that-breaks-the-camels-back.
When you die in World of Warcraft, you either corpse-run, or get rezzed by a healer. Unless you choose to release, rather than run back to your body, the penalty is simply a repair-bill.
When you die in Allods, there's no repair bills, but you get a debuff known as 'Fear of Death'. This reduces your stats by 25%, and can stack up to 4 times, obviously adding up to a 100% debuff

Picture a raid-situation, you die on a boss, and even if you're rezzed by your team-mates, you're now 25% less effective than you were before dying, meaning your much more liekly to die again.
To get around this, you can give some in-game gold to an NPC, but as the price increases with each death, this would soon become very expensive.
Alternatively, you can use the Cash Shop, to purchase 'Perfume'. While under it's effect, you do not recieve the death penalty.

Now a few people have done the maths on this one, and with the current $US cost of that perfume. And the average number of wipes expected in a raid. The cost per player would be $50 to $75 per month, at end-game. Who the hell is going to pay that?

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the Fear of Death also applies if you are PvP killed... It put's things in a great deal of perspective.

Guild Management:

I've yet to be able to try this, since I haven't been able to log on. But apparently the guild interface is extremely basic, and buggy.
For a game that's going to rely quite heavily on it's social aspect, this is a pretty major flaw, that's goign to have to be resolved fairly soon.


It's a shame about all of the above. There's more faults, but these are some of the more important ones.
But I'm not going to give up on the game just yet. It's still fun to play, and the problems could potentially patched-out.
The general feeling seems to be swinging wildly between "This is a potentially great game" and "WTF!"

If things don't change fairly soon, it's going to end up being just another dissapointing MMO that no one plays.

Munqui Refresh

Well, it's now official(ish).

The Munqui Tribe is now a social gaming network, rather than just a guild on the Darkspear EU realm of World of Warcraft.
It's probably the only way to see the Tribe survive the lull in WoW, and the big new MMO's that will be coming out soon.

So, with Brasts blessing, I've given the froums a bit of a spring cleaning, changed the news layouts, and categories, added more info to the 'Leaders' 'FAQs' and 'Ranks' pages... and tried to generally open up the site a bit more, to make it more Multiple-Game freindly.

I've tried not to change too much, I know some people hate change to the point where they'd prefer to keep the same car for 20 years even though the doors fallen off, and the ariel is attached with sticky-tape, just because they feel comfortable in it.

So the themes have been kept, and the general layout of the front page has only had a few button changes.
But it's now a little less WoW-Centric.

Offline Life

I'm Offline and I don't care... doo dah... doo dah

The Allods Online open beat began yesterday. Essentially, it's the full release of the game, but with the developers reserving the right to change things at random without explaining, or people getting too upset.

I was looking forward to launch night, but I didn't log on. A few real-life issues have cropped up recently, not leaving me much time for gaming, or leaving me time only to enjoy the pick-up-and-put-down console style.

But here's what I've realised today. I'm not really bothered that I didn't log on yesterday.
If that had been WoW, I'd have felt I was missing out on something, or maybe not doing something productive with my potential time.

But with Allods, I didn't feel that. I'm not paying anything for the game, and my characters aren't going to be suffering because I didn't log on to do my dailies.

It feels a little like an alcoholic standing up in a room full of strangers and admitting his addiction.

"I haven't logged on yet, and that's OK!"

It's not that Allods is an inferior game to WoW (although in many ways it obviously is), but it's the fact that I don't feel punished, in any way, for not logging on.
By waiting a day I'll probably avoid a lot of the quest congestion that's bound to happen on launch day. I'll also benefit from other people having been-there and done-that before me, so the AH will have some stuff on there, and if I ask in chat for advice on quests, someones probably going to know the answer.

It feels... strangely... refreshing.

Tonight I'll probably log on. Make a few characters, level up at least a handful of levels (it'll be slower than in closed beta because all XP was doubled until now). And generally get a feel for how the game is going to pan out, and the society of people that are going to be playing it.

After all, the greatest game on earth would still be a horrible experience if everyone you met was a complete tosser.
Oh wait... that's what they mean by "Real Life", shame there's no alternative MMRLRPGS I can try for a while.

But hey-ho, away I'll go, and I'll be trying to set up the new Munqui Tribe guild within Allods as soon as I get the chance.

Closed Beta... Closed

Allods has now shut it's doors until Tuesday, when it re-opens as an 'Open-Beta'.

Quite a few of the Munquis seem to be intrested in giving it a try, and voted heavily for playing as Empire rather than League... so that's where we'll be going.

My son even loves the game. He really wants to play alongside me, but he's also fascinated by the Gibberling race, so he's a little torn.... ah, to be 10 again, and have such difficult choices to make.

My first few attempts at Empire have been pretty succesful. Unlike some games, where you get the feeling the 'evil' or 'opposing' faction was added-in after they'd finished all the 'good' sides stuff, and maybe gets a bit rushed. In Allods Online, I felt the Empire starting quests and area were actually more original and beter done than the League ones, and with slightly more comic effect.

The 'Evil' of the Empire is actually defined by their 'Capitalism' and led by a Dictator, compared to the 'Socialist' views of the League, and their Council led leadership.
It's a Russian game originally, so read in to that what you will.

The item shop was opened-up (and was temporarily free) to give people a chance to see what they could expect from it.
And it looks like the predictions were right... Temporary Boosts and Luxury Items (e.g. bigger bags) but nothing that would give any major advantage, unless someone wanted to invest a fortune in the random chests in the 'hope' that they would get something awesome. But anyone trying this lottery style of playing had better be working on Wall Street to make that way of playing worthwhile.

An interesting part of this is that gold trading will become 'sort-of'' legal too. You will be able to buy items from the shop, and then post those items on the in-game Auction House.

I've read in to the whole Astral ship thing a bit more. They look awesome, and will require a major guild effort to achieve them. Parts will need to be collected by doing major quests and raids, and the ships will require repairs.
For this, some parts will be available on the item-shop, but nothing that you could buy with in-game gold, or find in-game yourself.

And the Ships will require at least 6 players to pilot them, with players taking on roles as Captains, Engineering, Gunners, etc...
But each ship can actually accommodate up to 25 crew-members.

The theory is that you navigate your ship to a far-off place. Complete a major quest, slay some major monster, or enter a major raid, and then return to an Allod (Island) to divide-up the loot.
But Astral space is open PvP territory, so you'd better be prepared to defend your cargo, as other ships can attack you, or even board you, for fighting on-deck.
Getting your precious loot back home could prove harder than the fight to get it in the first place.

What this means though, is that small guilds need only 6 players to be involved in this. And larger guilds can have the full 25 crew, and will obviously be better defended in a fight.

To go the step further, guilds can have more than one ship, so in theory a major guild could have an entire armada at their disposal. Or smaller guilds could band-together for the safety in numbers aspect.
A cool addition to the game, and a good way to promote social activities, in my opinion. Although I've obviously not experienced this in practice yet.

Fingers Crossed, Tuesday comes, Open Beta begins, the Munquis begin their campaign in Allods, and something good comes from it all.
If not.... oh well, no harm done, no cash spent, and we all get to experience another game for a while... Which is never a bad thing.

Alodd'a Fun

Vind has now taken Allods Online for a spin.
I was speaking to him in the game last night, and he suggested that we try switching to playing as Empire (Horde), if we're going to give it a serious try.

I'd been toying with the idea myself.
In WoW, Horde have always been viewed as being the more serious of the 2 factions. The kiddies almost always choose Alliance, and the population on the Horde side is almost always lower than the Alliance.

The downside to this is that Allods has a faction restriction. You can only have toons on one side or the other, not both.
The word is that everything is going to get wiped soon, so I haven't really been getting attached to the characters, and have been spending most of my time trying out new classes, and professions.
So with that in mind, I deleted all of my League characters, and re-rolled Empire ones.

gPotato have done something sensible here:
In WoW, they found that one of the main reasons people didn't play as Horde, was that they didn't have 'handsome' character choices. When they introduced BloodElves as a playable race, the Horde gained a lot of popularity.
In Allods, there are humans on both sides of things. We're humans, we can be good or evil, without explanations. And it means that you can choose to play as a 'normalish' character but still mix with Orcs, and the cyber-punk-undead Arisen.
No extra character models, very little extra effort, and problem solved.

In little things like this, gPotato remind me of the Chinese cloning phenomenon.

For those who have no idea what I'm talking about: The Chinese are currently going through a phase of copying everythign in the world, and making it quicker, faster and cheaper.
e.g. The IPhone - Apple is charging £500+ for their 3GS beauty, within a couple of weeks of it's release the Chinese had come up with the IClone, selling it for around £70, with almost all the same features (minus the AppStore) dual sim card slots, memory card expansion slot, and it's sold unlocked, for you to place any sim card you like in to it.
Also e.g. They also did this to an American car, and the copies were so close, but also so cheap, that you could take the door of your Chrysler in the US, buy a chinese door for a few quid, and it would simply slot in to place, with the seals lined up and everything. The American company went ballistic, launched lawsuits, and basically spat their dummy out.
But after a fortune in legal costs, and no sight of a victory, they realised there was nothing they could do to stop this and simply started buying the parts from China themselves to reduce their costs.

Sometimes, the simplest solutions are the best. And that seems to be the case with some of the Allods features.

I found the the Empire starting area to be a much better taster of things to come later in the game, than the typical paradise-island setting of the League starting zone.
You start in a ship under attack from the League... and other things. You get to shoot cannons at another ship, and see one of the collosal Astral-Monsters that you'll be up against later in the game.

Unusually for me I actually read the text of a few of the quests. And was initially suprised about some of the things I was being asked to do.
One of the first quests you get is to beat up rats and slugs, but also Prisoners of War, to see if your brainwaves change while carrying out your orders.
It's just a game, and they're just pixels, and you don't actually kill any PoW's, but I was a little suprised at the order. That's the only example of things like that I've found though.

Once you're past the starting zone, the city feel of the Empire is actually slightly better than the League side.
I got the impression that the league takes itself very seriously, whereas the Empire is much more laid-back and slightly funnier.
For example, in the League City of Novograd it's all guards and swords, and ancient elven mysteries.

In the Empire city it's Orc Policemen (think PIGs from DukeNukem, if you've played it), and the quests are generally more along the lines of "Do me a favour" rather than "Your Empire Commands".
It was quite refreshing actually.

At the end of the day though, Quests are quests, and it's all just XP. And by level 21 Empire and League will be questing in the same zone anyway (Much like in TBC / WotlK). But at that point the open-ish PvP will come in to play.

You wont have to take part in it, you'll never have to PvP if you don't want to. But the flagging system will work differently to WoW's.
If you flag yourself for PvP, you actually recieve a buff that increases your XP gain, if you don't you get a buff that reduces it. You don't have to attack anyone, and you might not get attacked yourself, but it's the chance you'll take for the buff.

Again, a simple solution to something that WoW never really mastered. It's not forcing you to join in, but it's a good encouragement.

The only down-side from Empire so far is that I quite enjoyed the Mage I had on the League side. Unfortunately only the Arisen can be mages on the Empire side, and I'm not keen on their look.
But I'm sure some will much prefer them to playing as a boring Human or a standard Orc.

The Munqui Tribe Corporation?

In the guild forums, Lewt posted something interesting:

"I would be happy to try Allods as a kind of holiday but I would be really sad if we didn't all switch back to playing WoW again when the expansion comes out.

I guess the Munqui Tribe should really be viewed as a circle of online gaming friends rather than a WoW guild specifically (damn, we're getting dangerously close to corporate strategy here!)."

I think this pretty much describes how the Tribe has worked up until now anyway. The Munquis have survived a server change from Nordrassil to Darkspear, Key players have come and gone, the GM position has changed hands at least 4 times, the officer-team has rotated fairly regularly. But the Tribe survives, by evolving.

Even players who have left the guild, or left the game altogether, still keep in touch. We're a group of freinds, most of whom met through the playing of the same game, but who have gotten to know each other well enough to keep in touch, even when not playing that game.

There's a lot of members in our guild who left months, or even years ago. Or who don't even play anymore, but who keep in touch, or keep an alt in the guild, just so that they don't lose touch.

When I rejoined the guild I met a bunch of people who I knew in-game. I've now met some of them in real-life, have them as Facebook freinds, MSN buddies, Xbox Live Freinds.
Although they're very underused by the majority of the guildies, the core of the guild tends to use the Munqui Tribe forums as a sort of focused social-networking site.

I'll be trying Cataclysm when it comes out, I'd be a fool not too. Blizzard has the biggest and best MMO on the market right now, and just because it might have gone a little bit stale, doesn't mean that things can't be turned around with the release of a major expansion.

The fastest way to kill a guild is boredom. (Although stealing all the money from the bank and kicking everyone would probably do the trick too).
But if we can adapt, and change, and (like Lewt says) consider ourselves a group of online gaming freinds, rather than specifically just as a WoW guild, then we can probably survive anything.

If enough people are interested in a new MMO, then I think it's worth a try.
I was considering trying to start a new guild in Allods, and not naming it after the Munquis, simply so people knew it was something fresh and different... But having thought about this a bit more, maybe "Munqui Tribe Mk3" is the way to go.

(Mk1 - Nordrassil, Mk2 - Darkspear, Mk3 - Allods?, Mk4 - ???)

Allods Online: 3rd Time Lucky

3 days in a row, and 3 posts, that's almost regular... Almost... And the content has obviously been a little shy on World of Warcraft info.
That's just the way it is at the moment. I'm enjoying Allods, and not missing WoW anywhere near as much as I thought I would.

There's now a couple of Munquis that have come to give it a try, and their first impressions also appear to be positive.

The question is: Will Allods Online just be a flash-in-the-pan?

At the moment, I'm enjoying the game immensely. The differences make it fun, while still being familiar enough to remind me of WoW and make me feel immersed in something worth doing.

But if Allods becomes the new flavour of the month, will it last?

There's some big competition on it's way, that could steal a lot of Allods thunder.

Bronze is already playing StarTrek Online, and seems to think it's worth a shot. Although from what I've seen it seems more suited to someone who's also a fan of EVE, rather than WoW. But maybe I'm wrong on that one.
If they offer a free-trial maybe I'll give it a look.

StarWars is going to be the big test though. With WoW appearing to be in a decline, and with all the fan-base that SW:TOR will have even before it's released, it could finally be the WoW-killer.
Only time will tell though, if the game turns out to be a steaming pile of crap, then it might get a few tourists, but they'll all end up runnign back to WoW with the release of Cataclysm.
If it turns out to be everything they've said it will, I can see a lot of people sticking with it.

So where does that leave Allods?

Well it's FREE (Have I mentioned that before?), which gives it a bit of an advantage. And it's available right now, which is obviously another positive. And god knows when we'll see SW:TOR or Cataclysm, so as long as it has a good few months to get its feet under the table, it could turn out to be something worthwhile.

I can't speak for the whole world, but some of the guildies have already made their case on why they will not be playing SW:TOR, or StarTrek, so maybe Allods will be the appealing place for them instead.

If you're a social / casual gamer, for whom it's more about community, crafting, and having fun, than about being the biggest-baddest *Jedi / Sith / Federation / Klingon* (*insert game of choice*). Then Allods could be just what you're looking for.


As an update: I've rolled a second mage (Human this time), just because it doesn't take very long and I wasn't happy about how I'd spent my points, and the profession I'd chosen.
The starting areas are very well designed, with plentiful quests, but the freedom to pick and choose which of them you do. As long as you follow the main storyline to finally leave the island (or Allod, as they call them).

Allods Online: Second Impressions Count

Well I've now been joined in the game by another Munqui. 4 more of those, and we can officially form a guild. That's always a good start.

My Warden (Druid / Hunter / Rogue combo) is now level 13. But I thought I'd try and roll a couple of the other classes just to see how they play too.

So first stop, I rolled a mage... And loved it.

He's now level 7, and I love the mage mechanic they've included.

Mage Mechanics:

In this game, It's impossible to have the 'perfect' spell rotation. They've solved the problem of cookie cutter builds with a very simple solution.
Mages have 3 types of spell, Fire, Ice and Lightning.
Whenever you cast a spell you get a stack of that particular type of magic. These have a cooldown of about 10 seconds. If you cast another spell of the same type within that time, you get a second stack.

Alone, these stacks do nothing, but if you reach 5 stacks, and then cast another spell of the same type, you recieve a totally random buff / debuff.
That can range from silences or increased / reduced casting time to a specific class of spells to a total HP / Mana regen or a big HP / Mana reduction. There's no way of knowing what it will do, or which it will be.
It can make you a temporary killing machine, or a temporary pathetic weakling. Or force you to switch to an entirely different class of spells.

This means that you've got to be reactive, and can't just blindly mash the same buttons over and over again.
It's not complicated, you don't have to do anything with the stacks themselves, you just have to be aware of what's going on... I love it.

I've chosen to be a lightning mage, but I'll still have to be well aware of what all my other abilities and spells do for the times when my lightning is debuffed, or the other spells are temporarily over-powered.

I havent tried all classes yet, so maybe this type of thing applies to them too. Probably, since I do know that warriors have a Rage-type mechanic, that druids pets have a seperate energy bar, and that threat generation is done in the familiar way.

Faster Alts?:

I'm not sure how it happened, but second time around, and my character seemd to fly through the starting zone very quickly. He wasn't even presented with the same number of quests that my first toon did, but was still the same level by the time he reached the proper part of the game.
Maybe this is intentionally done to stop the low-level grind, or maybe it was just my perception, since I knew what I was doing that time.

Micro-Transactions:

I've found out a little more about the item-shop (which is how they will eventually fund this game). It looks as though the enitre game will be playable without ever visiting it, but if you want 'luxuries' then that's where you'll find them. Respecs, Fast-Mounts, Bigger Bags, all that sort of thing.
In my opinion that's the perfect way to pitch things. If I'm enjoying the game, I'll happily hand over a few quid to buy a bigger bag, or sort out my talent-spec if I've made a complete mess of it.
Or if I want to level a new toon, and fancy an XP boost to avoid the grind... why not?

I think they've found the right sort of balance for the micro-transaction model. It's not actually up and running yet, so don't hold me to it. But from what I've seen and read, nothing will be impossible without spending money, but for those things that make life that little bit easier, it's there.
The only question is, can they make enough money from it?

Crafting:

I've yet to do any of this, since it requires gold which I don't have much of yet.
But the mechanics of crafting are also randomised. With a mini-game type of situation. You select your ingredients, and then play the game with them. The better you do, the better the quality of the item / elixir / weapon etc... that you create.
Again, this means that there's no perfect way to level your skills, if you're good at crafting, you're good. And if you're crap, then the stuff you produce won't be of the same quality as someone who's a master.


Summary:

I'm enjoying the game, looking forward to seeing things progress. Excited about the possibility of customisable guild-ships. That are manned and piloted by the guild - for the guild.
And I'm enjoying the mechanics of the game.

It isn't perfect, it has a few flaws. But that's OK.
If it had come out at the same time as TBC, I think that it might have given WoW a run for it's money.
As it is now, it's coming out at about the time that people are getting bored with WotLK, and maybe that's even better timing. The general feel of world-chat is that it's full of WoW players, and all pretty happy about it.

It's not better than WoW, but it's close.
And WoW is much much bigger. But...

You can hire a Stretch-Limo to take you and your freinds to town. And it will feel awesome.
Or you could just all jump in a taxi, and have just as much fun once you arrive.

Allods Online: First Thoughts

Hey, long, long, long time no post.

It's been a busy few months for me. So my MMO gaming has had to take a back-seat. That's not always a bad thing though. Sometimes it's good to stand-back and look at things from a distance.
And that's pretty much what I've done for the moment.
I do intend to return to WoW. But, if I did it now, I wouldn't be able to commit to raiding. And the only alternative is endless heroics, or rolling yet another toon.

So I went in search of alternatives to fill the gap.

After much deliberation, I decided to give Allods Online a try. So with a sceptical eye, here are my first impressions:

Graphics:
Quite similar to WoW really. Maybe a little more polished, but very comparable, and adequate for the job. A nice variety of effects and different monster models.
It runs nice and smooth, at max res, and draw distance, and effects, in windowed mode on my Laptop, which although a little overpowered compared to most laptops,  would be comparable to a reasonable desktop PC.
If WoW is playable for you, this probably will be too.

Sound:
Does it's job. The background music adds atmosphere nicely, without becoming too annoying. There's no speech in the game from any of the NPC's, but there isn't for most of the WoW ones, so again it's very comparable.

Gameplay:
It's basically a WoW clone. In case you hadn't picked up on that fact from reading the lines above. But it's a very very good one.
It describes itself as a 'Space Opera' but to be honest it's more "Burning Crusade" than "Battlestar Galactica".

It's still in 'Closed-Beta'. It has to be the most open closed-beta in the history of games, but still... that's what they want to call it.

I've experienced a couple of game crashes, but nothing that wasn't resolved by just closing the window and logging back in again. So no major problems in that respect.
The game feels very complete. And if it was released tomorrow, it would be worth buying.

But that's another of it's key features... It's free.
It's going down the micro-transaction route, and that part isn't operational yet, but from what I can gather it would seem to be nicely balanced so that it's fairly optional to use. E.g. a character re-spec might cost you real money, but playing the main game and progressing wouldn't.

One of the original things that put me off playing this sooner was that the end-game is supposedly ship-combat. Although I'm not against this in principle, it's new to me, so made me doubt if it was going to work.
But having seen videos and read reviews of how it operates, it seems to fit in well with the game.
You don't do it solo, you do it as a guild. The ships are expensive, and difficult to master. But with team-work you can really go places... .Literally.
I think this could be a great way to encourage guild-participation. And It's a change from the basic raid mechanics of Tank / Healer / DPS. Instead you'd have a Captain, Gunners, and Support Staff.
I'm no where near end-game yet, but I'm actually quite looking forward to seeing this part of the game now.

Which brings me to the negatives of the gameplay. And there aren't many.
The game comes with a built in quest-helper, which shows you quest locations on the world-map. And tutorial hints pop-up whenever something new is available. The interface should be pretty intuitive to anyone who's played MMO's before, but with the differences you'd expect when switching between games.
But for an experienced MMO'er like myself, there's a distinct lack of information sometimes.

For example; I wanted to create a guild in the game. I know it's possible, I've read about others, and you can see the guild interface simply by pressing 'G' in-game. But I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out how to create one. After an hour of googling, I finally found out that it costs 95g to form a guild and you have to buy a token to do it. But this information was found buried at the bottom of an unrelated forum post, that took ages to find.
Anyone who's not 100% internet savvy, would have struggled to find that.
Since my current bank balance is about 2g, I'll have some way to go before the guild is set up. But the idea is there.

There are dungeons, and elite mobs wandering around in the open. Some of them take a team of 5+ people to bring them down, even at low levels.

Some of the quests aren't very clear. The lore has been worked-out nicely. So you know why you're doing what you're doing if you can be bothered to read the text, or you can just skip to the slaughter-at-hand if you can't be arsed.
But occasionally it's not very clear what exactly you're supposed to be doing.

For Example: Take this chalk, and go and mark 6 of the biggest trees in that area, so we can chop them down for timber... Sounds simple. But there's actually only a couple of very specific trees that you can mark, and they despawn when others have marked them... which results in you wandering around a forest trying to mark the trees, that aren't there, until eventually you find one you can click on, that looks exactly like all the other bloody trees.... Bollocks.

But luckily, this problem is rare, and no MMO is perfect anyway. Other than a few minor annoyances like this the game has very few flaws.
If they just provided an instruction manual, or at least a wiki-site that explained things like guilds, or the basic mechanics of each class, my overall enjoyment would have not been hindered by having to google so much to try and figure out why I couldn't do something that seems so obvious.


Pros:
It's free. It runs very smoothly. The class balances seem to be correct. End-Game isn't as weird as it first appears (there are dungeons as well as ship-battles). It's not WoW.

Cons:
It will eventually switch to Micro-Transaction (but this might turn out to be a good thing). There's a lack of some basic information and support. The community is relatively small at the moment (but it is growing).

Summary:
I currently have a level 11 Kanian Warden (a sort of Druid / Hunter combo). And I'm looking forward to logging back on to him tonight to see where things go next.
I've been told, that the first dungeon is around level 13. So it'll be interesting to see how they work too.
On the munqui forums I rated it as a 4.5 star game (with WoW as a 5 star for comparison).
I'm going to drop that to a 4 star game, but only because of the lack of support. Which could put some people off, particularly the more casual, or the WoW tourist. If that was sorted-out, then it'd get it's half a star back.

If you decide to join in the fun /whisper me in game. I'm "Smyth", just to be original.