Currently, I’m a F2P nomad. I come and go where the alpha and beta signups call, play for as long as my interests hold up, and then resume riding the wind to the next F2P that happens to spring up. Sometimes I linger for more than a month, other times my attention span is less than a week, and although I haven’t played them all, there are definitely some features, as well as some foibles, that I’ve managed to remember:

Features

• Costume Drops – Nothing keeps me grinding longer than knowing that whatever mob comes across me and whatever weapon I have equipped may drop something I can inevitably wear to look cool, stand out, or collect. I’m a fiend for games that give me the chance to express myself with ridiculous virtual clothing drops, like playing dress up doll, but with the incentive of slaughtering monsters for the betterment of the world. If character creation fails a game, costume drops would be the best way to make up for a character’s uniqueness, and the more to wear, the better.

Holic Online fashion statements

One of the games that stood out for me with this concept was Holic Online. You could get a costume drop by just tripping over a mob sometimes, and there was a hefty load of varied stuff you could wear. Witch’s hats, angel wings, backpacks, waist packs, boots, gloves, there was always something to wear and not enough room to hold them all. Asda Story had costumes too, but it wasn’t anywhere near as robust a selection.

2d and pseudo 2d games like Secret of Solstice and Talesweaver are the types of games that accessorize players for its share of character uniqueness. Unfortunately, sometimes the economy drastically kills any chance of getting some items in some games, but at least there’s still the possibility of attaining that new set of devil wings through persistance (and the selling of your character’s virtual lung if need be), unlike cash shop equivalent costumes.

• Collectable Item Drops – This went along with costume drops in the notion that maybe saving the world, being a hero, or helping out an NPC just isn’t enough to give me motivation to slay yet another monster to get to that next level. Being the pack rat that I am, however, if there was some random cute collectible plushie, card, or whatnot that could possibly drop from said mob, I’m all the more quicker to start a monster massacre. Even if that item did nothing more than look cute and take up space in my inventory, I’d still be inclined to stuff that bad boy in my backpack just to appease the collector in me.

Examples would be Ragnarok Online with their cards or Legend of Golden Plume with their plushies. If it looked cute and collectable, chances are you’d have me playing.

• Auto Walking - Every now and again, I’ll be forced to travel obscene distances to deliver some random quest item for experience, rewards, and pre-scripted NPC praise. Three cheers for Auto Walking, when you can’t afford a game to port you straight to the source, this is the lazy gamer’s answer to those tedious distances traveled.

Some games handle it better than others, such as Legend of Golden Plume. One click on the world map and you can run off for a snack or a quick bio break. Even when it looks like it’s driving the character into a deadend, it at least tries to compensate, turns around, and tries to persevere to its destination. Zu Online’s version of auto-walking seems as reliable as LGP’s, but I haven’t played enough of it to know whether or not it’ll leave my character’s face perpetually kissing a wall that it may run into. Mabinogi has its own version, but unless you plot out your course by continuously shift-clicking on the minimap, there’s no doubt that your character will somehow end up walking itself into a wall, tree, or even a cow trying to get to where its going, but failing miserably. Dream Of Mirror Online’s auto walking had a 50/50 chance of your character making it to its destination, so your character’s odds were slightly better than your character in Mabi (although there was no auto-fly feature in DOMO which would have made it tons better).

Of course, auto walking is not for every game. PvP mmos and areas that have high-agro mobs wouldn’t benefit too much by having an unplayed character randomly traipsing through it, but in large cities, it would definitely be a useful tool to give folks a break while doing their auction house/repair travels.

• Custom UIs - Sometimes a game’s UI functions, but looks fugly, other times they look amazing, but you can’t find squat on it, so when a game lets a player fiddle with the UIs to their tastes, that’s awesominous in my book.

At first, I usually feel guilty about modifying UIs, feeling as if I’m taking away from the game immersion by not using what’s defaulted-ly given to me, but the moment I start tweaking, I eventually succumb to the wonderment and satisfaction of having a personal interface all for myself.

My first experience with modifying an interface came with Guild Wars and its ability to move and and resize the various UI elements such as the minimap and chat box, player and enemy status bars, etc. It was a rather freeing experience to give myself as little or as much visual space I needed without having the clutter of menus and icons I might never touch more than once that were only one hotkey away from activation.

For me, WoW has one of the best user interfaces mainly because there is almost no limit to how you can set it up thanks to user mods and addons. You add what you need to suit your needs and two folks playing the same character can have drastically different looking interfaces. Places like Curse and WoWInterface give mod developers a chance to peddle the fruits of their labors and gives players a chance to voice their specialized interface needs.

I’m sure not every game will have the financial capabilities to program as in-depth a custom interface as WoW, but it can be as simple as letting a player hide buttons or giving them an option to change a menu’s color that can mean a slightly more enjoyable, albeit self-centered, experience to one’s gaming.

Foibles

• Regional IP Blocking – Sometimes, there comes along a game that seems so interesting, you just have to give it a try. You go through all the trouble of looking it up, signing up for an account, downloading the install, waiting through patches, and then hit the brick wall known as IP blocking.

When did internet gaming restrict you from meeting new friends from across the world? Is it the allure of money that forced publishers to pick and choose who got to play, or was it players who became nit picky when a game didn’t cater to their language? Regardless, blocking sucks, especially if you happen to move to a new region (like I did) and are kept from playing with your friends back home.

I’m looking at you Mabinogi and Aeria Games’ Dream of Mirror Online. I comprehend english just fine, so there’s nothing except your lousy IP blocking to keep me from understanding and perhaps even enjoying your games. And at least DOMO has the excuse that there’s a European version of the game out with Game Tribe, but there’s no Mabinogi in sight for the European sector, forcing would-be cash paying players to have to resort to proxies or ignoring the game altogether.

• Timed Quest/Item Drop Mobs – There’s nothing like doing a quest where the item you need drops from solely one mob. And this particular mob is camped like hell by a bajillion other folks who are doing that same quest. And the final topping on the already stale cake is having that same camped mob spawn once an hour (or day) in pre-camped supposedly random spots. Ah… the torture of it all. As if you weren’t already devoting hours of your free time to grinding or questing, developers plan on sucking more of your play time by forcing you to fight for a mob that, after camping it once, you will never ever want to see again.

Dream Of Mirror Online had one quest to kill this man-eating (more like time devouring) spider that spawned in two separate areas of the same room. Blink your eyes even once, and you were bound to miss your kill or have it stolen from you by another group, and forced to wait another lousy hour where you contemplate if the reward is enough to hold you there (which doomed those players who were completists for wanting to do every quest). At least FFXI didn’t force you to complete quests by way of timed mobs, but if you wanted to be somewhat well-equipped, good luck with mobs like Leaping Lizzie (though when I played, they did take steps on trying to relieve timed mob camping, it’s just that it didn’t seem to help too much…).

• Webpage Login Screen – So far, I’ve only encountered this kind of atrocity once, and that was with Holic. Clicking on the game execute prompted IE to come up and harrass me to login there instead of the game itself having its own login screen.

It may seem petty, but it’s a big inconvenience (and part of what ultimately led me to uninstall the game) to force my already disgruntled computer to bring up another window in order for me to get my game on, not to mention bringing it up on a browser I’m not to fond of using instead of relying on my default browser (which is probably already up to begin with half the time).

• Death Punishment (Durability | Item | Experience Loss / Deleveling) – You would think dying would be punishment enough, but some games like to rub salt on your festering wounds. Some go as far as to take your experience earned, or your item, or if not your item, then your item’s durability, rendering it useless so that, when you do resurrect back where you died, you’re left defenseless and a prime target to be killed again.

De-leveling and item loss are two things that I absolutely hate when dying. There’s nothing worse than working for over an hour to get a certain level, and then accidentally doing something stupid like falling off of a cliff and watching a majority of that xp (or items) disappear into the abyss. Everquest was my first traumatizing experience at losing items, even though I vaguely remember it happening in Diablo II (luckily, I played with guildmates, so it wasn’t as horrifying a loss). In FFXI, de-leveling and experience loss were my bane, where it took less than a minute to lose more than an hour’s worth of experience.

At least with durability loss, there’s always a chance to repair the item. Unless you end up in a game, *cough* DOMO *cough*, where a weapon is rendered useless because you have to spend real money, in a free-to-play game, just to fix it, because it offers no other alternatives for repair.

Heavy punishments like these make it hard to want to explore the gameworld’s nooks and crannies for fear of having that accidental slip off a cliff or running into obscenely-high-leveled-monster territory. This is especially hard for me since I love running around and traveling to the far off corners of a game world to see what neat things I can find.

If you’re going to take our experience points, don’t let us lose our levels (making our newly bought armor useless and leaving us in the nude). If our items are going to break, make it reasonable to afford the repair instead of forcing us to buy a replacement weapon to replace a barely used one.

Well, I’m sure I’ve forgotten a good chunk of other things I like and dislike in mmos, this should do for now, since you’re either bored by the end of this article, or itching to go play your games. Now if you’re going to do the latter, feel free to comment on some of your own personal likes and dislikes of features in mmos you play.

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