Possession

Well, it’s that time of the month again. Yup, that’s right, it’s time to pay the rent on my cottage in the countryside.

They’ve got quite the scam going here. I haven’t actually played Asheron’s Call in about half a year now, but every month I still fork over my $10 USD to keep the subscription alive, and log in at least once in order to refresh the cottage’s lease.

Why? Well, in one word: Stuff.

RPGs are all about Stuff. Mug monsters for their Stuff, so you can get more powerful and go after even bigger monsters for even better Stuff. There’s always something bigger, better, and badder to go after, which is part of why these games have the longevity that they do.

Well, after a while, you’ll have collected a lot of Stuff. Usually you throw away or sell the older, weaker items since you don’t need them anymore, but some stuff you might want to keep. Maybe they have some sentimental value depending on how you acquired them, or they’re spiffy-looking, or it was hard to get and you want to show it off, or you want spare items in case you lose the ones you’re using, or you want to keep a supply of items to sell to other players, or you want to hand them down to other, weaker characters, or maybe you’re just a digital packrat (like me).

Traditionally, the game would offer a bank in which to store your extra Stuff, but they’re often limited in capacity, and don’t let you show items off easily. And AC specifically doesn’t even have banks. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were somewhere else you could stash your stuff. Somewhere under your own control, with a greater capacity, where things could be on display. Someplace homey…

Enter player housing. So far at least Ultima Online, Anarchy Online, Asheron’s Call, and DAoC all offer houses of some type to players.

There is a catch, though. A house has to actually *be* somewhere, and that presents a problem for the game designers. For a house to truly blend in with the world, it should be on the same landscape that players roam around on. However, that landscape is finite in size, so there’s a limit to how many houses can be placed on the map. Even then you don’t necessarily want to fill every little spot large enough to contain a house or the map will be a mess of urban sprawl. The number of houses that will fit nicely on the map will probably be far lower than the number of players that want a house.

This has been solved in different ways by different games. Ultima Online opened up a ‘mirror’ landscape for people to place more houses in, but even then not everyone could get one. Anarchy Online made you access your apartment through elevators which teleport you away to your private area. Efficient, but you don’t really have a spot on the map to call your own. What Asheron’s Call did was to introduce houses in waves, so there were multiple opportunities to get one, and part of the purchase cost for a home included a random item you wouldn’t know ahead of time, so everyone would have to run off and find the item first, to put everyone on more equal footing. Later on AC also added ‘apartments’ off in their own separate area, which satisfied most of those who still didn’t have a home, but a full, proper house on the map is still better. :-)

Fortunately, I was quick in the first wave released, and snagged the above cottage in a fairly good location (near the city of Zaikhal). Fortunate for their pocketbooks that is, because I’m now stuck paying the upkeep on it. Because of the scarcity of these full houses, you have to pay in in-game currency to keep them, the theory being that someone shouldn’t get to keep a house forever just because he got to it first, even if he isn’t using it anymore, when others would be willing to pay to take it over.

So, I have to log in once a month to pay the upkeep on the house so I don’t lose it. In order to log in my subscription has to be active, so I have to pay that as well of course. And I do so, even though I don’t really play anymore.

Why? Because of the Stuff, of course. I’ve accumulated lots of weapons, armour, quest items, rewards, trophies, and so on, all stored away in there, and I don’t want to lose them. I may not be playing right now, but who knows? I’ve taken breaks and come back before, so next week I might start playing again and when I do so I want all my Stuff to still be there waiting for me.

So, I continue paying. Even though it’s all virtual stuff, just bits on a server. That I’m not even using.

I told you it was quite the scam… :-)

Lesson for the day:

One thing I miss about ‘tcsh’ is using the “:r” modifier on variables to strip off extensions, which was really useful when doing things like batch conversions:

$ foreach a (*.bmp)
foreach? cjpeg -optimize -quality 85 < $a > $a:r.jpg

‘ doesn’t have a similar feature, but apparently ‘bash’ *does*, via “${a%.*}”. It’s a bit more cumbersome, but better than nothing…