"Rusty Hearts" the story of my first MMO

[Kaldrak]

Addiction.

It crawls into your head, taking over your waking hours and reducing your ability to think about anything else other than that thing. You know what I'm talking about. That thing, whatever it is. The one that consumes you. Your first thoughts on waking and your last thoughts before you collapse in your bed, your mind spinning with the possibilities. Ah, Rusty Hearts, how I miss you so. And yet...and yet I was done with you, so done in fact that I hadn't played for months before they shut your servers down. Almost a year it's been since they nailed down the lid on your coffin and I have seldom thought of you at all in the meantime.

I moved on. Yet I remember those first, heady days. That black, ugly time where I was unemployed and searching for work and decided I'd try this interesting looking game with the tag, 'Free to Play' on it. Man oh man was that misleading. Sure the game may not charge a subscription fee, but I spent more money on Rusty Hearts than on any other game I've ever played in my entire life.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I've been careful. I've stayed away from MMO's for the most part. I saw World of Warcraft and decided that I should stay far, faaaaar away. That game is a life consumer, I reasoned, but while I was carefully avoiding the obvious pitfalls in front of me, a Korean MMO grindfest snuck up from behind, grabbed me in a chokehold, and wrestled me down to the mat. It took over two years before I finally tapped out.

Rusty Hearts was my first MMO experience. Before, all I had to go one were single player games and coop shooters like the Left 4 Dead series. I honestly had no idea what the appeal was and to some extent, I still don't fully understand it.

I learned an awful lot during my time playing RH. Proper online etiquette in an MMO. How do deal with people who hit on me and think I'm female just because I've chosen a female avatar (That was a fun one). How to deal with weird pseudo-crushes some people developed on me simply because I acted like a decent person and they didn't care about my real life gender (I never quite figured that one out, to be honest, but man was it awkward). I learned about guild dynamics, joined a few and started two myself, one jointly with another person and another mostly for myself and my alternate characters. I soloed almost everything in the game except the very hardest of the hardest dungeons and came to realize that my level of skill put me almost in the top tier of people who played the game...but not quite.

I spent endless hours in PVP and I learned what the phrase 'pay to win' meant. I cursed the very existence of certain cash shop items that allowed people to create gear that could one-shot anyone regardless of level...and that it was allowed in PVP in the first place. I gained proficiency with every weapon in the game and saw that some of them were so stupidly imbalanced that it made it nearly impossible to fight against them effectively.

I saw firsthand what happened to an awesome game in the hands of an incompetent publisher who didn't care at all about the game or the fanbase. I watched Rusty Hearts die a slow, agonizing death, its server's mostly empty, the publishers practically unreachable for more than a year before it finally got shut down, and the few who remained spreading hacks and exploits with no one trying to supervise or watch over what was going on.

This isn't just a review and it isn't a simple story, but if you're willing to listen for a bit, I'll tell you what happened.

Let's start at the beginning though. What was it, exactly?

Rusty Hearts was a Korean MMO hack n slash arcade style beat em up. Or something along those lines anyway. Imagine the stylized combat from the Devil May Cry series, complete with style rankings and combo meters and then combine it with an anime style JRPG and you've essentially got the heart and soul of what made Rusty Hearts so much fun to play.

Your first step upon joining the game was to choose which character you wanted to play as. Each character had three weapons to choose from and there were essentially four main character classes. These characters were called the Golden Seal Team and they were sort of like supernatural mercenaries hired to fight against monsters.

Frantz was the first class. He's a half vampire out for revenge. Typical angsty type. I never really liked Frantz all that much, but...

*sigh*

Most powerful class in the game. Frantz types come in three flavors. Sword, axe, or twin swords. And no I'm not bitter or anything. It's not like PVP slowly became filled with almost nothing but sword users after a while, relegating anyone else to being either insanely good or crazy overgeared for PVP. It's not like almost everyone playing the most stupidly overpowered weapon in the game got boring after a while or anything...oh no. I'm not bitter at all.

Stupid frigging....

Never mind.

Second class in the game is Angela. I really liked Angie. She's a witch in her late teens whose default costume is a sleeveless blouse and a black tie with a skirt. And no, they didn't skimp on the sex appeal for any of their female characters. She was very cute. She's outspoken and brash and often the butt of jokes from some of the other characters because of how clueless she is about some things. She gives Frantz a hard time and she seems to have decided to tag along with him for some reason only she knows. Angela wields a magic sword, a scythe, and a glaive.

Third class is Tude. He's a laid back drifter with a cursed gauntlet on his arm and an easygoing, cavalier attitude about most things. Due to his raggedy clothes and sandals, the other two mistake him for a homeless person upon first meeting him. Tude's weapons are gauntlet, claw, and demon hands.

Last but certainly not least is the buxom beauty Natasha. She had light blue hair and packed a pair of pistols that she certainly wasn't shy about using. If you like girls and guns, she was perfect. Natasha was a late addition to the plot, getting her first story appearance in one of the later dungeons. She wielded a musket, a pair of revolvers, or a weapon bag, which was something like a briefcase full of gun attachments and weapon type gadgets.

These were the original four characters that were available when I started the game and at that point, they only had two weapons each. The third weapon specializations came later. Eventually though, there were gender flipped versions of some of them with the same move sets, though slightly different animations and hitboxes and of course different names. There was Meilin, a lady with Tude's move set. She wore something like an apron/Chinese dress thing and a tiny jacket. Her outfit was very form fitting. Frantz of course, got not one, but two alternate avatars. The vampire sisters Roselle and Leila. Roselle had this weird costume that looked something like a brassier matched with booty shorts, and chain thingies hanging off of her long sleeved jacket to trail behind her while she ran around. Very vampy. Leila, by contrast, was much younger and she looked like someone had decided to make one of the Rosen Maidens playable. If you're not familiar with that anime series, then I'll just say that she was very cute, little, and doll-like, and she dressed kind of like she was in Victorian England. Lots of big poofy dresses. The final alternate version of a character we got was a little boy named Edgar. He had Angela's move set and he wore suspenders and a beret.

Oh and most of these alternate characters they charged twenty bucks for in the cash shop, before eventually making them free after a long period of time, leaving those of us who actually paid money for them feeling just a little bit ripped off.

I may have purchased a few of them myself and I may have been a little annoyed when they became free...but I will neither confirm nor deny any specific time this happened.

The game is set in some period of time that looks equivalent to our early twentieth century, but in some kind of alternate timeline full of vampires, monsters, and magic users. The army has apparently trapped Dracula—er excuse me, Lord Vlad in his giant, sprawling mansion/castle in Europe somewhere. They and the Golden Seal Team members are slowly battling their way through the magic barriers and monsters on the castle grounds.

The plot is very, very anime-ish. It alternates between silly jokes and more serious stylized, over the top action sequences. Angela and Frantz are each pursuing Vlad for their own reasons and they pick up Tude pretty early on to join their quest. The music and style is really enjoyable and the graphics manage to do the anime look in 3D without looking awful, which is not something you used to see very often. Sadly, the story has no resolution, to my knowledge. Our 'end game content' was a couple of raid dungeons that eight people could go on at a time, which was double the max number of people in a party for a normal dungeon.

The combat in RH was its shining glory. It was fast paced and stylish and it pretty much ruined clunky multi-button MMO's for me after I played it. I tried a couple after RH, but combat is just too slow and boring in most other MMORPG's, so I quit playing them. For that, if for nothing else, I am very grateful.

You spawned in the town of Bramunez and you could walk around and talk to the NPC's or other players hanging about. In order to start things off, you go to the nearest portal that takes you to the dungeons that are available from it. Each dungeon has a level requirement, but if you don't follow the story, you'll eventually get stuck. It pays to do things in the order the game wants you to. So you get a quest or three or five from the NPC's, you go to the necessary dungeons and run around killing things till you've completed the quest, then go back to town and turn in your reward.

The dungeons were divided into different areas that spawn a bunch of enemies on you when you walk into them. You clear the area when the last monster is dead. Dodge around and combo on things, try to see how many consecutive hits you can get on one monster, see how long you can keep one enemy in midair with your attacks, try not to get hit any more than you have to, pick up loots, etc. etc. etc.

The boss fights ranged from simple and boring to huge, epic battles against massive creatures with spectacular AOE attacks.

I loooove the combat system in Rusty Hearts. It was so much fun. At least until late game when things got so much hp they took forever to kill unless you twinked out your gear using cash shop items. If you got killed in a dungeon and had no resurrection scrolls or didn't want to use them or whatever, you would respawn back in town with a status effect that made your gear degrade four times faster than normal for about ten or fifteen minutes, unless you paid a large chunk of gold to make it go away. I guess this was set up to discourage people from joining dungeon runs or raids and bailing on the party, but in practice it just punished players who weren't very good or people with poor internet connections. Oh and having your weapon break in a dungeon meant that your damage abruptly went down to almost nothing. Same for your armor and defense. You could equip random stuff you found in the dungeon of course, but changing gear reset your hp/mp values and could cause rather significant injury.

At the end of a dungeon, depending on your style rank, you'd get your choice of a bunch of question mark boxes of different color ranks to open. Bronze, silver, and gold, respectively. You'd usually get nothing, but sometimes you picked up some pretty good loot there. Occasionally, the grim reaper himself would draw everyone into an otherworldly arena where you fought against a bunch of powerful creatures and got some specialty loot items...if you wanted to, that is. You could vote against it and just end the run right there otherwise.

There is this thing in a lot of games nowadays, but especially in RPG's. It's called the RNG, or Random Number Generator. I had never heard of it before I played RH. I mean, now that I know what it is, it's quite obvious that a lot of games use it, but back then I had no idea what it was. The RNG governs the level, quality, type of loot that you gain, and your chances of getting it. It's supposed to be completely random, but it rarely ever is. It is a strategy that game developers use to keep players playing their games and extend the longevity of the game itself. For those of you familiar with it, you may want to skip the next part, but I'll explain.

You see, there's this thing called random reinforcement. It works basically like a Skinner Box. A while back, there was this scientist who set up an experiment with rats and food pellets and dispensers. One group of rats got a food pellet every time they pushed a lever in front of the dispenser. The other group got a pellet the first time they pushed the lever, but every subsequent time they did it, their chance of getting anything was completely random. You know what happened? The rats in the first group would push their levers whenever they were hungry and then ate their food. They were fine. Probably a little chubby if I had to guess, but otherwise fine. Whereas the rats in the second group turned into lever pushing maniacs, spending literally almost all of their time in front of the food dispensers, frantically pressing their little paws on their levers just for the chance, the mere chance that this time, they would get tasty food.

Congratulations, you and I and every gaming/gambling addict are no better than the rats in the second group. When I first learned about it, this irritated me greatly, but if you're not a complete jerk about it, I can see why devs do this. Consider the following scenario:

You have a dungeon that players run in your MMO. They get to the end and get a specific armor. What happens? Most regular players run the dungeon once, get the armor, and then never do it again. Item farmers might run the dungeon a million times for selling purposes, but they are statistical outliers. So essentially, you have a lot of time and work and effort put into a level in your game world that most people only ever see once. Ah, but you can change that. Make the armor at the end really shiny. Change the color to purple or brilliant gold or make it glow or something and call it an 'exceptional' or 'epic' item. Now give the players only a one percent chance to get it on every run. Suddenly, you've got people running and rerunning the same damn dungeon over and over and over again till their fingers are about to fall off their hands.

This is the grind. And Rusty Hearts is the grindiest game I've ever seen.

Not gonna sugarcoat this. Random reinforcement is basically evil. It's what keeps gambling addicts sitting at the slot machines for hours and hours on end, day after day, week after week, pouring their time and money into a bright, shiny thing that will almost never pay them back for their investment into it. It works much the same way in video games, make no mistake, but I can understand why they do it.

If you have a way to lengthen your game and keep people playing, why wouldn't you use it? If you just give everything to the players on the first run, there's no incentive for them to come back, but the lure of the bright shiny stuff just over the horizon draws us to spend nearly countless hours struggling to acquire that next little bit of awesomeness.

Rusty Hearts though...ye gods.

Remember how I mentioned the raid dungeons? Well, in order to get into them, you needed a special key, a key you could only get from playing a particularly difficult dungeon difficulty called blood mode. In blood mode the rewards are increased and the monsters' stats and attack speed are much higher than normal. You also don't gain any experience for BM runs. At the end of the run, you have a chance to get the keys that allow you to go into the raid dungeons as well as some nice gear. Not guaranteed, mind you, just a chance. But you can't just go into blood mode, oh no. You need to do runs on very hard and the bosses have a chance to drop blood mode keys. So if you do all of those things, you can do runs in the raid dungeons, which have a tiny, miniscule, microscopic chance to drop the type of gear you want. There are four classes in the game, each with three weapons, so if you're after weapons, you have a one in twelve chance of getting the type of weapon you can use, on top of the already sadistic RNG multiplier. The chance of getting epic armors is better, but all raid epics bind on pickup, so you can't do anything with them if you accidentally click yes when it's your chance to pick something up.

This is eeeeeviiiiil.

In order to do this, you had to farm before you farm before you farm, just so you could have a chance to have a chance to have a chance to maybe, possibly, at some point in the far-flung future society where we are all immortal and have unlimited time on our hands, you miiight just manage to get the epic weapons you wanted in your raid runs. In practice, the ones who had them probably spent hundreds of hours over the course of months doing nothing but running the same dungeons over and over and over in some kind of Kafkaesque hell.

Grindy grindy mcgrindfest galore.

I avoided this mostly, but I did get caught in one horrible farming scenario for a Halloween costume once. Spent weeks running the same dungeon over and over again before I got what I was looking for, then I switched characters and got it for the next character on the first run.

It's shit like that that makes me sit down and reevaluate my life choices. How did I get to this point? Why am I doing this? Is there something else that I could possibly be doing that isn't this? Why am I not doing that thing right now?

All very important questions. Too bad that feeling wears off or I might be further along in writing my book series right now. However, all Rusty Hearts had to do to keep me enthralled was release one more sexy cool costume for one of my characters and suddenly my mind was gone.

Frigging costumes. They are my major weakness when it comes to MMO's and RPG's and really, almost any other game that has them. Cute, sexy, cool, flashy, stylish, limited edition, bizarre, what have you. I wanted them. SO MUCH. We're talking a critical hit to my willpower any time they would release one. I'd roll my saving throw and just flub it, almost every time. That was where I spent the majority of my money in the Rusty Hearts cash shop. Pay to win items? Didn't give two shits about them, but costumes? Ahhhhh!

Turned me into a starry eyed fanboy.

I never intended to spend money on the game. It just sort of snuck up on me. It was hard to rationalize at first. What am I doing paying real money for digital items in a multiplayer game? And not just any digital items, oh no. Cosmetic items. Items that have almost no real use other than to make my characters look pretty. The logic breaks down into something like this: I could spend about ten bucks eating out somewhere, or I could buy a game I'm not going to play on steam, or I could buy this sweet costume I'm going to stare at on my character for the next twenty or thirty hours I play this MMO, plus I can show it off to other peeps. And there you have it. Check, mate, and win. Or loss, in the case of my wallet. The more costumes I bought the easier it was to rationalize buying them. Not that there was anything really rational about the whole experience, to be perfectly honest. Rational me finds many things about Rusty Hearts utterly bewildering.

Case in point: panties.

My rational self is trying very, very hard to shut me up right now, but I'm ignoring it.

I cannot deny that one of the neat things I loved about Rusty Hearts was the camera control. You could maneuver it to any angle, including one that allowed you to see right up your character's skirt so you could stare at her underwear if you wanted to. I, being a firm believer of the 'if I'm going to spend hundreds of hours staring at an ass it might as well be a shapely one' theory, almost always run female avatars in games.

It is...difficult to describe the happy, idiotic feeling that overcame me when I discovered I could do this thing with the camera. I was mentally transformed from my normal, adult, mature, thinking self into a giggling adolescent. Look, panties. Hee hee. It was completely stupid. I know that...but it made me happy. Dumbly, blindly, idiotically happy.

I can no better explain it than that. Make of it what you will.

I spent most of my time in Rusty Hearts playing in the PVP arenas, matching myself against other PVP addicts. There were long stretches of time where all I did was play RH. I would get up, turn on my PC and just play...all...day...long. I don't miss those days. I really don't. But I did love PVP. It was pretty imbalanced, but great fun.

The main thing that got me about RH PVP, other than how one weapon in the game was stronger than all the others, was the fact that people could use any gear they wanted to in normal PVP. So, jagoffs with waaay too much money and time on their hands would twink out gear with items from the cash shop, making them stupidly overpowered. They would then run around and one-shot everyone else in PVP. This led to a sort of arms race, wherein all of the overpowered gear hounds would see who could make the most stupidly overpowered weapons and then they would all fight each other. The matches were usually over in seconds, no matter how many people were involved. And if you were the unlucky sod who happened to join a PVP room like that who didn't have any epic gear, you were hosed. You could spend a whole match whaling away on someone and have them do one move at the end to kill you.

There's no skill involved in this nonsense. Ooh, let's all one-shot each other aaand done. Whoever gets hit first wins. I'm not really sure in what way that was fun for anyone else, but it annoyed the ever loving crap out of me.

The serious PVP addicts, myself included, would fight with gear that wasn't augmented. We usually had a set of PVP gear and multiple alternate characters of various levels to get the full PVP experience. Most of my alts were around level twenty to thirty. The max level was fifty and you couldn't join PVP unless your character was level ten at least.

I'll let you guess how much fun being a level ten character in higher level PVP room was. Here's a hint: not very.

And that pretty much sums up most of my time with Rusty Hearts, but there is more to tell. I spent the better part of two years playing this game, mind. This is a rather long story. The next part however, has to do with the publisher.

Perfect World Entertainment.

These...people. I...really...do not like them. As near as I can tell, PWE is a company that buys licenses to distribute foreign games here in the US and Europe. They purchase the rights to a title and then translate it. Most of the games they have under their wing are Korean MMO's like Rusty Hearts. Their 'business model' and I use the term loosely, appears to run like this: Get the rights to a game, translate it, release it and support it for about a year or so, then stop communicating with the players, stop advertizing for the game and stop updating or moderating it, and then quietly let it die a slow, painful death, drawing any and all money they can in the meantime by leaving the cash shop open in the game until they shut down the servers.

Then mix and repeat with a different title.

Even when they were updating the game, their incompetence was incredible. For instance, there is this thing called a server rollback, where you would log onto the game, do a bunch of stuff and log off, only to have all of your progress erased the next time you logged back on. You couldn't get anywhere or do anything. For three weeks we had this problem before they tracked down whatever was wrong on their end with the servers and fixed it.

There were laughably bad translation errors and even dialogue being attributed to characters it shouldn't have been, making a person look like they were talking to themselves in a really bizarre fashion.

There was the case of a major cutscene, the introduction of Tude, one of the main characters, being inexplicably cut short after an update. It would just...skip the part where he jumped in and saved Frantz and Angela's life, facing off against a giant monster named Fluffy. This happened several months after I started playing and was never fixed for something like a year and a half till they shut the game down. Kind of an important cutscene and new players never even saw it after that point. I know PWE knew about it, because I reported the glitch to them myself, multiple times.

The awesome music that played at the end of the first 'day' in the story, one day just vanished with no explanation, while holiday only music that played in the marketplace area of the town suddenly became permanent, replacing an older, much less sanity destroying tune that used to play there. New players weren't even aware of these things, or that matters had changed for the worse.

There was the time when an update broke an entire set of moves for the Frantz character class. A very, very necessary set of moves. They were called air recoveries. Basically, if something knocked you up into the air, you had certain attacks that you could use to allow you to regain control of your character and hopefully break your enemy's combo if they connect or at the very least ground you so you could defend yourself. Very necessary in PVP. Any attempt to use these air recoveries during the months before they managed to correct the glitch, would simply freeze the character in place midair, like a big target saying 'please kill me.'

There was the time when they decided to consolidate all of the server channels into one. We went from having fifteen different channels, to only one. Can you guess what happened? The server inexplicably became full. Wow, what a concept. Who would have thought that eliminating the vast majority of the channels would result in overloading the server? You had to wait until someone disconnected in order to log on, otherwise you'd just get a message that the server was full. Good luck competing with all of the other players attempting to log on at the same time as you.

Such. Much. Incompetence.

And it just kept coming. In the last year before they closed the servers, they attempted to run two holiday events, which were exactly the same as the ones they'd run without a hitch the year before. The Halloween event, which I mentioned previously, and the Christmas event. This time though, it was almost hilariously bad. They scheduled the Halloween event to run before Halloween...and then just didn't implement it until sometime in late November. They called it the Nightmare before Christmas event. So we got Halloween during Christmas. Okay, that's...annoying. But it didn't go away. The Halloween event just stayed for months, until finally they pushed it out in February and implemented the Christmas event, which they called Winter Wonderland. That nonsense didn't go away until April. Nothing like having Christmas trees and lights still up in freaking April.

There was the time where they went from us being able to create as many characters as we wanted to on one account, to an arbitrary cap. I can understand why they would do that, but some kind of warning would have been nice. I was already over the maximum number when the cap went into place and I had just purchased one of the cash shop only character creation items...which I then couldn't use until I deleted a few of my characters. An item I paid real world money for that I couldn't use. I was piiiissssed. Contacting their support accomplished nothing. They were mainly confused as to why I had so many characters and what my problem was with the new limits being implemented with no warning.

There was even a time where my account got banned for...some stupid reason I'm not even sure of due to their poorly implemented auto-ban system. Thankfully, this time my interaction with support actually did something.

Glitches and exploits abounded. We would document them and report them to PWE and they did almost nothing to solve the problems.

Oh, at first they kept the game updated regularly and talked a good talk. We loved the game, so we weathered the frequent storms of incompetence from PWE, but somewhere along the line, they just...stopped. We couldn't talk to anyone. Their representatives no longer came to the forums. They no longer did cute little preview videos of new content for the game. It's not that there wasn't any new content either, oh no. Windysoft, the company that originally made Rusty Hearts over in South Korea, is still making new content for their game, content which I'm sure they were happy to share with PWE, but we got nothing.

Finally, after almost a year of almost complete silence from PWE, they made a post on the forums telling us to watch for big news on the RH Facebook site. Ooh, we all thought. Big news. Maybe the massive content update we were promised? We all waited with bated breath and you want to know what it was? Do you really?

Their 'big news' was that they were shutting down the RH servers. It was one last middle finger to the remains of their dedicated player base. After being shat upon by PWE for so long, we were finally free of them...and unfortunately also free of the game we loved so much.

We were supposed to get more, but it never happened. More content, more dungeons, more characters, more weapons, more costumes, more everything. Instead, we lost it all.

It's easy to blame PWE for it. Their incompetence is what started RH's decline. I don't know if their dev team was just four dudes in a basement or what, but towards the end I think they downsized to one guy who maybe checked once a month to see if the servers were still running. There certainly weren't any Admins or Moderators in the game during the last sixth months it was running, that's for damn sure. We weren't the nicest group to talk with after a point though. Imagine if every time you contacted your player base, they pretty much told you that they hated you and demanded that you fix things you couldn't fix. How often would you even bother trying to talk to them after a while?

Maybe we weren't really helping the situation with all of our complaining and we certainly could have treated the 'Community Manager' of the forums better. Things were very toxic for a long time between us and them. Maybe it's understandable that they abandoned the game. But I can't like them for doing it. Nor do I cede the responsibility for what caused the rift between the players and the company in the first place.

So that's the story of my first MMO. I bet you've probably never even heard of it. It wasn't the largest game ever. Rusty Hearts was certainly no Everquest or WoW, but it was considerably more fun than those games, for me and a lot of other folks.

What really gets me in the end is that I have nothing to show for it other than my memories, some good and some bad. Why are people so...okay with this arrangement? You own nothing. You lease a small amount of digital space that the company who runs your game controls. They can delete your data and you can't recover it and one day, even the mighty WoW itself will shut down its servers and all of the players who played it will lose all of their account data, just like we all did with Rusty Hearts.

When an MMO goes down, they generally don't release a single player version of the client for people to play on their own if they want to. Maybe one where they could host LAN games and invite people over to their place to help them play it. No. The game is just dead. And all of the time you spent on it is gone. There is no record of my many characters in RH or of the dozens of stupid costumes I bought for them with real world money except a few screenshots I took of them.

To put it another way, you don't own your save data. All of your saves are hosted on the servers, not on your computer. If I lose my saves for a game because I forgot to back them up or I lost them when I updated my OS, that's on me, but when RH went down they just deleted everything of mine that I spent almost two thousand hours to acquire. I don't agree with this method of doing things. In fact I think it's utterly insane. And there are people who have to pay a monthly subscription fee just to have access to their saves in other MMO's. Don't pay and your account gets locked up. Not only do you not have your saves, but you also can't even play the game at all until you start paying them money again.

Sheer madness.

It makes it very hard for me to rationalize ever picking up another MMO. Did I enjoy RH? Yes. I met a lot of people I wouldn't have otherwise, a couple of which I even still chat with on a semi regular basis online. I certainly don't regret meeting them or making the friends I made, even if I lost contact with almost all of them after it got shut down. Establishing online connections with other people using an MMO is a unique experience and as these types of games become more ubiquitous, this may be one of the primary methods of online social interaction for our generation.

There is a question I ask myself though. If someone brought the game back, would I play RH again? If so, how much would I be willing to pay for it? At first my answer was a firm no, but some time has passed and I genuinely miss the game. I miss the atmosphere and the gameplay. I miss the music and the characters. I miss some of the other players I had such a good time with. I think the answer to the question is self evident. If someone resurrected Rusty Hearts, I would likely rejoin the game. And of course, someone actually has. Back in 2013, a group of players with programming knowledge started their own, illegitimate RH server. They don't have a license to distribute the game and I'm pretty sure everything they do is very under the table. They now have a working client, which you can download if you donate money to their cause, or if you apply to be a beta tester and they accept your application on their forums.

And so here I am. I have a lot to think about, not the least of which is my fear that if I start playing the game again, the obsession will once more consume my free time. I am also afraid of the game just disappearing one day, with all of my save data gone just like last time. But it is hard. I have a chance to experience something again that I thought was well and truly gone. In a way, it is like welcoming back something I loved, brought back from the grave by other people who loved it too.

Is this the end? Not really. I may have a second chance now.

Sometimes I think that nothing really ends, but something happens to people that we aren't aware of. That we perhaps can't be aware of because of who and what and where we are. Sometimes I think that...and I realize that I don't really know anything, not for certain.

I still have yet to decide what I'm going to do, but damn. I miss playing Rusty Hearts.

[Anastasia]

Not gonna sugarcoat this. Random reinforcement is basically evil. It's what keeps gambling addicts sitting at the slot machines for hours and hours on end, day after day, week after week, pouring their time and money into a bright, shiny thing that will almost never pay them back for their investment into it. It works much the same way in video games, make no mistake, but I can understand why they do it.

This is essentially what I was thinking for a large part of this article. I've avoided MMOs for a variety of reasons, the ones in your article included, and it's interesting to see it from another PoV.

What really gets me in the end is that I have nothing to show for it other than my memories, some good and some bad. Why are people so...okay with this arrangement? You own nothing. You lease a small amount of digital space that the company who runs your game controls. They can delete your data and you can't recover it and one day, even the mighty WoW itself will shut down its servers and all of the players who played it will lose all of their account data, just like we all did with Rusty Hearts.

It's a strange attitude in the digital age. There's a sense of impermanence, hoping things will remain. Digital music/game distribution comes to mind here as well. You're really at the mercy of whomever has control.

[Kaldrak]

A friend of mine said this to me after I talked to him about it: "He who has the keys to the kingdom, controls who goes inside." Basically, if you want to play their game, you have to abide by their rules, and that's the price of entry.

Oh and just for fun, a Rusty Hearts trailer for the now cancelled Japanese RH:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0vqZHd4I9Q

I applaud you for reading all the way through what I wrote, by the way. This one was LONG. I realized a little bit ago that my reviews aren't actually reviews, in the traditional sense. They're more like stories. Stories of my experiences with the games I play. I do try to include relevant information about the game for anyone who's interested, but for the most part I'm just putting down my experiences in a way that I think is enjoyable to read. Hopefully, I succeed more often than not.

[Dracos]

In truth, most multiplayer games are Temporary events in time.  Local multiplayer can evade it a bit, if you can convince folks already there to play it with you...

but online?  Even if maintained, people usually move on and many aren't maintained.  And when the game relies on those people to be part of the scenario, then it also dies with them.  I've popped on games and checked out multiplayer a year or two after launch to find ghost towns and dead servers.  MMOs aren't any different in this regard.  Once their time passes, the game falls over.  Doesn't need an uncaring admin on the other end to ruin it.