So, there you go. More or less a year after unrolling the Planetside: Reserves program, SOE have now discontinued free access to the game for all Reserve station accounts, bringing the year-long free trial of the obscure MMO-FPS to an end. To be honest, I'm rather surprised, figuring it was going to be like the Anarchy Online one - effectively free for ever, but contractually obliged to declare it in year-long blocks for some reason. Seems I was wrong, and for you, Reservist, the war is over.

Current Reserves accounts are now locked, although can apparently still be unlocked and upgraded to full BR25 CR5 BFR-Enabled accounts upon receipt of the appropriate billing information and whopping $14.99 a month payment, which has to make it on a par with all the other most expensive 'A-list' MMO subscriptions in terms of sheer cost.

The war continues on Auraxis however, with a now somewhat culled population scrapping it out in the remnants of a once glorious conflict. Last time I was in there, a week ago or thereabouts, I worked total server population out to be about 200 players, at peak. I've no idea how many of us were Reservists, but anecdotal evidence on the forums (which I can still see for some reason), suggests that Emerald - the main US server is now lucky to see more than 400 players a night, and Markov is a bit of a ghost town.

All sorts of rousing 'Good! We don't want freeloading Reservists anyway!' sentiment there too, blaming us for the lag, and the like, and only a very few wise and forlorn veterans pointing out that the only thing that distinguishes Planetside from say, Battlefield 2142 or similar, is that Planetside can support matches of over 64 players, and that Planetside costs $14.99 a month to play and features some quite ropey client-side hit-detection and graphics at least three years old. If the typical server population drops noticeably below, say, 128 players in total, people are going to start wondering why they need to be subscribing to an online service at all. The more targets, the better, I'd have thought. Mind you, the various names that are spouting the 'Don't Let The Door Hit You...' rhetoric seem to be the same names I recognise as being very much in love with the 'solo' game of Planetside anyway - the hotdropping heavy assault Bruce Willis types. It's a lot like wolves campaigning for the abolition of sheep.

Anyway, I quite agree. Paying, as I did, nothing toward Planetside's upkeep for the last year, (instead, offering my easy-to-shoot body as a target drone in a kind of bizarre Community Service initiative), I have precisely zero say in where it should go now, how it should evolve, and now my interest becomes purely academic. I could be wrong, and often am, but I suspect Planetside now has months to live, as the Reserves program was the only significant marketing and recruiting campaign Planetside had going, and that's now over, having by now converted pretty much anyone it was going to.

I expect the next thing we'll see is a server merge - Markov into Emerald for definite, and possibly Werner into the remainder also, as more than any other online game I've known, player population density is absolutely critical to Planetside's survival.

The end of a bold experiment? I always did suspect that Planetside was little more than an interesting technology demo, which happened to have been complete enough to make a bit of subscription money on the side. What does this mean for the Next Generation of more traditional MMOs? Does Planetside's legacy doom all future attempts to add FPS elements to the more usual MMORPG? I hope not, but to date, the only other MMO-like experience I can recall in which aiming is required, is the less than resounding success of Neocron 2: Beyond Dome of York. Perhaps Planetside is a failed experiment, and we'll not see it's like in MMO again. I hope not.

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In other War Related News, the previously mentioned war declaration against our EVE Online corp expired at the weekend. Seems The Enemy couldn't be bother/couldn't afford to pay for the thing to be extended into next week. I doubt it was money, mind you. That amount of cash - one million ISK - is literally an hours work for any pilot able to take on Agent Level 3 combat missions. (Battlecruiser)

As far as I'm aware, no shots were fired, and The Enemy never came anywhere near our current 'active base', which is almost never the same base as listed on the Corp Info window. (If yours is, you're fools and should move the actual day-to-day operations at least one region away!) All in all, a bit of a false alarm really. I must admit being somewhat relieved about it all to be honest - the tinge of danger, and the necessity of keeping an eye on the Local chat list is all very exciting and all, but does get a bit tiresome after a while when you're trying to actually play the game too. For many, these kinds of wars are the game, but I still quite enjoy playing the NPC stuff at the moment - missions and market, and playing PvP and PvE at the same time is always a recipe for misery in any MMO.

Still, the whole experience does seem to have been a bit of a wakeup call for the corp as a whole, and apparently, this exact thing has happened a few times before I joined - sudden and brief war declarations which get everyone all worked up and panickey, but do not materialise into actual fighting. Maybe it's a kind of psychological war? Anyway, Corp Leadership has decided to get a bit more organised about it all and to that end we're going to be doing a bit of internal live-fire combat training, using cheap ships and gear, as a kind of practice - dividing the corp into two teams for the purpose, in a kind of good-natured civil war of our own.

For me, this is ideal, as I have no EVE PvP experience at all, and although yes, you can learn this stuff in the field, it's nice to get a chance to pick up the basics without all the brutal unpleasantness that goes with it - the smacktalk, and similar. Also, the Police totally ignore attacks on your own corp members, so that's useful too - fighting without interference and security rating hits, in the comfort of safe space. (This only applies to Player Corps - going berserk against your fellow students in the University of Caille or similar, with still get you 'Concordokken', so careful!)

Certainly there were many in our corp who are expert combat pilots and veterans of other wars before, but as a coordinated outfit, I suspect things would have gone badly if The Enemy had come for us in earnest; too many carebears like me, and not nearly enough coordination. When the next Enemy comes for us, as I'm sure they will, we ought to be in a far better position after some training.

Interesting times ahead.