Feldon I always intended to post an article about Fortune League. Yes, it’s only tangentially connected to EverQuest II. Yes it’s a Facebook game, a service I don’t use (I already tried its forebearer AOL in the 90’s). Yes it’s a StationCash money sink. But I also know quite a few people who really liked the idea of a Fantasy Football type game with some of the concepts of EQ2 as a background.
Sure most people played Fortune League for the Alternate Advancement (AA) instant XP potions. But I thought it was popular enough to sustain. Apparently not.
Aliscious of EQ2Talk brings us the obituary:
AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM SONY ONLINE ENTERTAINMENT
As of Monday, July 11th this Facebook game will no longer be operational. In the meantime, you may continue to play and redeem prizes until the conclusion of this final season. However, the ability to add Station Cash funds to your wallet will be disabled on Friday, June 24th. Any existing funds in your wallet can still be used until the game is turned off.
Beginning on Monday, July 11th, you may request a refund of the non-promotional Station Cash in your wallet if you play Fortune League and do not also currently play any other SOE game (EverQuest II, Free Realms, etc.) where you can still continue to use the Station Cash in your wallet after this Facebook game has been turned off. If you are eligible for a refund, please contact a Customer Service.
I played it and found it pretty interesting, but when you got too many rewards, you couldn’t redeem the newer rewards due to a buggy interface. While it was fun, it wasn’t fun enough to warrant playing without getting the rewards.
It is possible to redeem them by manually inputting the address for the new rewards, but I could never be bothered for it when you had multiple rewards waiting.
I don’t know, even though I doubt it they might have fixed it since I played, but that could be a contributing factor to why it’s going away.
Does make me wonder how secure our account info was. Facebook apps are notoriously insecure and I never felt comfortable about giving this third party app my EQ2 login =/
Aw 🙁
While the”game” was certainly flawed I had hoped they would slowly evolve it over time. Hoping here that the idea isn’t completely thrown away as I believe a minigame like this has promise.
I’m betting this is where the recent rash of station cash hacks came from. Glad I never gave it my $OE login info.
Sigh, Where else am i going to get those awesome AA scrolls – Worth 15 AA points at level 10 😛 and those potions that were worth $10.00 in the cash store 🙁
Oh well. Guess i’ll just have to buy them now.
I was able to get a stack of those AA scrolls and potions helped nicely while maxing my new toons.
Fortune League never worked for about half of the people who tried it–mysterious errors preventing redemption of prizes, or of playing in the first place. The end result is that those who were fortunate enough to be able to actually use the thing were almost always in the top 50% of players thanks to all the abandoned accounts, thus winning AA scrolls and whatnot every week.
Personally I’m glad to see it go. EQ2 has this trend of rewarding you for things other than playing EQ2, and Fortune League was part of that. I don’t think a player of an MMO should have to also play a tangentially related Facebook game and online CCG in order to be on even footing in the game they actually signed up for.
Last week SOE announced that it was turning off The Agency: Covert Ops / Wildlife Refuge / James Patterson: To Catch a Killer at the end of June. Dungeon Overlord was recently or is in the process of being transitioned fully back to Night Owl (its developer). Add all this to the recent Fortune League announcement and I think that completes the exodus of SOE from the Facebook game space.
With all of these happening with in such a short span I would have to speculate that there was something that triggered it. Saying that it was just a money motivated decision seems to be too easy.
It’s hard to beleive that even in a lights-off run mode which most of these titles seemed to already be in that they were still operating in the red. It appears to be that SOE threw in the towel for the social networking games and is maybe trying re-focus its remaining resources on its bread-n-butter titles rather than venturing into new properties.
Does this mean that the TCGs like LoN are next?
Its because as of the first week of July all Facebook games now have to use the Facebook credit currency, which Facebook takes a 30 percent cut from.
Wow, guess Facebook likes to keep pounding nails in their own coffin.
Ah, so facebook screwed it up, that figures now. I bet otherwise EQ2 would have been happy to run it as a advertising thing alone.
And those AA scrolls were insane, I used one on a new character, on a double XP day using a 110% potion and picked up 43 AA points 🙂 After that each one gave 20,12,8 etc though, but defintely a great boost for a new character.