f13.net

   Hey, Zen (or Zenscrotum) here. one or two might remember me from Waterthread.org, slownewsday.net etc etc, Anywho.... since this is like the last bastion of "The Community" that started with LTM.net I bring tidings of a pretty interesting new game and merely hope that some of you will read up about it and give it a chance if interested. if any of you have ever heard of or played Haven & Hearth, Salem or other sandbox games you get the general gist of the game but this one is going to allow an immense amount more freedom.  Hope some of you are interested....

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1784263141/topia-online (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1784263141/topia-online)

http://www.topiaonline.com/Home?redirectPath=%2F (http://www.topiaonline.com/Home?redirectPath=%2F)
                                                                                          
                                                                                                            Zen

  Comments? Flames? Fuck off, Zen? Recipes for a nice meatloaf? BUELLER? BUELLER?

Incidentally, i don't go by Zen or Zenscrotum now, I've gone by Painhertz for 2+ years now so if you've ever played Haven and Hearth, ya probably hate me. :P

I think we need a thread to track the Kickstarted MMOs and how long before they collapse having released nothing they go.

So the world can blow up?

Open PvP with "severe death penalties" and no apparent penalty for killing except the possibility that "the community may hunt you down" - it certainly takes me back to the Lum days:)

I like the idea of being able to script my own spells or henchmen behaviour.

   Not so much blow up as monsters can get out of balance with the humanoid races and consume all resources until the world basically blinks out. A buddy of mine has started a Monster Union with the express purpose of destroying the first world.

Looks interesting. I like the old school 2d art style, and customized spells sound really cool. The notion that all monsters must be created/programmed by players seems a bit strange though.

Looks like you can diddle around with a little tech demo thing here: http://www.topiaonline.com/Sandbox/Show

     Bear in mind that the sandboxes both graphically and technology wise are FAR behind what the Devs are working with right now. the combat sandbox should be out next week some time hopefully and before beta (Tentatively Jan 7th) there's supposed to be a multiplayer sandbox put up.  As for monsters? they are all either being directly controlled by players (As their primary character) or have been scripted by players to do stuff while they play a less monsterous bipedal race. Either way, no monster you meet will react the same, fight the same or be the same as any other.

     The only "NPCS" per se will be dumb animals like deer, bears etc etc. shit for you to hunt and get materials from.

Stop indenting your "paragraphs".

   The fuck? 

It's really annoying. Why do you even do it?

Graphics are a huge turn off right now, I like the concept though.

LOL at "We need another developer, graphic artist, lawyer, and 3-4 other people but we expect to be able to launch with just $50k"

Looks interesting but I'm a little afraid of how it's all going to turn out, given how broken people are.

Yes I am serious.

 :popcorn:

One does not simply indent paragraphs on f13.

i don't know if it was a quirk of the little demo thing, but what felt really clunky to me was the fact that my character was so clearly moving on a grid. If I was moving right, then wanted to move up, my guy would keep walking to the end of the grid THEN walk up.  Just felt very clunky to me.

Anyway, I like the ideas they are touting, but as always, execution will be everything.  I'll keep an open mind, but I am not especially optimistic.

I used to indent paragraphs. Then I took an arrow in the knee.

     Blow me?
Blow me. Blow me.
     Blowme.
Blow me. Blow me.

     Sorry, was I indenting again? Anyway, to anyone interested come jump on either the forums or even better the IRC, the Devs pretty much talk with us and ask our opinions of whatever they are working on at the time and... ::cough::  actually do or don't do shit based on our opinions.  Tell Schild that Zen said Hi. He'd hang around but whoever this Trippy Sperg is has problems with my...paragraphs. Laters.

 :why_so_serious:

This can only end well.

Do people actually play games in 2012 that look like they were made in 1988? 

Stop indenting your paragraphs. You heard the man.

Also isn't topia the name of a pretty high profile iOS thing? Pretty sure it is.

I think people still play dwarf fortress, so yeah.

Topia World Builder (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/topia-world-builder/id534282109?mt=8).

Yea that.

   And Terraria, Unepic, the upcoming Starbound, Legend of Grimrock..... I'll leave it at that.

He didn't think I was serious :oh_i_see:

And yet his name is still a link.

He's temp banned, not deleted.

This thread puts me in the holiday spirit.  :grin:

Don't anger the Trippy.  :grin:

You need a title so people know who you are. It could say "administrator" or something.

I was thinking about that, but there's something to be said that if you're new to a board (whatever your background) you don't come in and start spewing obnoxious shit when someone tries to gently correct a bad habit.  A title shouldn't be required to enforce etiquette.

A wide open expanse of Sarchasm.

LOOK AT IT ANAKIN.

I'm guessing the browser he's using has some auto-indent feature.

&blowme would've been more appropriate.

 :facepalm:  I'm just going to blame sleep dep for forgetting we actually have titles.  :embarassed:

That would be an obnoxious fucking feature, as there is nowhere on the internet that considers indenting proper etiquette.

Not to mention it can probably be turned off

Let's not try to attribute to some weird programmed feature what can be easily explained by simple retardation. 

Hey Zen, why so angry about trivial crap (http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/topia-online.4544/)?

 :why_so_serious:

If I sigged other people's quotes, that would be one.

Bonus point to your find Arthur for it bears a link to a lovely 2004 Lum's article (http://www.brokentoys.org/2004/12/18/the-unbearable-darkness-of-ultima-online/).

EDIT: Zen does not indent on Lum's forum!

My god.  He's one of the "special" ones.

Now I can see that we were far, far too nice to him.  Jeebus.

Wow. Zen's a bigger d-bag than he gives himself credit for.

I like how he insults the F13 admins (presumably for banning him) and then turns around and gets himself banned by Lum o.O

I found Iain's comments the funniest in all of that mess.

"This is not a unique idea. It's been tried a billion times and we know it does work. You have no coders to pull this off. We've been over this ground, found it wanting, and yet you insist on retreading it."

Response: "FUCK YOU TRYHARDS!!!11"

The overlap between people banned here and people banned at BF is pretty significant. And a lot of them go on to not be banned at QT3.  :why_so_serious:

I think he's only temp banned here and it was an honest question as I don't really recall him being that big a dick before all this.  I mean it's funny but I wasn't trying to start a pile on.

Some pile ons start themselves.

Holy shit, I love mine, but Ingmar's grief title makes me very envious.

Yeah he was only temp banned which has expired but so far he hasn't come back.

Lum let Geldon go wild on his site for years, though.

This pleases me to see.  :heart:

Only 4 days to gather the other $25,000! They can do it you guys!

I have decided to believe that ZenStain is responsible they're having trouble getting it.  His douchebagginess has actively hurt the prospects of this game.  Then I remember it was doomed to failure to begin with.  But I'll still believe! 

A FUCKING COMPANY IS AT STEAK

Agreed, Fetuspults/golf clubs would make it a better game.

Well, my ban was "supposed" to be lifted on the 31rst but up until day before yesterday hadn't been.... That aside.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1784263141/topia-online/posts

The only purpose of the Kickstarter, as stated multiple times was to add an artist and another coder maybe so that the game release would be sooner rather than later. Later today the pledging/pre-order system moves to the front page of the game where all pre-orders will of course be instant and not held up by the kickstarter system + 3 weeks for a check to be cut. Beta starts sometime between now and the end of January but those who get the pre-order now will have access to various tools, multi-player sandboxes and mini-worlds until beta starts.

1 Coder or artist by themselves will cost them more than the $50k goal .....

What's the deal with the paragraph indent hate anyways?  Serious question.  I'm not trying to stir shit up.  I learned early on that it didn't fly on the internet, but I have no idea WHY it's so hated.

Read Rule #6 from here:

http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15026.0

In a forum format, where text isn't right-justified and line widths are typically much longer than is optimal for visual scanning, a single line break and an indent don't do a sufficient job of separating chunks of text from each other. A full empty line is required to break up walls of text, rendering indentation both redundant and hideously ugly.

Plus there's the matter of HTML being completely indiscriminate in its handling of whitespace characters, yeah. The only reason they're even showing up here is because Simple Machines is going out of its way to replace normal spaces with non-breaking spaces in situations where your browser would otherwise just ignore them.

I suggest using an at symbol paired with an indent if you want to try for a perma-ban.  Trippy might get so angry he accidentally nukes more than one person.

But the @ has to be followed by somebody's name. Otherwise I'll just think you are being stupid.

You know your MMO is going places when most of the thread is dominated by discussion of text formatting by the end of the second page.

So I guess they cancelled funding on this today. I'm shocked. Is anyone shocked? I'm shocked. SHOCKED.

   They've already received 50% of the Kickstarter pledges through Paypal on the sites front page. That's in the 6 or so hour's since the new Pre-order system was put in place....  Your continued snarkiness in no way affects this game coming out. And the mere fact that a Mod is in here derailing the thread says everything that needs to be said.

Well Zen. To be fair, it doesnt exactly scream quality. Also no one cares how successful any of this shit is really. Compound that with the fact you came back to spamvertise.

I hope it comes out and that it is great, because frankly, there isn't a lot out there like what this game wants to be.  But we've all got way too much experience around here with promises being made early in development, particularly in the context of sandbox games, to feel real excited about this game as a community.  If Topia comes out and is great, I'll be the first one to play it, but I'm not going to get hyped over bullet points, especially when it comes to a low budget kickstarter project.

Is repeat-indenting a permabannable offense?

Yes.

It really IS hard to live in North Korea.

I don't remember Zen being that stupid either, memory is a funny thing.

He's starting to sound like a cartoon bad-guy. YOUR CONTINUED SNARKINESS WILL NOT STOP MY PLANS FOR WORLD DOMINATION MWHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

He obtains zen from a ballsack.  You can't really expect a big-budget bad guy.

More like Scooby Doo bad guy? WE WOULD HAVE GOTTEN KICKSTARTED IF IT WEREN'T FOR YOU MEDDLING FORUM POSTERS!

That got me good.

So that's a quarter of the original target? Well done, good sir, on getting money from people for a game that doesn't yet fully exist.

If you look at how many MMOs have been successfully Kickstarted, I think there are about 5 who made it (including PathO's and Embers of Caerus' investor demos) and a whole heap that didn't. One day I'll look to work out a success rate, but it isn't good.

That thread is fairly stupid on both sides. An MMO with permadeath - we know that never works!! Really? One of the hottest games of last year was basically an MMO with permadeath and PvP. (Hint: brainnnsssss)

There's almost no high-level game idea that flat out can't work.

Not to say that this will work but is the idea any worse than Space Romans? I mean...FFS I laughed out loud just typing that.

The thread content was the main reason I picked the word trivial when linking it.

    Did the zombie game go around begging people for money before finishing its tech demo though? I'm not being sarcastic, I actually don't know.

    Also, did the zombie game ride a wave of hype (nostalgia?) that made pre-Trammel UO grognards flock to USENET the internet, indent their paragraphs, mock tryhards, and sign their posts? Again, I ask out of ignorance. I didn't pay much attention to the zombie game(s).

                                                                                                                                          Cheers,
                                                                                                                                          Hutch

Indenting is no less annoying when you do it.

Anyway my point was merely that the thread at Lum's was fairly silly all around.

I have absolutely no idea why that game reverted Zen to the mind of a 15 year old butthurt fanboy. It looks like shit. I simply don't understand how anyone could think otherwise.

It is rather odd. I can understand it for even the Populous guy because he made Populous and we should give him money to make another Populous. But this?

It reinforces the idea we need a F13 kickstarter for our own game about Bat Country the interactive MMO.

I'll fund it if it has permadeath.

It has permadeath, but only if you don't pay the monthly $50 subscription fee.

I think the issue was that it bought back memories of pre-Trammel UO except that it promised to be even more griefy because of the permadeath. Early UO is pretty much universally agreed to be horrible and something that could only have been acceptable in the days when UO was the only MMO around. When the first mainstream MMO came out allowing people to escape PvP (ie Everquest I), UO immediately followed suit by introducing the non-PvP mirror land, because they knew their original design was unsustainable.

However, I wonder if the consensus tells the whole story? Are we sure there isn't room for a sandbox MMO which has open PvP but still attracts (this is what's meant to be impossible) different types of player, not just the "killer" type? I mean, Wurm has pretty open PvP from what I can tell but it seems to attract people who enjoy building and crafting. Are there no PvEers or socialisers playing Darkfall? There are certainly industrialists and roleplayers playing in 0.0 in Eve, although I take the point that only a minoty of Eve players ever leave the safe(ish) zones. I don't know the answer, I just wonder if the consensus might not be based too much on the memories of bitter vets from the early days of UO.

And once you die, you get rezzed with a grief title last name. We can have Haemish design those.

Tyrox ... Weaselraper

Meh, how many times do we have to have this conversation?  About 10% loved the freedom about 90% hated it.

I am educating the youngsters buddy!

Needs more charts.

This isn't really applicable, for one simple reason: it makes absolutely no sense to try to do industry in nullsec right now, apart from smalltime producers. Making shit in hisec and JFing it out is vastly preferable, both in terms of cost, risk and effort.

There's an increasingly heavy push to try to get CCP to remedy this imbalance, but I wouldn't hold my breath.

It's permadeath with almost no character permanence - starting again was (mechanically, probably not emotionally) trivial. I'm extremely curious about how many players stuck around after the first few sessions of giving DayZ a shot too.

Plus DayZ was a mod that went viral, not a separate title that trying to survive on its own revenue. Again, I'm curious how DayZ the standalone game will do when it comes out and has some kind of cash shop.

So, it would be like Team Fortress 2, But when Scout 42 dies, Scout 43 respawns!  BAM!  Permadeath!

Cash Shop + permadeath or full looting seems like it's bound to fail epicly.

Bat Country the Inactive MMO you mean.

In TF2, you get to keep your hat.

It wasn't so much the permadeath in and of itself. I'm not reflexively anti permadeath although I think that it is incompatible with character investment in a game that wants to make money. It was more the whole suite of terrible design decisions taken as a whole.

Permadeath not just of characters but of whole servers.
Persistent characters in the world even when the player has logged out.
No AI enemies except for ambiance beasties.

There were a few others but I don't care to reread their pitch to remind myself of them.

Calling DayZ MMO is funny. Apparent anything with a online component is an MMO now.  And lets face it DayZ was a shit game that elevated by confluence of pop culture and novelty game play.

Which still put it miles above most of the games out there, for people who like that kind of thing.

This distinction between what is and is not an MMO is pretty blurry these days, especially when many "MMOs" are designed to minimize player interaction. I suspect that in another 5 years or so MMO as a genre won't even really exist.

DayZ is also actually a thing you can play right now, unlike this silly piece of vaporware.