f13.net

 Winback  (http://chronicle.ubi.com/NR/exeres/00015b14lsnkwbpjfutaqbqo/News+Article.asp?NRMODE=Published&NRORIGINALURL=%2fArticles%2fNews%2f200504_winback%2ehtm&NRNODEGUID=%7bD2758E90-E122-4CF4-A945-9F145770EB25%7d&NRQUERYTERMINATOR=1&cookie%5Ftest=1)

What changed? Mine fights are good opportunity to PvP, mines provide resources that allow 'formula' rolling of items you want and gold to not farm for city upkeep if you can control few of them, PvP balance was cleaned up a bit, your city assets no longer vulnerable outside of active bane phase so no 4am wall bashings anymore, no more gold healing anything, no more dropping bulwarks on people.

sb.exe still happens, though now it seems only to happen after you log out.

You have to love it when Haemish breaks out the big red font.

Every day I come here hoping for the high quality funny.  Today, I will not leave disappointed.

What's a crotchpheasant?

I don't know what it is ... but I first heard it on Family Guy.  Stewie calls a little girl that.  Damn I love that show.

I am very afraid to find out.

I don't even care what a crotchpheasant is.  If it has anything to do with sb.exe it must be very horrible. 

I want to know what the deal is with the 'theme' avatars.  Are they evolving?  Morphing into something else? Will there be some sort of surprise eventually?  What's with you guys lately?  Is it some sort of man love club?  Haemish's is most awful... it reminds me of DV.  The f13 staff is beginning to make me nervous.  You are all very nearly mostly strange.

What? HUH? I woke up under my desk with flecks of foaming spittle drying on my jaw. It was night time and my hands were full of the hair I'd apparently clawed from my head. What was I talking about?

Wow, I haven't felt this out of it since I quit Shadowbane.

Crotchpheasant sounds like a variant of chickhead, the two birds sharing similar repetative feeding motions.  Once again my youth as a farmboy with a dirty mind reveals to me secrets best left unknown.

Shadowbane still has too many bugs, still takes too much constant focus, and still ends in a desolate wasteland of a server.  It's much better than it was, but those fundamental issues remain.

Which brings us to an interesting topic of discussion (I think, forgive if this has been hashed and re-hashed prior to my arrival) how little focus is required to give a MMOG that mass appeal?

What I mean by that is, can you use a fps engine in a traditional MMORPG?  I get the feeling many people like not having to actually apply themselves to performing well in combat.

How do you incorporate sieges (which you should) that aren't meaningless ala DAOC's keeps and WoW's Battlegrounds without creating burnout and constant-focus syndrome like ShadowBane?

In a nutshell:  Are mmorpg's doomed to suck because nobody wants to deal with the effort required to have player-skill determined pvp with meaningfull large scale combat?

*I know there is an extra L in there somewhere, -thanks spellcheck!- but I can't find it.  To atone I have removed the index finger from my right hand*

The problem is for these games the only meaningful activity is to get people to quit.
Imagine you face an zombie and every time you kill him, he just comes back over and over again.
Soon you realize that the only way to get the zombie to stop coming back is to kill the necromancer controlling him.

The End User is the necromancer.
If the game protects the End User, the game will be meaningless and carebear.
If the game doesn't, the game will be meaningful and a harsh wasteland.

Of course, this is Item #8 in the List of Endlessly Debated MMOG Topics. So, my reply is just a scream into a hurricane.

I have no mouth, but I must scream... endless streams of profanity?

Have the city building costs and times and the seige system reverted to beta 3 design yet? Are they going to pay us a lot of money to play? If the answer to both of these questions is 'no', then they certainly didn't need to restore my account.

Shouldn't they address some of the fundamental problems before they try to entice old customers back? I'm with Stewie on this one.

Isn't that what the frontpage for?

I kid, I kid.

Frontpage ?

I believe this is the point where Myschyf comes in and bans everybody.

I teased them by pretending to download.

Did you get a phantom sb.exe error for your trouble?

Is the client avaible for download ?
 I seem to have lost my CD's. Maybe I burned them, I do not remember much from the time I played shadowbane the last time.

Yes, you can download it.  I can't be arsed to provide you with a linky, however. 

I'm feeling disagreeable.

http://www.shadowbane.com/us/FreeTrial.php

Christ. Label you're links NSFW when appropriate.

Thank you a lot. I downloaded the client, via fileplanet, none the less.

Could not muster the strentgh to actually play a bit, I will try it tonight.

What really ticks me of, is the fact that the client is labeld "Throne of Oblivion", but I seem to be blocked from rolling a new vampire character. Way to go. Winback ftw.

You know, I thought about doing this, and giving you guys the blow-by-blow on the front page.

Then Guild Wars came out, and I was too busy enjoying good PVP combat to be arsed.