f13.net

Brad posted some sort of manifesto for the game within a FoH thread (http://www.fohguild.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14779) that I find interesting and amusing in a number of ways and that is spanning already 6+ pages in less than a few hours.

Anyway, this is his stance:

Holy shit. Where do I get a job where I can talk like an absolute loon and make assloads of cash? Here I can only talk like a loon.

Hi, we're a website full of hardcore gamers. Look at the success of WoW. Everything you just said makes you seem positively clueless.

But I'll give you the benefit of the doubt cuz I'm feeling generous. Give me a virtual world that's interesting and I shall live in it. Give me EQ1.1 and I'll make it my mission to drudge up every single one of your past press releases and interviews and point out where you went wrong.

Start saving those releases to your hard drive.  I've said the whole time he's just releasing EQ1.01 with a newer, shinier wrapper and he just about said the same thing in that release.

   "Miss grinding, corpse runs, hours-long raids and sitting on your ass killing things over and over and over for that rare spawn to make it's rare drop? We think you do and we're here to provide that game for you!"

Vanguard is catering to the e-peen needing catass who is pissed they can't have uber equipment to wave in the face of the masses paying to keep their digital viagra perscription going.  I'm sure he'll hit his 250k number, though, because I know there's a lot of broken, lonely addicts out there.

I could go on for a page or more ranting about how sad it is, but really it's not worth my time.  I'll just continue to watch from afar, laugh every once in a while and wait to see how things go when it launches next year.

What a fucknut. If I wanted to continue doing that shit I'd still be playing EQ1..

Az

WoW's success doesn't contradict what Brad is saying, it just means that WoW's formula has more mass appeal. I agree with Merusk that there are plenty of catasses out there that 250K is doable

I think these guys are pretty lucky to have MSFT as backers, because I think this guy is badly incorrect thinking that times and attitudes haven't changed.  Who wants to play a game that offers less rewards for more time?   He may get 205k catasses, but that's not a game I'd play.  And I imagine that many asshats together would cancel each other out after awhile.

Is it? Would those people rather play City of Heroes or Guild Wars? I mean, the playing field has a lot more competitors than it used too, and a number of them a good.

You're talking about gamers who enjoy a good game.  I'm talking catasses who need an e-peen.  These are the asshats flocking to forums LIKE FoH.  While there they whine that CoH sucks because there's no loot, WoW sucks because while there's loot it's too accessible, and GW sucks because there's no PvE raids for uber, uber loot and you can't put a nice box around the game strategy.

  It's a niche strategy (one we've all said needs to happen for MMOs to evolve.) but even to hit that 250k number I'm suspecting a LOT of those accounts will be doubles, triples, quads so joe uber catass can level himself. (Or, like the folks I knew from EQ drooling over VS, so ubercatass and his wife can have a private group with their 6 accounts..)

Actually I made the statement to purposefully exclude Everquest 2. Aren't they fighting over the same piece of rotten meat? And aren't there already less than 250,000 of them?

Sweet, I can cross this game off my "watch" list. I know some people that would find that appealing, and I really feel sorry for the lifestyle they lead because of it. Spending 8 hours each and every day playing a video game is not my idea of fun. Sadly, there are plenty who think it is.

I disagree with what you said. Here's how:


Only, there have only been 2 MMOG's since EQ to have 500k users that we know of, Final Fantasy Online (which had not only the benefit of release on PC AND console) and WoW. Final Fantasy used an existing brand that has a RABID fanbase. WoW used an existing brand with an equally rabid fanbase AND was targeted for the casual gamer.


You try to hook the casual gamer for more than 6 months, you'll be developing forever. You need to keep him 6 months, keep the box on the shelves and try to get some new stuff out there for him 9-12 months from release.


EQ1 WAS A FLUKE. You came at just the right time for that kind of game. First 3D MMOG at a time when 3D cards were just becoming standard on a gaming PC. UO was bleeding users who wanted nothing to do with PVP and you gave them a non-PVP game. The Internet was just reaching critical mass as a gaming device. YOU ONLY HAD ONE OTHER REAL COMPETITOR WHO WAS HAVING PR PROBLEMS AND WHOSE GAMEPLAY WAS FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT.

How much more perfect set of circumstances can you get?


Because there are about 50 billion EQ-alikes out there, each with a slightly different set of advantages and disadvantages.


Good for you.


Those people, US HARDCORE INCLUDED, are butterflies now. No game is going to hook us for years like that first game without asstons of new content being placed regularly and without bugs. And even then, you won't keep us.


I hope it isn't your money you are betting. The genre in general is completely wrongheaded in thinking it could or SHOULD reach a large audience who will subscribe for years at a time. The subscription model is fundamentally flawed and is going to kill the genre.

I do miss corpse runs. I do not want my hand held. I want it to be possible to lose everything if I fail. I miss the shivering adrenaline of breaking Fear and Hate with everything at stake, the horror of failing and the hours of trying to recover. The only thing that has come close for me since was raid-scale PvP battles in the first year of SWG. WoW offers great entertainment but none of the fear. I was disappointed when SWG (shortly after launch) and WoW (during beta) both dumbed down their death penalties.

I left EQ because they raised the bar too high for me in Planes of Power (or perhaps Luclin) and because raids were designed to take even longer than before, so I don't think I'm a catass. But I also left because they dumbed EQ down. I hated suddenly being able to travel everywhere easily (I was a troll warrior) and I didn't like accumulating loot any more when I was no longer risking everything to get it.

Back in the day, a successful clearing of the Plane of Fear, a Vox kill, or even just a Fire Giant run, needed skill, teamwork and daring. WoW reduces it to just skill and teamwork. I want risk, fear and daring built into my MMOGs. I hope that's what Brad McQuaid is doing.

If you want fear, play the game with your testicles suspended over an aquarium full of pirahna.

these guys are owned by MSFT -- they are not risking their own money.  And they are the post-Mythica hail mary.  Arrogance and a cluelessness over general current trends in gaming indicate to me this guy can't see over the hill of money protecting his ass.  He is justifying his own prejudices, which is FAILURE#1 in product management (i.e. don't assume your tastes are the exact tastes of your customers; or more simply, don't think you're selling to yourself -- you can't buy that much)  

If you want to complain about catasses, don't make 5034 posts at 11.599 per day.

I said I want piranhas beneath my in-game testicles, and the chance of them getting irreversably fed.

In the time it takes someone to make 12 posts, someone may have gotten 25% of a level during the mid-game of any given MMOG.

Don't be a non-sensical dick.

I won't be buying it either.

Lovely, you're old school. ok. congrabulatons. golfclap even.

If you went back to EQ today, you'd find that raids, especially PoP and OOW, require a lot more tactics then Vox or Naggy did. No more bullshit like the buff-line, camp to chat, all log in and make your groups now, gogogo ah fuck we wiped. Nowadays you can do crazy shit like buff your groups without needing to log off to preserve them before the encounter, and the encounters (now) involve slightly more strategy then zerg for teh win.

Yeah risking everything made for a great fun time. Like a 6-hour Fear clearing that turned into a 12-hour enforced CR clusterfuck since if you didn't get your corpse out tonight with your guild you were truly fucked. Nuh-uh, never again.

Despite the mousewheel of mudflation that EQ is, the game has improved vastly since Luclin, which was until very recently considered the biggest POS SoE ever pushed out the door (until Gates of Discord), and especially since real competition knocked on the door and kicked their asses, aka WoW.

As for hating the PoK books. I hear this whine all the time, and quite frankly you can cry me a fucking river. if you want to spend 45minutes walking from the EC tunnel to Thurgadin so you can hunt giants, nobody's stopping you. Don't like the books? Don't fucking use them. Easy. Better not buy a horse either. those make travel too fast.


If you want to take it up the ass everytime you die in WoW, be a man and take the responsibility to do it yourself. Give 10% of your money to some random putz right after you rez, as your "additional durability penalty". if 10% of your existing cash is under, say, 1gp then bag one item you're wearing until you can pay the 1gp penalty. That's how we'd do it in "the good old days" the PNP days. If a rule didn;t exist for what we wanted, we'd make one up that made sense and use it. Death in WoW not harsh enough for you? Pull your fist out and make it more harsh for yourself instead of crying on the internet that the game is too easy.

Unless the problem that you think it's too easy, you want it to be harsher, but you want everyone else playing to hang their nuts over the pirahna tank with you, whether they like it or not? Looks like Clueless McQuaid, Vision 2.0 in tow will be glad to oblige you. I think you'd better bring your own lube though, 'cos they won't supply any.

Az

Corpse runs don't give you lube, suck it up like a MAN!

EQ2 (according to press releases anway. Yes they suck, but they're all we've got besides Bruce's chart. Ha!) has hit the 250k number, though.  That's impressive considering it the CW is that the game sucks, and it has two very big strikes against it, which VS won't have.

 1) Years of SOE hate and broken promises.

It's amazing to see the Vanguard fanbois drool about this game, when they were the self same people bitching about EQ 4 years ago when it was run by the same man.  This is probably the biggest reason it facinates me so.  All that hate McQuad, Abashi and the rest of the Vanguard team generated was sloughed off effortlessly when they left the company.  Then they started pointing to their previous beast and shouting things like "that's not how it was supposed to be, man! What suckers you all are, come to us it'll be different!" The fuck?

 2) Catering to the fanbase of a game with low system reqs with a game of ginormous requirements (comparativly).

EQ2 was originally supposed to capture the folks who left EQ, then they fucked that up and decided they just wanted the current fanbase to migrate.  That's great an all for the hardcore and the gamers who forgo other things to upgrade their machines.  There's folks STILL pissed they can't play EQ1 on Win95, so I want to know what they were thinking when they pushed out such harsh specs for EQ2.  Lots and lots and lots of people don't upgrade PCs every *4* years, much less every two.  Those folks they wanted to capture went to WoW not only because it was touted as fun, but because it was the only game they could run.

Like I said, it'll be a niche game, and I expect that a lot of those 250k subs will be multiple accounts.  Folks like Tale here (and ElGallo, who was also drooling over VS at one point..) are looking for this game, and that's great for them.  So long as Sigil doesn't actually plan on hitting 500k (what a loon) in this day and market, I think the game will succeed. Aim higher and you're just looking to be shot down.

While I pretty much agree with almost everything you posted, I'm not sure Brad's reading your reply. Though I did see Scott Hartsman post a couple of times here, so who knows?




Just to clarify, are you counting FFO's Japanese numbers there? Cos the game was out in Japan for a good year or so (on PS2) before the US release.
And doesn't Lineage 2 have a fuckton of subscribers? Albeit most of them are Koreans, but the NES (non-English-speaking) market is a major factor in MMOGs now. Remember the Guildwars Beta "select your region: 1: Korea 2: Everywhere Else in the World".



It'll be interesting, I go back to study in 2 months, and I'll be hitting 60 probably a couple weeks before I do. I like the questing and mucking about right now, but if the game at 60 just evolves into instance farming for uberer loot, faction grinding and shitty PVP (when I want (fun) PVP, I'll play Battlefield) then they better comeout with something else interesting to do, or WoW will have been a fun 6 months...



/applaud.

Seriously. How many of us would have been willing to sit, blind, looking at that fucking book for 35 levels if there was an alternative game that did basically the same things, only better? That's where we are now with WoW. It's EQ, before it became raid-to-live-live-to-raid, only refined for fun and maybe comparable to Kunark-Era as far as overall content goes. Vanguard must think they're in a time/space vaccum.

Az

You could always go play Diablo 2 on that difficulty level where when you die, it's permanent. Nightmare, or assfuck. Or whatever it was called. That's irreversably for ya..



I've wondered the same things about the SoE hater/Sigil Fanbois as long as I've heard of Sigil developing a game. I think too many people are wearing their rose-coloured glasses when they think of the original EQ. It was amazing because it was the first time (most of us) had done anything, played anything like that. Having someone watching over your shoulder while you jab at the screen with your finger explaining "see there? that's another player! that's another person".

The rose-coloured specs are made up largely of the sense of wonder we had the first time we played these things. The true newbie feeling when everything is discovery. Once you've done that once though, you don't get it back.


Az

I know and you'd be surprised.

Hardcore mode for your diablo 2 comments. And it rules.

Responding to Haemish's weak retort about piranhas with an equally weak retort makes more sense than a thread full of people imitating each other. This thread consisted of "I can slam Sigil better than the poster above", few new points made, until I had the piranha-endangered balls to differ.

I don't think Brad McQuaid was pandering to catasses. He reminds me of my old boss, long-time editor of a well-known magazine, who had grown up reading the magazine (no, not that kind of magazine). He was passionate about it and its readers, and his personal mission was to bring them more of what he had loved. He wrote in the same over-enthusiastic way about his plans, and people often doubted him. Nowadays his long-gone editorship is thought of as the golden era.

I don't see having a longer journey than WoW as necessarily a bad thing. Maybe they have a way to reward non-catasses (like the WoW XP bonus for not logging in), or put required achievements in your path that require co-ordination and skill rather than time. Maybe I'm wrong, and they don't - maybe it will just be another grind. But I agree with McQuaid that there has to be something more to do than WoW currently offers. It lacks risky challenges like Fear and Hate. Raids like Onyxia are just risk-free puzzles with pretty lights.

We seem to come from different planets. I honestly did prefer that I couldn't get around that easily, it's not an attempt to sound oldschool. It felt like I was in a world. The PoK books made it feel like I was just in a game, and I hated that.

I hate grinds and I'm an employed professional with much less gaming time than people who can catass. But that's a different matter from wanting challenges that create opportunities for success AND tough penalties for failure, rather than just opportunities for success. So I think I'm one of the 250,000 losers who would play what you're all hating, and I don't think the other 249,999 are catasses. Gotta go to bed, it's 3:50am and I'm supposed to be driving a car at 7:30am.

A longer journey than WoW isn't a bad thing. I honestly liked what EQ1 did with AAXP, which gave you an opportunity to slightly better your character while still staying on more or less an even playfield with your friends/guildmates/whoever. 5 expansions later or however many it's been since Luclin and the balance has gone out the window of course, but I'm sure with forethought and good planning something like this could be done.

WoW already has the Talent system in place, the key is to tweak it enough to on one hand give the casuals like me achievable carrots to keep us going while not overdoing it on the other end of the spectrum for people that will sit in one spot grinding for 12 hours a day.


And no, old-school Fear clearings sucked. Some were fun at the time, but you'd spend 6 hours there before the raid called it a night, skipping the Temple almost everytime. A bad wipe and you were suddenly committed to a minimum of 2 and as much as 6 hours of CR. One raid took us 12 hours counting the CR, Zone repop when we were almost done, CT agro and the whole zone rapes you so you have to find people late at night willing to to come help you break the zone and clear to your dead raid.

Sorry, that kind of shit is just unacceptable to me now. The fear wasn't of wiping, the fear was of after already epsnding 6 hours in the shithole of losing the remainder of the entire night and a large chunk of the AM on a shitty CR. That level of harshness is not enjoyable or playing the game, it's just a waste of my time and I no longer have that much time to waste on these games.



See the thing is I'd already walked the width and breadth of Norrath for several years. I've waited for and caught all the buggy boats to everywhere and back. By the time the Velious Spires and later the PoK books came out, when I got on, I wanted to enjoy playing with my friends and guildies with my limited time. Not spend 30minutes just getting everyone to the same spot in the game so we could start making our way to someplace else to chat while we whacked imaginary monsters over the head. And like I said initially, no-one forces you to take the books. If you like walking, then walk. But don't complain because others don't enjoy playing exactly how you do. Ditto for the WoW-death penalty. If you want to make it harder for yourself, then make it harder for yourself. I don't see what's so hard about the concept.

See, to me what Bradley wrote about Vanguard sounds like a shitty game and a shit time. if you think it sounds like heaven on a stick and you go play it, my opinion is go knock yourself out, have the time of your life, I don't care. Just because I think it sounds crappy, doesn't mean you can't play it and enjoy it. if you want to take the PoK book and I think the PoK book concept sounds like crap, I don't have to use it.

see?

3:50am? Different planets? nah we're in the same country mate.

Az

Sure there does. But what in the things you've heard from McQuaid or out of Sigil about Vanguard makes you think it will be anything other than what we've already seen in EQ1? We've SEEN raids. Just making them more punishing for failure is not what is missing, because it's been done. And WoW does it better than EQ1 in that it allows more people to enjoy the raids because it doesn't punish them when they fail.

There are only two ways to get the "fear" back into raiding in MMOG's: 1) Permadeath, 2) the game punches you squarely in the family jewels when you fail. What else is there more punishing than the EQ style? Unless you as a person are invested in the game and its items, there's not fuck else you could take away from a player than EQ1 during McQuaid's reign. And if he or anyone else is high enough to think that the mainstream audience who paid for WoW will want to pay to get punished, they are deluded.

WoW has succeeded for a number of reasons, while Vanguard is trying to pull in a subset of a subset of its users. And yet he expects it to get at least 250k, which baffles me. The hardcore people who are his fans make up about 1% of the entire playerbase of all MMOG's out there. His attitude is one of someone who HAS NOT RESEARCHED THE AUDIENCE.

I don't remember research being a part of "The Vision".

It's been a while since I read the FAQ. The first time through nearly made me ill because it's not a gamestyle I consider fun or healthy, and I did it for a very short stint in EQ.  (Losing one's job over a Video game tends to wake you the fuck up.) Reading VS's FAQ he flat out says "Time in-game WILL matter." The game is being designed so that you must sink time into it to be uber.  Rare drops on rare spawns, 12 hour corpse runs, days of camping for a single quest mob. It'll all be there because that's what makes a good game to them.

It's spelled-out pretty clearly that no leg-up willl be given for the folks who 'aren't willing to put in the time.' AKA the casuals and the time-starved folks with kids, jobs, lives and homes they don't feel like abandoning for a few digital bits. It's digital crack being sold to addicts.  Maybe he can sleep well at night and look at himself in the mirror in the morning, but I couldn't, and it's not a lifestyle I want to go back to.

Games are entertainment, not a lifestyle to me.  If you want them to be your lifestlye, yeah, VS will be a great game for you.  I'd rather hold on to reality because I don't need some place to escape anymore, which is all catassing and turning a game into your life is about anyway.  With that in mind, Onyxia being 'just a puzzle' is fineto me. It's entertaining, and proving the size of my e-peen to a bunch of other digital addicts in a game that will be gone in 10 or so years leavnig me with nothing isn't my idea of an admirable goal in life.

^^^^^^^^

What he said.

"sometimes it's fun to be the victim"
_{(EQ CS rep in response to player complaints, circa Halloween event 2000, when Faydedar appeared in the Lake of Ill Omen and proceeded to rape all the newbies until the level 60 Ubers came along and got to have fun killing the Dragon)}

Was that Abashi or Absor? Verant or SoE? During Brad or post-Brad? I forget.


Also, what the guy 2 posts up said...


edit - wait, 2000.. that's gotta be during Brad's reign..

Merusk, it's also easier to develop.  Content < Time.  It's easier to build a game where everything is harder/longer, since it saves you from putting out better design and content.

It was, and the Mouthpiece of Sauron that said it was the King Cockgobbler Abashi.

The real question is will MS be happy with 1/5th the market share of WoW, or will it be a repeat of the the whole Verant->SOE thing?

I doubt Microsoft wants to limit the potential customers such as Brad is describing.

IIRC, Brad has claimed that MS is very hands-off at the moment - thing is, he emphasises the 'hands-off' where he should be emphasising the 'at the moment'.

I won't play this.  I should not have to elaborate beyond saying that I have a full time corporate-type job, commute two hours a day, have a nongaming wife, and a sixteen-month-old boy.  There's your Fear raid right there.  One solid year of not sleeping -- because you can't take a break from having a child -- broke me of ever thinking I could enjoy something like EQ again.  Hell, I can't sneak upstairs to get a few minutes of GuildWars in without interruption.  I don't have a lifestyle which is conducive to unplanned multi-hour ass-sitting sessions anymore.  The planned ones are fucking hard, too.  I'm just not that guy anymore.

However, I don't hope that Brad's game tanks.  I'd just be acting out of bitterness and anger, and I have other things to occupy my mind besides McQuaid's fate.  The only way it will affect me is by sucking catasses out of whatever game I happen to be playing.  More power to him.  I even hope he names one of the major cities Svtfosorcim and holds back a race of furries for years.

I also won't make fun of anyone here who wants to play this.  It should be obvious to any of you exactly what you are getting into, however, so if you get all engorged "down there" thinking about this game and later come back to whine about it... I'll point and laugh.  Because that's just the kinda guy I am.

That's true.

The point is that they want their e-peen to be POPULAR. They will never accept to play a catass-only game where they cannot show the e-peen to EVERYONE.

In order to really aim at this target audience the game must be mainstream AND the e-peen must be exclusive. That what was happening in EQ.

If Brad really aims for the exteme players but without being able to produce a mainstream game, he will just obtain deluded catasses.

The thing was EQ was NEVER that fun.  Once the graphics and the lack of getting ganked every 5 minutes wore off you found a completely shitty time waster based around doing the same thing 100s of times so you could then go do it somewhere else 1000s of times.  It has always been a worthless game designed for obsessive compulsives.

Vanguard looks to be continuing that shit concept. 

I don't really have to post here because many of you have expressed my own feelings so well.

But I will anyway.

Okay. Answer me this.

When you failed a Fear or Hate raid, why did you fail?

--GF

Cleric going AFK
Mage pulling out his pet despite known pathing issues
Idiot Paladin who walked where told not to and agged too many monsters

In summary: other people.  The appeal of WoW isn't the lack of risk, its the lack of ASSUMED risk, i.e. the risks you take for grouping with players X, Y and Z.  But the side effect of not having serious consequences when others screw up is that there are no serious consequences when yous crew up, meaning little risk and little challenge.

For the break ins it was:

Fear: almost always because of some dumbass going through the portal when he wasn't supposed to and running to the break in point with train on his tail instead of dying at the aggro spot.

Hate: people standing too close to the walls closest to the archway in the zone in room and pullers not paying attention to the number of mobs they aggro where some break off and take the scenic route and bring more friends along for the party (pathing was seriously screwy up there).

That's true but there are also a lot more MMO players than there were a few years ago and so while there is a lot of poaching going on the pie is only getting bigger. If it wasn't, WoW by itself would've closed down all the major NA MMOs. Though I don't see Vanguard bringing in many first-time MMO players it won't have to siphon off that many players from the competition to get close to 250K -- e.g. just making up some numbers: 100K from EQ & EQII, 50K from WoW, 50K from FFXI, and 50K from misc. other sources would get them to 250K.

Shrug, seems like he did a simple calculation:

"Can we expect to have 2 million subscribers?"  "No."  "Ok, how can we make the same money as WoW?"

"Well, let's take WoW, 2 million subscribers but they'll leave in a year" (he wishes) "that's like keeping 500k subscribers for 4 years.  So we'll do that."

I think Vanguard is going to get a whole bunch of EQ/EQ2 and ex-EQ players...for about three months, until the rose-tinted glasses come off and they are reminded how slow & tedious original 'EQ at launch' was.

Is Vangard going to be North American only?  Because all this 'You will invest time into the game' stuff - isnt that the kind of stuff that makes the Koreans and Chinese get all warm and fuzzy in the pants?

From the other board.

/ooc level 10 rogue LFG for Red Oak grp, PST

I find it amusing that BM took a few shots at Raph Koster, but I'm not surprised that Vanguard is positioning itself to be the anti-WOW, because it's highly unlikely that SG could compete with Blizzard for the casual gamer's market share.

I have mixed feelings about EQ, and about BM's opinions on why it was popular. I think it's unfair to say all success in EQ was built upon time investment. Well, obviously it was, but the game does (have not played in 2 years, so I don't know about now) require tactics and some degree of common sense to play. Idiots don't do well in EQ, unless the devote a lot of time to playing.

In the good old days before SOE turned the game in Everexpansion, it was great fun to take a single group deep into Lower Guk. To break a room and hold it took teamwork, and smart play. I guess that's what I miss about the Classic Pre SOL EQ, that need for teamwork and trust and common sense.

WOW is a blast to play, but I don't think it has that same intensity that EQ has (had). On the other hand, I don't miss exp debt, corpse runs, or the time investment. I certainly don't miss having to wake up at 5am on a Sun morning just so I could camp for J Boots, which were considered a must have item.

I don't think anyone is saying that mmorpgs shouldn't be a challenge, but that EQ was simply too Lord of the Flies extreme, and went way beyond being challenging, to simply being a stress inducing treadmill.

I have to admit though, I've been reading through that thread on the FoH board for the last few days, and my god I'm glad that those people hate WoW and think Vanguard and Brad are going to be the place for them since even though I haven't bumped into these people in-game yet (since they were all 60 before I got WoW, a month after release) I really don't want to have to deal with them ingame at all.

The only thing they leave me wondering, is if they so much hate WoW and prefer EQ1, why are they playing WoW instead of having gone back to EQ1..?

Wow that sounds almost as stupid as being able to kill yourself crafting in EQ II.

Have him debuff a tree?

I don't buy it. No developer is that stupid. NO DEVELOPER. NOT EVEN DEREK MOTHERFUCKINGSMART.

Seconded.  WTF do you need to harvest trees for in a futuristic MMOG?  Wooden bullets to shoot cybernetic vampires?

Vanguard is medieval, afaik. But I like where you're going. Don't stop.

Oh, heh, I'm confusing it with Sigil.

Sigil being the company making Vanguard. Oh man, you're confused.

Hahah, Tabula Rasa?

YES. WE HAVE A WINNAR. :roll:

Don't confuse "difficulty" with "pain in the ass for no other reason than to be a pain in the ass."  I'm a virtual-world nutjob too, but come on ... honestly.  It doesn't make a game more difficult to require you to spend inordinate amounts of time just travelling, to be able to lose your corpse, to require an hour or more of buffing up before taking on an ubermob with all the intelligence of a spastic child madly thwapping the keyboard, or any of the other things we all know and love about EQ 1.  All those things just make it a pain in the ass.

EQ 1 didn't take a huge amount of skill.  It just took a willingness to stare at a screen and a lot of time.  Lots and lots of time.  Time > all.  All those ubermobs that supposedly took "skill"?  They just took people willing to eat xp loss (time spent staring at the screen) to figure out which combination of zerglings (more time staring at the screen) were needed to win.  The goal was never to make the game require skill, since that would actually require design effort.  EQ 1 just took every task, big or small, and forced it to take so much time that you had to keep playing for years just to see any progress.

McQuaid is seriously off his rocker.  I doubt he'll even get the 250k subscriptions.  It's not that there aren't that many catasses out there, because there are.  It's that even catasses know how to optimize time.  Sure, they'll always play 8+ hours a day.  But which would Joe Catass choose:  8+ hours of going from level 1 to level 1.5, or 8+ hours of making real progress across possibly multiple characters?  Gee, tough choice there.

StGabe going to weigh in on this one or what?

Try doing a 5 man scholomance or strath run and get back to me. Especially because the vast majority of EQ dungeons were trivial if you had a half decent enchanter in your group. And once broken it became even easier. I'm also impressed that WoW has achieved one of the EQ dreams, crawl rather than camp, but no one noticed. They might well notice if they were forced back to it though.

WoW has a lot of issues, and I never dreamed blizzard could be so slow, but some of the foundation shows skill. For example WoW's travel system is excellent, without the immersion breaking instant teleportation of the PoK books but not too tedious.

That said I don't think it's really worth listening to a designer at this point, especially since he'd be bending his words to appeal to the FoH forums crowd. What actually comes out will probably be quite different. And since microsoft are using it to drive XBox++ sales I expect it to veer strongly towards a more realistic, mainstream friendly, goal as release nears.

Internet problems aside (which plague any online game), failure happened either because of human frailty or bad luck. Success was possible if you had good luck and worked well as a team. It was usually possible to overcome bad luck through skill and tactics, which separated dedicated guild raids from pickup raids and allowed players to really demonstrate some skill.

Failure on break-in meant the start of a seven-day rot timer on a chunk of XP for each corpse, plus the items on your equipped corpse (plus a smaller permanent XP loss on each corpse). A naked break-in attempt was far more difficult, so you could easily end up with multiple corpses and lots of XP loss if recovery attempts failed. If there was another planes-capable force, you might be saved in a few days by someone else's successful raid, but total failure and multiple corpse loss was possible. Success meant the chance of godlike upgrades to your belongings. For me, that kind of risk was appropriate and made the rewards more satisfying. I admit I never had to go the full seven days on my main character's equipment, but some close friends lost everything twice over, and after the initial devastation we had great fun re-equipping them. They shrugged and got on with it.

If losing is painful, and good judgement and luck lead to glory, I'd consider the game to be functioning well. It's possible to have too much pain and not enough glory, but I didn't think original EQ's challenges were that way (I'm referring to raid challenges, not the grind). I feel let down when systems are changed because of the argument that "I am a customer, I deserve to keep my winnings". As a customer you're buying the chance to spend time playing, winning and losing. No consideration should be given to those who put real-world value on their in-game wins and losses, other than to prevent them trading stuff for real world currency.

I don't support permadeath or anything like that, but I do support perma-loss of things as a worst-case penalty for failure. And these are idealistic principles, but I think that when developers start pandering to the message boards and easing the pain, you end up with dull and predictable games.

All I can do is repeat that I liked having to travel. You had to be on your toes during the travel (e.g. getting through Siren's Grotto and crossing Western Wastes), and you saw things happening in the world on your travels (e.g. passing someone who was in trouble and helping them out). Electing to travel overland while everyone else used the PoK books wasn't an option once they were implemented.

I could not disagree more. The difference between a reliable guild group and a pickup group was always significant. Split-second decisions were required to manage trains, choose whom to heal, and select what to tank. Bad decisions made by unskilled people led to failure. If that's not the influence of skill, what is it? Skill only became irrelevant when people were fighting in areas that had become trivial for their level.

I may have had a different experience because I'm from a low-population time zone (GMT+10, Sydney Australia), but I also disagree that it was a case of "just get more zerglings to win". There are only about 26 million people in developed nations in my region, so the number of EQ players during our evenings was small, the number who actually played on our server was smaller, and the number of those who wanted to play the high-end game was tiny. So we were forced to try things with 30-50 people that others had done with 80, plan everything very carefully, and either fail or only just succeed. It really showed the difference between one tactic and another, and one skilled puller/enchanter/whatever compared with some guy we found LFG.

EDIT: I should clarify that I'm not disagreeing with everything you said, just the parts I mentioned above.
Time and grinding was a problem. It was hard to keep guilds together because people moved at different paces. As I said above, the bar was eventually raised too high for me and I dropped out rather than catass. It took me nearly a year to get from 51 to 60, but that never stopped me raiding, and then I spent half a year raiding at 60. But having to be 65 with 100+ AA (I had 6 AA) just to keep raiding was too much. And the quests for keys got too hard as well. I didn't mind the keys in Velious and Kunark, but Luclin keys and then PoP flagging was a nightmare.

That said, I wasn't really bothered by progress over time until they raised the bar that high. It seemed like a change from incremental to exponential raising of the bar.

The Koreans love PvP, though, so not having that initially is going to limit the appeal of the game in Korea (assuming it's released there).

I think that was a consequence of changes in their player base more than anything.  Dec-2000 to Dex-2001 saw Velious, Luclin, and DAoC come out, each of which causing EQ to lose a bunch of the less hardcore players.  As the EQ player base become more and more hardcore, the expansions had to become more hardcore to keep up. Ditto DAoC from ToA onwards it seems. 

Perhaps its a natural consequence of a maturing server in any MMO?

I poked around a bit and found some more info about crafting here:

http://www.thesafehouse.org/viewtopic.php?t=20087
http://www.thesafehouse.org/viewtopic.php?t=20090

and here:

http://www.vanguardsoh.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=13892

The SafeHouse ones are more interesting since they explain the "spheres" concept and examples of crafting and resource gathering gameplay. Basically with crafting Sigil is trying to do what SOE could not with EQ II which is make crafting its own standalone "career" path with its own gameplay style. There's also a "Diplomacy" sphere and Brad being Brad is making all three spheres (Adventurering, Crafting, Diplomacy) interdependent with each other -- in other words it's:

The Vision³

No, it's a deliberate choice.

It always begins with the first expansion. Do the devs release more content for the casuals, or do they release new content for those players who are already maxed out and bored. Sometimes you can do both, such as with Kunark, but with each expansion the gradual shift is towards keeping the hardcore power gamers happy, and that means content that becomes increasingly out of reach for casual players.

Until the gap becomes so huge that casuals simply stop buying expansions.

Then the devlopers have to throw in some sort of must have feature, so the casuals will have a reason to buy the expansion anyway.

POP is a perfect example of this.

That's why I have more time for the Sigil crew than most here. They were responsible for EQ1, Kunark and Velious. They were partially responsible for Luclin, but they were all gone before PoP, the expansion that ended EQ for me.

That's weird, because before I played EQ I had been a SubSpace (http://beginners.subspace.net) addict since it was a one-zone alpha project in 1996. SubSpace was by Jeff Petersen and Rod Humble, and I still consider it one of the best games ever made. The Executive Producer/Director of Development of PoP was Rod Humble, while Jeff Petersen did some of the programming work.

I will put my hatred for EQ1 in a box, because that just sold me on the game. Must be tried at least for the first month.

Note that there are (in effect) four spheres, as crafting and resource gathering seemed to be separate careers.

Btw, they recently fled from EQ and are now working at Maxis.

While I have been quick to criticize EQ1 I have to admit that I was surprised to hear about Diplomacy, perception, etc. I honestly didn't think they (Sigil) had it in them. That is to say, I knew they had the talent, but doubted their desire to make something other than EQ2.

I wonder if I can tolerate the grind long enough to get to the good bits, but then I'm reminded that to Brad and co. the grind is the good bit, so I'm still on the fence.

I am looking forward to VG because, other than WoW there has been one major MMOG that actually had environments that appealed to me.  Too many games have randomly generated/modular shit environments (SWG, AC, CoH, LDoN etc) and the rest just have unimaginative handcrafted areas for the most part with little appeal for me (Most post-Luclin EQ expansions, DAOC, etc).  Now, just about every game has an area or two that stand out, but I remember a ton of EQ zones because they were impressive.  Almost all of them felt lovingly and skillfully handcrafted, and that goes a long way with me.  If McQ & Co can make a world like that again, it will be worth a long, long look from me.

Mechanics-wise, I think there is a mean to be found between EQ1 and WoW.  WoW was having some content issues just a few months in.  Let's be honest here.  If you like this style of game, you are going to
A: run out of shit to do very, very fast
B: have timesinks
C: get shitty, modular, randomly-generated and/or extremely buggy, unfinished content
D: pay $100+ a month to play

You can't have "dense" content in a MMOG, it's just not going to happen.  You need to water that steak down into a stew or your game is over in 2 weeks. 

Frankly, WoW could have stood to have group-oriented content and *some* downtime from the beginning.  Instead, they actively penalize their players for grouping for most of their lives (until they get to the "oh shit we don't have nearly enough content, here's UBRS and MC to farm 78,000 times phase"), and don't allow the groups that do form and significant time to chat, and then are shocked that their community ranks somewhere between "non-existent" and "junior high school bathroom." 

Now, do I have worries about VG?  Fuck yeah I have worries.  I worry that McQ will go overboard with the tedium because I fear the "tedium and hard mean the same thing" crowd has his ear at timies.  For example, travel.  I like travelling a long way the first couple times I go somewhere.  I do think it makes the world seem more real, and learning the world is part of its challenge.  But the 900th time is not so fun.  I worry that McQ doesn't know how to make great encounters.  Say what you want about post-Velious/Luclin EQ, the bosses got a *LOT* more interesting and a *LOT* harder after McQ left.  From original EQ until PoP, you had larger bags of hit points to hit and longer complete heal chains to manage and...well, that's about it.  Boring as fuck, hit autoattack and make dinner fights.  Recent EQ bosses have been much more imaginative, and demand a much higher level of skill from the players.  WoW fights are generally much better and much harder as well.  I worry that the tradeskill and diplomacy system will just be craptacular snorefests like EQII's trading system.   Those are just a few, I have a lot more.

But I am looking forward to the game.  _{will suck cock for beta invite}  McQuaid and Koster were the dominant forces in pre-WoW western MMOs.  They made the two games that actually mattered, and the only two that will be long remembered.  Koster got his second-gen shot and struck out with SWG.  McQ might do the same, but he might make something special.  We'll see.

Once again, let me chime in. Arguably, we're still in first gen. Guild Wars might be second gen, but then most of it's mechanics are still completely first gen. I don't think second gen will exist until skill with twitch or strategy overtakes the hotkey method of attack. Cuz right now everything feels like...Everquest MajorMud TeleArena AD&D, but slower and less imaginative.

If by penalize you mean they don't assfuck you for not being in a group 24/7, I guess you have a point.  Then again, this mechanic already exists in quite a few mmorpg's, and we see how well they're doing.

And WoW's populace consists of jacked up fucktards?  Hi, welcome to every mmorpg I've ever played.  Putting a million mmorpg players in any game is going to give it a rather large element of douchebaggery; you can't blame WoW's endgame as the cause.  The more people you throw in the mix, the higher the signal-to-noise is going to get.

Note to self: learn to type complete thoughts.

In defense of the original Verant team, they didn't know any better back at the beginning as in the story that it never occurred to them that more than one group would attempt to kill one of the uber mobs at the same time -- i.e raiding was a totally foreign concept at the beginning of EQ. And then they didn't plan properly for stat/item inflation and so you have all the brokenness that is Complete Heal. With Velious I think they were probably too busy putting together the complicated storyline/quest structure in that expansion to try and make significant changes to the end game gameplay though they did tinker around with some of the other mechanics like nerfing Enchanter Mez (another thing they underestimated the uberness of) and Monk FD pulling in raid encounters (though the monkeys compenstated by chain pulling or exploiting gameplay loopholes like the Z-axis).

Good observation. I think thats part of the success of WoW: Everybody can get to 60, but to successfully raid the high-level content you need to be good at playing the game and organizing, its not just time.

Its a similar relation between pks ( griefers ) and victims: No fun being wolf with no sheep around, just as its no fun being uber if nobody is below you. 

Words fucking fail me.

EDIT:


But that's the thing about EQ1. IT WASN'T CHALLENGING. I say that, because for every challenge I ever faced, there was nothing I couldn't overcome given enough patience and/or people. If I was willing to fuck it up a billion times, I knew that on time # billion and one, I'd probably succeed. That's not challenging, that's frustrating. Challenging means that I have to come up with something inventive, something clever or just be really good to win, and I don't feel that at all about EQ (or really most PVE).

Not to mention that the real challenge wasn't even the patience, but the ability or willingness to suffer through the pain of defeats. You had to be willing to lose whole levels just to get things done, and it wasn't because it was challenging, it's because it was punishing. The causes for fuckups in Fear and Hate, on Dragon raids, had to do with either people's idiocy (or their inability to act like complete robots and execute every command letter and time perfect) or with bugs, such as Hate pathing. Again, those aren't challenging, they are frustrating.

No, my friend. That was a combination of your sword being too weak and your supplemental wood-cutting skill not being up to snuff. Words simply had no effect on the tree, which you should have known before trying to insult it into kindling.

Saying that they didn't properly learn the lessons of/really improve upon Diku before stealing the gameplay isn't much of a defense.  I remember doing things in Hidden Worlds that I was doing in EQ six years later.

But, but, but.. EQ isn't based on DIKU, Verant/SOE signed an Affadavit and everything! How can they learn the lessons of something they never even looked at?!

(Yes, I know that was only the codebase. Stop taking things so seriously.)

El Gallo, you're mellowing man. You get older or something?  :wink:

 I seriously believe that the  "tedium and hard mean the same thing" crowd not only has his ear, I believe he's still a part of it.  Perhaps I'm wrong, after all they did include that nifty Tooth thing in Velious for travel.  That was a nice touch that kept the world fairly large without the stupidity of travel time that was Kunark.  However, they DID do Kunark in the first place and only did Velious that way after MANY folks bitched about the travel times. 

Like I said, I expect VS to be a great game for people willing to sink a TON of time into it on a large-hour-chunk basis.  Everything I've read from McQ has indicated this is their intent, and they want to 'reward' the people who spend lots of time in the world significantly.  In addition to being just plain bad game design, that's just stupid business (hello server/ bandwith/ CS loads). But there's folks who want a game like that, and will pay the $20 or more to play it.  Great for them, I'll be over here having my life.

I spend a lot of money on games. Fairly wrecklessly. I will not spend $20 a month on a single MMOG unless that MMOG happens to be Soul Caliber online and has at least 8 fighting styles, 7 hojillion weapons, and completely customizable characters.

Reading this thread and the FoH thread just make me sad. Shit has just gone so far downhill.

http://notsecret.spleens.net/minerfarm.html

That is what we need again. Not EQ. Virtual worlds my ass, nothing even compares to UO.

Nor will I.  But $15 was supposedly also the "I will not cross" line for a number of other folks, and now it's the 'standard' price.  $15 a month debuted with SWG almost 2 years ago.  VS isn't going to be out this year, and likely not the early part of next year.  By then there will have been another price hike, (Perhaps to $17 or $18 a month.)  So yeah, since VS is a 'premier' game, I expect a 'premier' price of $20 or more attached to it.  Ridiculous, yes, but there's folks that will eat it up.

I am not positive how many they will get with their aims but I will note that my eq2 guild just got back 3 members from wow that each got at least 2 characters to 60 and grew bored of it. Getting people to stick with your game for 5 years like eq1 did may not be doable anymore but at the rate people blow through content in games like WoW they are going to have some serious turnover and there is no real way to prevent it.


kaid

It's also worth noting that I've met a number of other people who got bored with WoW and returned to UO.

Fixed that for you.

You had a typo.

But but but...they've just invented an entirely new class here; the Anti-Druid!  Instead of these elvish pansy tree hugging and frolicing in the glades, it's debuff trees and trample flowers underfoot for great justice!  Brilliant!

On a more serious note, I'd like to see more of what appears to be the only new gameplay stab by Brad and Co; the diplomacy sphere.  Of course, only being able to engage in politics with NPC sounds rather underwhelming, but being able to task invisible npc minions to fulfill your goals sounds different enough to be worth an eyeball.  Them throwing the term "RTS like" control is a red flag however.

Well, we shall see.  Why do I expect "14 lvl Dip LFG to make a peace treaty run to Freeport....again"?

Xilren

It's true.  I suspect WoW is hurting EQ worse than it is UO, just because anyone capable of being entertained by a levelfest with shinier graphics already left UO years ago.

StGabe going to weigh in on this one or what?

Naw.  Most on this board have adequately demonstrated that they aren't really interested in outside opinions or the notion that game designers might design games for other playstyles (and only acquire audiences of a few thousand other people, oh noes).  So why bother?  I'd just get called a catass (even though I've been so busy with work and having a life that I haven't logged into any online game in a month now).

I do find humor in the bits where this forum intimated as being representative of hardcore gamers (after having chased off, out-yelled, and otherwise pissed off anyone who has a different opinion as to what is fun hardcore gameplay).

Gabe.

Whoa there dickhead, you were chased off for being a total fanboi and for not using the fucking quote function. Your opinion would have been welcomed if it weren't for those two little bits there, believe it or not. Yes, that's right, it had more to do with HOW you posted rather than WHAT you posted. I'd touch on the other shit you said, but it's not raging douchebag week.

Maybe he has a mullet.

Only, this designer is designing for the SAME playstyle he already designed one game for. And if he only acquires an audience of a few thousand, the game will tank, because he's obviously gearing it to support 250k-500k users. But I'm sure you weren't being sarcastic or anything.

There are plenty of playstyles out there, many of which don't jibe with my playstyle or the majority of this board. However, most of the games out there are designed for ONE playstyle, the hardcore catass, and this game seems to be designed for that playstyle too. The rest of us who do not play in that style would like a game designed for us. While there have been some strides made towards that style, such as WoW and Guild Wars, neither have really embraced our playstyle.

When the designer of the first, real uber-hardcore-catass game that made us all hate camping, timesinks and grinding treadmill play decides he wants to design another game, with "new gameplay" from his previous game, yet determines that all the shit that was bad about his first game is stuff he wants to amp up in his new game, we will deride him. It's up to him to prove us wrong.

The only smell test I have to predict Vanguard's potential success is this:

Of the 30 or so people I met in EQ1 and am still in gaming contact with, not a single one is talking about Vanguard. These are people I "saw" every night in EQ1 for 2 years. Some of these people played on the Rallos Zek server from 1999-2001, a server where not only could the PvE content fuck you over, but the other players could as well. Some play CoH, some play WoW, most play EQ2. Some even tried Planetside. We talk about Auto Assault. We talk about CoV. We talk about DDO and LotR Online. We never talk about Vanguard. Never. Same for Tabula Rasa, actually.

If 30 people with their wallets firmly in the genre since 1999 are not interested in a game due out this fall, how big can the potential US customer base really be?

We only chase off the gamers with thin skins.  Maybe you got chased off because you can't handle one or more dissenting opinions?

If you can't handle being called a crotchpheasant once in a while, this place ain't for you.  I really just wanted to use crotchpheasant in a sentence again.

EDIT:  Woohoo just noticed my new title-isciousness!

I "got chased off" because, after so much righteous indignation, I no longer give a shit.  That's what half the posts on MMO's here are.  OMG, they aren't building a game just for me, those bastards!

It's not about having a thick skin.  I do.  As evidenced by just how impersonally I took prior threads.  It's about giving a shit.  I once had a girlfriend who was very religious.  And I got to sit down for a while and talk to her pastor about my inability to grok the greatness of Jesus.  And after a while it became apparent that this whole guy's worldview revolved around biblical quotes and there was no way I could change that.  So I just shook his hand, thanked him for his time, and left.  That's what I ended up doing here.  Tohe"game world" views here (for most)  revolve around the idea that anything that isn't your personal playstyle must be bad and that any game designer that dares to build a game that isn't your personal playstyle is an asshole (the latter part is the worst of this).  As though no one should dare build a game without this forum's personal consent.

It's one thing to say: I'm not looking forward to Vanguard because it's not the sort of gaming I'm interested in.  Honestly, I'm not that excited about it myself.  It's quite another to spend literally pages and pages (in thread, after thread, after thread), yelling and screaming about what an asshole this McQuaid guy is and what catasses all those EQ1-style players are . . .

. . . just because they like to play a different game than you.

That's just righteous indignation.  And tediously repetitive at that.

Gabe.

Look deeper and you'll notice that the reason we bitch about catasses is because they have a way of ruining the games we do play and are interested in.

These forums have a lot of good, and a lot of crap. The key is to skim or ignore the crap. If half the posts are crap just ignore them.

I don't hate Brad McQuaid or anything like that. I don't really even know much about EQ. Vanguard sounds like a game I won't like. The end.

I don't think it's right to categorize these forums as being for hardcore gamers. They are for people who like to think and talk about games. There is a big difference. I do think it's interesting to talk about the intended target of the game and how time has changed it's prospects. There is a huge huge difference between the time when EQ1 came out and now. When EQ1 came out the only other game in town was UO, which was most famous for the lawsuits against it.

Catasses ruined your gameplay?

How?

Because they dare to attract a market?  Should I say that sports gamers or driver gamers ruin my gameplay because they take away from game development that could go into strategy and puzzle titles?

Because they dare to play the game they are interested and you, while playing that game, can't achieve as much?  Isn't that just your fault for actually giving a shit?

The real problem is that a game like EQ1 comes on the market and is fun for a while, or for a certain subset of the gamer population.  And then when it is no longer interesting for a person or when a person isn't in the subset of gamers that likes it, they go the extra step of suddenly blaming the game company for catering to those other 500k players and not themselves.  As though any game on the market has an obligation to appeal directly to you and if it doesn't, the designer is an asshole.

For what it's worth I agree that the market has changed significantly since EQ1 and I think Brad may need to learn that lesson.  However I would agree with Brad that there are a lot of players who did enjoy the experience of EQ1 early days and would like something that harkens to that.  I would go further to say that there is still a lot of room to innovate from there in different directions than those that been taken by WoW, et al.  We have games exploring the casual gamer space in WoW's wake.  Lots of them.  I myself think that means designers have even more reason to go the other way and explore the other ways to go post-EQ1.  I myself see the genre going downhill recently with respect to the gameplay that I enjoy -- take that as you will.  I'm not alone.  There is a market and I hope people try to continue selling to it.  McQuaid is trying to sell to a different market than WoW and I will wait for more than mere vagaries like this to actually judge whether this includes myself or not.

Gabe.

Generally speaking, the apperance in most recent releases is the catasses tend to drive the design decisions once a game gets through any significant portion of live.  "Improving" a game by designing for the top 20% seems to rub people who aren't in that top slice the wrong way.  Now, I understand from a business standpoint of identifying your most valuable customers and focuing on them, but in terms of an mmorpg, catasses do not appear to me to be those customers.  Since everyone pays the same rate, why wouldn't you want to appeal to the broadest audience possible with your hooks rather than focusing on a niche of a niche (people with 8 hours a day and 2 computers)?

People with the most disposable time will blow through your game content in short order no matter what you do, thus upping the time requirements needed to accomplish anything at the "high end" (or end game, or whatever you want to call it) is viewed by people without 8 hours a day of unallocated time as rather...irritating.  This trend did seem to originate with EQ being the first graphical mmorpg most played; so most of us are extra jaded when it comes to Brad and Co.  The stories of original EQ's foibles and fuckups are the stuff of legends now.  Brad busted many an online cherry, so it's little wonder he stirs some emotion now that he's back in picture like that old girlfriend who gave you clap.

As to the cursing, name calling and general asshattery you see on this site constantly...what were you expecting, the reasoned ivory tower discussion at Terra Nova perhaps?  Calling someone who made a questionable decision a crotchpheasant has it's own entertainment that simply saying "I disagree with what you said" lacks...unless you're Gbob.  if it bothers you, you really are thin skinned in terms of tone.  Lots of good stuff here; and larger amounts of bullshit.  Welcome to the intraweb and all...

Xilren

CATASS: "describing the nature to be so deeply involved in something that requires so much time, you allow your real life to degenerate around you." (http://www.anyuzer.com/archives/110.php)
The corollary of which should also be "forcing the in-game life of other players to degenerate in order to compensate for the real-life effect of the game."  

I'm sure others will describe this better, but for me the problems are basically two-fold, but really the same:

1) designers building games that demand and enable obsessive compulsiveness and other pathologies for success.  
Not every game may have an end-game, but every game has a goal(s) and a prestige to achieve (e.g. new class, new item, new land etc) and achieving success in every MMO == time.  I think it's genuinely very unhealthy to continue building games and increasing the difficulties in existing games by demanding more time online as a differentiator of success between players.  I really do.  It's unfair, it's really unhealthy and it's a bad business model.  People subscribe monthly -- they don't need to be in-game every day of that month.  There should be more imagination and critical thought given for how people can achieve prestige, success and narrative goal(s) than making them spend more time than someone else in the world.  The driver behind time as the big throttle in every game are catasses who are the early achievers and either skew the game economy or lower the prestige of an achievement by their self-promotion or complaints with the ease they could "finish the game".  They are the ones who "finish" the content first, who complain or champion the ease of their success. In short, catasses are the people who I think are the most vocal to complain about a game's content or ruleset that inevitably cause designers to make things more tough == longer.  Not more interesting, not more rich, or sandboxy/flexible/innovative.  They are the cocksuckers that require designers to put a dragon in every room because the dungeon otherwise was solo'able by them.  Fucking over the rest of game community in the process.

2) designers changing existing games to respond to catasses
This almost always involve new constraints (time and rule changes), because catasses have 'sploited or taken a poor gaming behavior to the nth extreme (camping, load jacking, whatever).  They are the people who solo dungeons and complain about it, but they're likewise the people who cap out professions, skills, or content generating part of the game that cause designers to lower DPS or change skills or raise mob levels or whatever to lower the rate at which other players can advance.  Yes it's time again, but it's also designers changing core rules around combat or communication or movement to slow the rate at which players can access content or just attempt a goal or class (e.g. Jedi Padawan instead of Jedi Knight), etc.  It's because catasses have the uber weapons, or the 'spoilted moves or the ultimate class template in PvP that skews a game mechanic that forces designers to nerf or introduce new content to lessen all players in their abilities.  This is because Catass are OUTLIERS in a game community.  They are the forum whores and the people who run and subscribe spoiler and sploiter sites.  They are constantly seeking attention in-game and on-forum for their unique situation.  But because games are designed around time and levels the only way it seems designers can respond to poor behaviors and the game imbalancing effect of catasses is to lower everyone.  They don't have the ability to deal with those players as outliers.

This is is how catasses have ruined my gameplay. 

Try the top 1% and you'll have a more accurate view of the catasses. The other 19% are just hardcore players (meaning they have the play every day mentality, they just may not have the time or addiction).

I'll go through EQ1 and show how catasses ruined my gameplay.

Through the first year of EQ1, I played a decent amount (maybe 15-20 hours a week or less), and got to about level 20. By the end of that year, I was running a guild that would reach about 100 members by the time I left 1 1/2 years later. Now, had I just played by myself mostly or just in pickup groups, I'd probably never have run into the situations that the catasses caused. But I didn't. I played with people, and I led a large group of people and these people expected to do things in the game that others did, like kill dragons. They expected to be able to experience any of the content they wanted to, because they paid the same amount as anyone else.

And that might have worked, had it not been for the catassers.

You know, the guys who made it to 40-50 in a month and realized there wasn't anything else to do except kill a dragon. So they did. And they did it a lot quicker than the designers of the game intended them to be able to do it. And the designers went, "OH SHIT! They will be bored and quit the game, and yell on the web and make others quit the game." And that happened, except they didn't quit. Or if they did, it wasn't in big enough numbers to mean shit. They were addicted, after all.

So the designers made the dragons harder. Or put obstacles to being allowed to get there, maybe more ice giants or fire giants. And it was good enough. Unless you happened to want to see the dragon without camping 3 bazillion foozles to do so.

So then the designers released the PLANES. The Plane of Fear was opened, and my wife and I were online the night it happened. She delighted in making a level 1 ogre and running it suicide like into the Plane of Fear, JUST TO SEE THE ZONE. Because it was cool-looking. And you know what happened?

The catasses complained. They petitioned GM's and screamed to the heavens. "The little level 1's will ninja-loot our stuff" (valid concern over a shittily designed looting system), "they will get our raid killed" (valid concern over shitty pathing), "they didn't EARN passage to the Planes." Now that last complaint is total horseshit, of course, because let me tell you, running a fucking ogre through Nek Forest through the gauntlet of monsters and fucking guards is very hard. It took skill. But that wasn't what they meant. By earning it, they meant putting in just as much time as they did, whether or not you had a life. So the designer changed it, allowing only level 46 and up people from entering the zone. That immediately put a carrot on a stick to the rest of the populace. It said, "If you aren't this tall, you cannot ride this ride."

Yeah, fuck you too. I don't play role-playing games to get treated like I'm in kindergarden just because I like to sleep instead of being up til 2 in the morning camping idiotic AI.

And as the design of EQ1 went on, every time a challenge was found and defeated by the uber catasses, it was changed to be HARDER, to give those whiny fucksticks more of a challenge, thus dangling the carrot ever farther from people like myself and most of my guild who didn't spend 8 hours on the game every single night. But since we couldn't really opt out of doing that content (as a guild leader, I certainly couldn't just tell my guild "We can't do these type of encounters" because part of the reason you have a guild is to be able to do things greater than you could do alone). And as Kunark got released, the new content outside of raids and other catasstastic activities was made harder to compensate for the uber catasses who had all the best gear. That made leveling to get that first carrot (the dragons) EVEN HARDER, all to cater to a playstyle that 1% of the population actually followed.

As for the profanity, as for calling developers pigfuckers, douchebags and crotchpheasants, look up the word hyperbole. It's entertaining. It entertains me. If you are not a fan of such interweb hyperbole, might I suggest you don't read the site?

You want him on this board or not?  Make up your minds.

Eh, doesn't matter, sounds like he's gone anyway.

Catassers aren't a market, they are resource hogs (playing more than design estimates), they are selfish (seeing the game only from their p.o.v.), and they somehow manage to make developers dance to their flute, as others have pointed out, by being very vocal about how they want the game to change to make them spend even more of their miserable lives in it. Or make other players suffer the same time consumption they did, otherwise they might get envious that there are people out there with actual lives.


Because they dare make the developers turn the game non-catassers started to play into something only fitting their playstyle.


Nice summary of why catassers (ie. the complainers) suck. So, do you suddenly agree with us?

Who cares?  While I appreciate different viewpoints, I don't want to have to put up with some whiney, crotchsparrow that can't deal with a community that isn't all hugs, flowers and teddy bears and won't use the tools given to him for discussing issues on this board.

If you want to be a coddled, unique snowflake then there are boards out there for you.  Find them, and go tell Geldon "hi" while you're at it.

I didn't ask for him to come here.  :-D But if he's going to post, being a dick about the quote function isn't going to make him any friends here. Nor can he expect to have everyone agree with him, or everyone not to say things like "Smedley is a pigfucker" then he is deluded. There are other sites out there for that.

When you read on a site, and then post, you better be ready to deal with the site's eccentrities. Some sites won't allow cussing. Some will be all happy luvy-duvy. If he read this site and thought that, he was wrong.

Fair enough.

You and Haemish keep mentioning the quote function.  What jumped out at me was the commentaries he made about the quality of the site, I didn't even pay attention to this quote function you keep mentioning.  His is the typical "I quit" posts with reasons why, yours is the typical reaction when something hits close to home.

I don't see many reds posting anymore; there used to be quite a few on the old Waterthread, and it's what attracted me to these boards.  My board-browsing pastime - ruined.

This thread is so anti-catass it brings a tear to my eye. Its... beautiful.

Vanguard is aimed at a niche no one in the west is really going for at the moment and im sure there's a market out there for it.  There's more to masochism than whips and chains, Brad's just stumbled on to the punish-yourself-by-replacing-life-with-a-MMOG crowd. I'm sure there's even a subset of catasses who are so hardcore they move to Korea and live in Bangs playing MMOGs with infinite XP curves.

His comments about the quality of the site are highly subjective, and in contradiction to the amount of other posters we have on the site who actually like the way it is. He doesn't have to read the site. No one does. I'm going to assume if they read the site enough to post, and not post that they hate the way the site is run, they like the way we do things around here. I happen to be proud of the uncensored honesty with which we discuss things here.

As for red names not posting anymore, most people, me included, don't like to post in places where they feel criticized. And we criticize devs. Again, that whole honesty thing. When a dev does something right, I'll applaud it. When they do something so obviously wrongheaded that I have less trouble imagining the quote came from an ignorant savage in the Congo than a seasoned game developer with access to market data I don't have, I will say so.

If the devs can't handle that, and quite obviously some of them can't, they can fuck off right back to the fanbois-infested sycophant havens that are their official boards. This is why no matter what I think of Raph or Lum or MahrinSkel or Calandryll's work, I respect them. They can take it when half the posters in a thread call them flaming cockmonkeys, without resorting to starting pages long flame threads a la The Good Dr. Smart. I have even less respect for the devs who read us, but don't have the courage to post because they don't want to deal with the bullshit.

Nice spew of catass angst.  Are we over it now?  Seriously.

Catasses exist.  People who want the sorts of challenging, epic games that tend to attract catasses exist.  Games that involve catassery will exist.

Do not play them if you don't want to.  I have no interest in sports games.  You know what?  I simply do not play them.  And I somehow manage to do this without developing a huge complex about the game developers that are "wasting money" on these projects or yelling at all sports video game enthusiasts.

As far as hyperbole it threatens to become the sole content of this site.  And the zeal behind it threatens to prevent any interesting discussion from taking place as any opinions representing a minority opinion will simply be silenced before it can take root and have a say.

I am myself a red name fellow of sorts and I too came here initially because of other red names and an interest in discussing game stuff with colleagues and other mature individuals.  But the red name posts themselves seem increasingly rare or coy.  Hmm.  Really that surprising on a forum whose hyperbole regularly includes crucifying developers for daring to not fulfill every single wish of every individual here?

Gabe.

Now who is dealing in hyperbole?  :-D


I don't play games I have no interest in. But that doesn't mean I can't talk about them, or shouldn't talk about them. I imagine McQuaid gets a keen kick out of all the discussion on his currently vapor game, because it keeps it in people's minds. Viral marketing, hype marketing, whatever you want to call it. Yes, we are part of the hype machine too.

We talk about things we are passionate about, in a passionate manner. Developers should want passionate players.

Passion is great.

But it just gets in the way of having interesting conversations or making good arguments.  Appeal to emotions is behind most of the most bullshit arguments and political views we have these days.  Just look at your post.  Designers that don't have the "courage" to post here?  You're almost co-opting neocon vocab now (those "cowardly" terrorsts that strap bombs on themselves and blow themselves up to make a point).  More like they don't have any reason to post on a forum that is nothing but "hyperbole".

I love discussing religion, for example.  So I go and sit in coffeeshops with folks of different religious and philosophical groundings and have nice measured conversations.  And I actually learn from that.  Now of course I could go out to where a bunch of militant pro-lifers are and start yelling at them about their views and have them yell back at me.  And that might even be fun in a certain sort of way.  It would certainly be passionate.

But I wouldn't learn jack that I didn't already know.  I wouldn't be having a discussion.  Whatever I told them it would basically translate to them as, "you're an asshole" and whatever they told me would basically translate into "you're going to hell".  And that's just what a lot of the discussions are on here.  "You're a catass."  "You're an asshat."  Whatever.

Whenever I read a flame about something I've worked on, I console myself that if they didn't care, they wouldn't bother to flame. It keeps me warm at night.

That being said there has been a significant nasty undercurrent here of late about how all game developers are raging douchebags who can't do anything right because they won't patronize our every whim. (Oh wait, not all - you guys like Guild Wars this week, I think. I'll check back next week.)  I'm used to it, because I've been reading MMG boards and specifically ranty MMG boards ever since I ran one. A lot of folks aren't, and get turned off by "TEH HATR3D". If you're cool with that, cool. But if you really are going to heap abuse on anyone who dares to say they actually like a game that the Groupthink has decreed is Badthought, then, well, enjoy one-sided conversations.

More on topic. You guys say you want originality in game design, and creative honesty. Well, McQuaid's being honest. He doesn't like the direction away from achiver-oriented gameplay we're seeing, and he wants to make a game he wants to play. (Remember, EQ was based in large part on a text MUD that McQuaid was a huge fan of.) If you don't like it, OK. But he's being original and he's being honest about the game he wants to make. Unoriginality would be making
"World of Vanguard".

And as for the rampaging hate; if you don't like MMGs don't play em. If you don't like the one I work on don't pay for em. That is, by far, the best way to reigster your "vote". Right now the marketplace is voting for World of Warcraft in huge impossible-to-ignore numbers. If you disagree with that, vote with your dollars on where you think the market should go. That's somewhat more effective -- and infinitely more adult -- than replying to this post with "you suck, romans in space, hurr hurr hurr".

Take a look through all the sections of the site. Scroll back through the past posts. There have been TONS of posts with reasoned debate, ideas, suggestions, critiques, etc. Haemish has written dozens of front page articles between here and Waterthread with good information (interspersed with entertaining hyperbole). Check out posts from people like Margalis or Xliren's Twin (who both happened to write some interesting posts recently- most people here contribute a nugget now and again). The content is here if you bother to look for it.

This particular thread is about one particular game from one particular designer that happens to strike a nerve with the majority of the users here (or at least the majority of the vocal posters). There isn't even a beta version of the game out to discuss, so we are left with A) the track record of the people involved, and B) the WORDS OF THE PEOPLE INVOLVED. Those who disagree with the design being ventured have gone on record (with varying degrees of passion or hyperbole), as have those who agree.

Feel free to join in the discussion here and elsewhere- that is what the site is all about. Or just continue to complain about HOW the other posters are conveying their opinions...eventually everyone will just assume you are trolling to get reactions and ignore you.

Edit- Lum snuck in while I was composing.

Keep in mind we're disputing that there's 250K catasses out there willing to pay for Brad's game. I don't question his right to make the game or the Vision he has. I question whether the Vision is valid anymore with all the other options out there.

I also question whether his corporate masters will buy into his Vision when they want WoW numbers.

I don't disagree that it's a valid question (that model has no appeal for me personally, for example), but Microsoft isn't known for not doing competitive research.

Didn't they get their fill of not dominating the world of MMOs with Asheron's Call?

Honestly, I myself am glad AC didn't get EQ numbers.  I would have had an even more frastrating/less fun time with it had there been even more assholes populating Dereth.  I could barely stand Eastham being overrun by the french as it was.

Nobody is saying they dont want Gabe around, its not really much fun to rip into yet another EQ clone if nobody ever defends them.

The fact is that MMOG gamers esp the hardcore kind that congregate to msg boards to discuss MMOG's are pretty fucking sick of half-baked bad games based around what they see as horrible misconceptions of the notion of fun.  It was tolerable when there wasn't a MMOG being released every 4 months but now not so goddamn much.

Catass' are a niche, and perhaps people who dont enjoy any type of grinding are as well.  I tried to point out awhile back in the Developer's forum that I felt EvE Online should be an utopia due to there being no actual exp and a general lack of grind altogether due to it not being so much work to kit out a ship with top of the line gear and many paths to get that cash together along with a truly massive world tons of freedom and no instancing.  But unfortunately due to some admittedly severe shortcommings in the game's fun level I never got my point that perhaps the linear grind item+1 from foozle+1 is all my tired brain can handle after a 9hour day at work.  I think I want freedom because the concept of a truly open world with many less restrictions on player interaction with other PC's as well as the world SHOULD be what MMOG's are trying to create in my mind.

That is the closest point I'm willing to conceed to the idea that Catass gaming has any future.  That perhaps open ended true virtual worlds aren't what anyone myself included is really ready for or wants to play.  We complain about being led by the nose but without at least a few nudges down some kind of path we get confused and frustrated.  Honestly I had a point where'd it go...

Oh, Vangaurd, it sounds like shit how are we even debating this?  I mean basically the only thing that would sound like even more shit would be if somebody came out and said:  "We're going to design a game with twice as long and twice as slow a leveling/item whoring/guild leveling/character class change quest system as lineageII.  Because that is what you stupid fuckers want, because you all Love to never be able to accomplish anytihng without the maximum amount of work".  Thats not what "Achiever" gamers want, as the massive WoW sub numbers Lum pointed out indicated.  Sure they want to get loot+1 but they dont want to have to gather 60 people together for 9hours just to get a shot at getting one uber item for one person involved.

Thats just not fun.

Also I'm confused by Lum's comments, aren't you the one that pointed out that gamers are fucking retarded when it comes to MMOG's and refuse to realize the flaws in their first game experience?  Therefore EQ did irreperable damage to the MMOG community by creating a bunch of people that just dont realize that grinds+corp runs+flagging+aa+artifact levels+all of L2 are the fucking enemy of fun?  Instead they play, burn out, quit and clammour for the next game.  How many people here are unwittingly victims of that I wonder, myself definately included.  I have not really enjoyed a MMOG for more then 3 months since ShadowBane.  Why would I eat-up WoW at release and play it every day when I know that type of gameplay doesn't really work for me?  Did I really think that because it was Robot Jesus aka Blizzard that despite all signs, beta included pointed to EQ clone that it wouldn't be?  Nope.  But I gave them $80 and 3 months of my time and quit like I always do.

Shit long as post and I'm still not even sure I've gotten to where I meant to be going with this at the start...  I'll try to edit it down or add to it in a little bit, consider it work in progress for the moment.  Sorry guys.

Maybe they'll actually advertise Vanguard.

Good points, but you're missing one thing.  The more torturous the grind, the greater the perceived value of the carrot at the end.  The truly hardcore competitive achiever LIKES horrible grinds because they make his achievement that much rarer and make him feel that much better about it when he's done.  If the grind is too easy, anyone can do it, and he doesn't get to feel as special for having done it himself.

Since I am mentioned here, I will chime in. In a way I do agree with Gabe and Lum. For example the thread about the front page article a while ago about video games vs. movies. I was solidly on Gabe's side and honestly it really seemed like the other side was just spewing "teh hate" first and reaching out for weak justifications second.

There certainly is a sort of ultra-nerdy machismo that has grown here over the past few months. Developers are scared, or dumb, or incompetent, or pussies or what have you for X, Y and Z reason. It really hurts to read sites where people are like "I am looking to lurn about programming so I can make Diablo 3" and some of the analysis here borders on that level of absurd. It's funny that Gabe actually has a game industry job. I have worked on some game related projects and I know people in the industry - it isn't easy.

A lot of the "analysis" here falls back on "people are stupid" or "people are lazy" or "people are sheep" or some other bland explanation. Why do devs at EA work 80 hours a week? Because they are scared to stand up for themselves. Why do games cost so much to make? Because devs are stupid and can't grasp the obvious cost-saving techniques that a website writer can blog up. Why do devs work under the publisher system? Because they are giant pussies.

Those aren't really good explanations. At some point "teh hate" sort of turned from an in-joke, like someone is being imitated, into the actual modus operandi. I have absolutely zero problem with swearing, and making this about swearing or a turn of the phrase is a red-herring. When you get behind the hyperbole, the actual sentiments being expressed have become very simplistic and often wrong. The language being juvenile isn't an issue, but the thought behind the language is becoming more juvenile as well.

If you look at the problem of say creating games that will sell on a reasonable budget, there are some interesting fruitful discussions to be had there, but "grow a brain" isn't going to start one.

I do feel like the number of red names has gone down and the site has overall become more immature. It's quite silly that people who work or know about the industry are just dismissed out of hand.

Producing "teh hate" is carthartic but some more rigor would be appreciated. Otherwise what's going to happen is that this is going to become a site that just preaches to a small choir.

I don't think anyone truly understands the MMO market.

Didn't some people estimate that the total subscription base in Europe was 250k, and get trumped pretty badly when WoW received 500k European beta signups?

I think the only things we know for certain about what makes one MMO more successful than another are:

1) Fairly Stable network code
2) Good first impressions in the first few months
3) Adequate, well "spaced" content
4) Known license/publicity

Anything else, such as a "vision" or a "focus" hasn't shown enough of a pattern.  EQ's focus is undoubtedly high level raiding at the moment, but it's still holding on to 300k subscribers, and I'll bet a lot of them are casuals.  CoH and WoW are both casual-ish, action-ish MMOs, but their subscription numbers are worlds apart.

I wouldn't presume that Vanguard won't get 250k.  It's got an established lead dev- he knows what he's doing at the basic level, and he's got a certain amount of reputation; that seems to count for a lot.

But they've had their WoW. In western nations, WoW attracted a large number of first-time MMOG players because it is a Blizzard/Warcraft game. They came from FPS or RTS games to WoW - I'd estimate about 2/3 of the WoW population is like that. Remember the trade show frenzy before WoW's launch where the interested people were reported to be mashing their attack button and circle-strafing around kobolds?

WoW is a MMORPG with training wheels. It enabled those people to "get" MMOG progress concepts, reach level 60, learn to raid and spawn a whiner community. Now they are finding a lack of things to do at the high end, and levelling up another character is trivial. They are staying in WoW because they're hooked on MMOGs, but if somebody came along with a slightly more hardcore title like Vanguard and it was deemed to be a good game, they might be ripe for it.

WoW has had massive exposure in the gaming mainstream, such that the magazine reviewers finally "get" MMOGs. If you made another WoW with training wheels, you'd want an iPod-like level of mainstream exposure to pull in the MMOG newbies WoW missed (that will come, I'm sure). And you wouldn't hire Sigil for that - the original EQ team would be better at making a post-WoW destination for all these new veterans.

[edit] And Smed, maybe this is how you could reposition EQ2 until Vanguard, as the l33t challenge for bored WoW veterans. The current advertising just says "we're better than WoW" which is uninteresting and untrue. What is true is that EQ2 offers bigger mountains to catass, which might spark the interest of the new veterans if it was emphasised. Remember to hide Station Exchange in a dark corner first.

Interesting and something I had not considered. There's still the issue of debuffing a tree for harvesting wood, however...

There's an easy explanation for all of the hate...

E3 week was raging douchebag week where we could all rail on developers and froth at the mouth like maniacs. Hell, I wrote (never finished) a piece titled "WoW Server Forums are completely fucking gay" but decided against going through with it because it was just too goddamn mean. It did have meaning and a direction, but I didn't think people would see through the introductory vitriol. 

The week afterwards people either still had their E3 avatars or booth babes.  Neither would produce a calming effect.

This week it's mullets for avatars. And we all know mullets are angry. The cut carries a certain attitude with it, and you must respect it.

Perhaps raging douchebag week in restrospect and the following avatar choices weren't the best decisions to keep the tone here open and inviting for our regular posters and especially the developers.  Getting swept up in the maelstrom of hate can be an easy thing to do.

Next week, kittens. 

Edit: Festivus is going to be a trying time here, isn't it?

Lum, on "Raging Douchebag Week:"

I think you missed the point. If developers want to give us vapor and fluff, we'll aim a solid week of vitriol at them. And I'm sure you all are upset Marc Jacobs was featured on the frontpage. I know someone was because of a certain couple of links from a few places that showed up in the referral logs.

If Mythic doesn't completely fuck up Warhammer AND manage to make Imperator a compelling title - compelling enough that I purchase it (meaning, I make it through - let's say 2 weeks of the free month), I'll put myself on the frontpage during Raging Douchebag week next year. But as it stands, I have more faith in Bigfoot coming over and having a civilized conversation about suburban sprawl over a seafood dinner.

Oh, and next year E3 won't be Raging Douchebag Week. We have something else planned.

It will be much better.

Raging Douchebag week will probably get moved to an even more appropriate week.

I hate to break it to you, but we've always been a site preaching to a small choir. In the scheme of MMOG's and rant sites, even Lum's site was just preaching to a very small choir.

Teh hate is a joke and a style. Were I to meet most of these developers in person, I'd probably refrain from calling them pigfuckers, because that's not what polite society does. However, teh interweb isn't polite society. And McQuaid brings out the Raging Douchebag in me. I'm scarred. As for:


This isn't a coffeshop, and sometimes, sitting around politely drinking our tea and crumpets accomplished absolutely nothing. This also isn't the raging firestorm that running up to a militant bunch of pro-lifers is either, because even in our most impassioned, we still have time to read the posts and think about our own posts. Both examples are the extremes, and teh interweb is somewhere in the middle. You can have reasoned discourse with passionate outbursts and still get to the heart of the matter. However, quiet, polite debate is called Palimentary Procedure, where everyone takes turns and that is a big bit of useless mental masturbation.

I consider this site, and my own writing "Anger Managment for Whiney Bitches."


Not really. Shit, WoW didn't have what I would call stable network code, and by some accounts, still doesn't it. The market has shown a tendency to put up with bad technical shit in return for some thing. But they won't do it for some no name game like Horizons, whereas they will for Star Wars Galaxies or Warcraft.

I'm not telling McQuaid he shouldn't make his game. If he listened to me, he'd probably be a fucking idiot. I'm expressing my opinion that creating Vanguard as he claims to be is probably not a good idea, based on what I know about the market. I'm also expressing the idea that he's fucking high if he believes that the market for that type of gameplay WITHOUT a license is as large as 500k. It wasn't even that large for EQ1. There aren't that many people that are going to bleed off into WoW for a game that is more grindy.

And as Way has said, the game isn't even in beta. We don't know what it's actually going to be like, all we know is what has been said and shown. It's ALL mental masturbation, even the stuff that glowingly fellates McQuaid, because WE DON'T KNOW. So we kvetch and we extrapolate, all in good fun.

Kittens, though. Next week is kittens and puppy dogs and flowers. For a preview, here's me getting mauled by a puppy.

(http://www.rebelpenguin.info/images/haem1.jpg)

If I really cared that much whether or not you featured him on your front page, I would probably correct your spelling of his name at some point. Frankly, I'm just relieved no one saw fit to use an unflattering photo of me.


No, actually I'd call this more of a loud, raucous sports bar. The "Other Place" is more of a coffee shop. With snarky latte.

So. Not mentioning any names. But there's some folks here who, when any MMG is mentioned - any - respond with some witty variation of "omgz you must be a complete witless retard to even give them any money". Well, the first time it may be funny. The second time, eh. The seventeenth time? Maybe a new hobby should be in your future.

What happens is then you get a culture of one-upmanship. (Oddly, here it's about making fun of people who play games, whereas at Corp it's more cut to the chase of making fun of people in general). People start to compete who can mock people who actually admit to enjoying MMGs the most. Which, again, if your aspiration is to have "Raging Douchebag Week" and "Tolstoyan Retard Thursday" and whatnot, is great. But to then turn around and say "Hey, people are wimps because they won't stand up to our heat"? Well, no. It's more that you've communicated, quite clearly, the conversation you want to have.

So from my perspective. And I'm probably really stupid for even bothering to open myself up to ridicule like this, but I'm currently on pain meds for a bad tooth, so I have plausible deniability.

I'm at E3, and trolling the various boards looking for reaction on our Warhammer announcement. Here we had this thread: http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=3353.0  Most of the posts were various iterations of "lollerskates, this is going to suck so bad, because Mythic is making a game with space romans". The few folks who pointed out (a) Warhammer has a distinct paucity of Romans, in space or otherwise, and (b) it might be a bit early to judge a game that has about 15 minutes of development time devoted to it were shouted down. Because HA HA! ROME! IN SPACE! MYTHIC! IT'S GOING TO SUCK! THEY SUCK! THEY CAN'T DO ANYTHING! HA HA!

I'll be honest. I felt pretty burnt. You have calluses built up about this stuff, from the Internet in general being really damned corrosive. But when you think maybe your company announces something pretty cool, and to have it laughed at out of spite, or a desire to be trendy? Well, it makes you not want to play ball on that particular playground any more.

So that's me. On one thread. And I'm just a data monkey at an MMG company - I don't actually make anything approaching decisions. Just happen to occasionally go to lunch with folks who do. Imagine how people who actually sink their soul and wallets into this stuff feel, reading TEH TRENDY HATRED.

So if you're wondering why there's less discussion lately, that might be a good starting point.

Not after the thread about E3 it isn't. Unless by snarky you mean 'ego.'

Edit: If you're talking about Grimwell, well, I'd say it's more of a cafe full of people with turtlenecks and big thick books and someone up on stage doing some sort of interpretive dance accompanied by a dude reading poetry while everyone else snaps their fingers.

Edit Again: Given the link from the super sekrit all-seeing eye place, I'm pretty sure some high-level devs got pretty pissed at Raging Douchebag Week. But I've no time to console people who don't have an inkling of what it was about. If anyone thinks we were pissing on their work or them as people, they have it all backwards. We're just pissing on teh state of the industry and the bullshit that is spewed on weeks like, oh, what a coincedence, E3. I mean did ANYONE WATCH G4? SERIOUSLY. Fuck.

Is it turn-based? What makes it different from other MMOGs? Is it Warhammer at all? Or is it DAoC RVR in a Warhammer suit? Given the press release, why should we think differently? According to just about EVERYONE I've spoken too, Imperator is DAoC PvE and Warhammer, according to your employer, is DAoC RvR. That's not Warhammer. That's exactly what it was called. Not. Warhammer.


You felt burnt? How do you think the Warhammer fans felt? How do you think the Star Wars fans feel about SW:G? Seriously man. If someone isn't going to do a license justice, don't do it. The types of reactions you'll get will be: "HA HA! ROME! IN SPACE! MYTHIC! IT'S GOING TO SUCK! THEY SUCK! THEY CAN'T DO ANYTHING! HA HA!"


Nothing to do with Trendy. I get pissed off when people who shant be messing with a beloved license start messing with it. Warhammer is a beloved license and it's been a curse to anyone who tried to make it. I mean, let's be honest, in the scope of RTS games, Dawn of War was pretty goddamn shitty. But every other Warhammer game has been an abortion. And it's because GW simply won't let a company make WARHAMMER on a computer. Warhammer in Everquest Clothing (or DAoC clothing as it would be) leaves us with only one response.

If I (or anyone else probably) wanted to have trendy hatred, we'd stir shit up at IGN or something. Or frontpaged an entire article about just how stupid the entire situation is. I understand sticking up for your coworkers. I respect game devs of all sorts. They pour blood, sweat and tears into their shit and people like us tear it apart after playing it for two hours. But really, we've seen it all before and expect nothing revolutionary. Particularly not from a level-based MMOG. Really, what sort of knee-jerk response did you expect? E3 is all about knee-jerk. Of ALL people, you know better.

BTW, Definately kittens next week. I'm just not feeling comic book guy.

(http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~shane/stasj/pics/dyr/cats/unger/cat_0040.jpg)

Some other message in this thread theorized what makes for a successful MMO, and I think the one about having the good initial buzz on beta/release is probably the most important.  If you think you can ignore the internets and teh trendy hatred - you can't...like pro athletes who can't ignore the media or risk having their reputations tarnished. 

You should be more worried that no one's really taking about DAOC/Imperator/Warhammer around here.

I don't agree. I really enjoyed Warhammmer 40,000: Chaos Gate which was basically WH 40K meets X-COM (same combat system). Space Hulk was fun as well though very difficult (even if you had perfect overwatch and firing lines setup inevitably your gun would jam/overheat at the crucial moment and it was bye bye Space Marine). I still remember the intro "movie" to that game where that one Genestealer that's hiding jumps out and kills the Space Marine that was otherwise kicking ass. Dawn of War wasn't very deep but it was well executed and I found it fun to play and thought it captured the spirit and style of the miniature game even though it was an RTS.

1.  Nobody starts a project thinking they won't succeed.  
2.  A lot of people need encouragement while they're still working on their project.

You're bashing Brad McQuaid continuously.  EQ1 may have been a bad game, and advertising a MMO's game mechanics only (it's what he's doing with Vanguard) instead of advertising the fun of it, or the expansiveness and beauty of the world, or the quests, or anything that would touch people's imagination is pretty bad in my opinion too.  But you're not criticizing his game as much as you're bashing him, and his reputation in your eyes.

Now, I don't know the guy, I don't care.  But it seems you're starting the same trend with Mythic.  A game can't succeed because it's Mythic making it.  And you're doing it to other people or other dev house names.  It's like the opposite of fanboism, instead of defending something because it's made by Blizzard, you're bashing everything because it's made by so-and-so.  

You may not feel this way but a lot of the discussions here go like that.

Waterthread used to be, I got the impression, a private club for devs and other game industry people to just hang out and chat.  Pretty cool for me, I'm a nobody, but through this board, a nobody with access to various experts discussing the makings of games.  Like listening in on a conversation between composers about classical music.

You've kind of driven them away.  It's your boards, and you can do whatever you want, and they're free, so I have no right to demand anything or even criticize; it's your show.  But I would have liked to continue being able to see devs post and discuss things, and see those discussions being commented on by you guys (obviously connoiseurs) and average people like me.

You're defending your past posts and the site, and that's understandable.  But the accusations brought up are a side issue, I think.  Less devs posting has been brought up by others (thought it was just me), and that's the main issue, I think.  Do you guys plan to do anything to entice more devs to discuss things here?  To feel comfortable discussing things here in a non-hyped, non-PR way?  That would just rock, if this site provided that again.

I'm staying way the hell out of all of this but this comment struck me as funny.

You really have no idea what the hell you're talking about.

I firmly believe Mythic is capable of making a solid game, but when they describe their products as "the best RvR game ever" - well, to be honest warning lights go off. And don't stop. Warhammer is turnbased RvR if you want to label it as such. It's not a game about leveling and won't necessarily transform into a well-crafted MMOG. Honestly, I wouldn't trust anyone with that license who wanted to make it a real-time MMOG and I know it's a big deal to Mythic. It's a big license. But with great power...blah blah blah. It's a situation I wouldn't want myself to be in - transform the license into something that isn't quite what the real deal is (read: Star Wars, though it's an extreme) or do something new with it. Given the stagnant state of MMOGs (which is why we're trying to cover a lot more than just online games here now), I have a feeling Warhammer is going to be more of the former rather than the latter. If it were simply an MMOG based in the Warhammer world (though 40k would be better for this since there's already way too many medieval games), and was admittedly such, I'd give credit where credit is due. But it doesn't seem like that.

As for bashing Brad McQuaid, I'm done with that. I need to play his game to see if he comes off as delusional as he seems. Until I do that, I'm just going to let his fantasyworld be. What he's said seems entirely too farfetched for a backer like Microsoft to fund, but we'll see.

Mythic, on the other hand, doesn't have a backer like Microsoft. They saw what happened when SW:G turned out how it did, and they have to tread very lightly to not have another one of those on their hands.

Personally? I want someone to make a MMOTBS based on any number of good table-top properties. What I don't want is to enter Warhammer Online or <insert other MMOG here> and make another goddamn human/halfling/orc/whatever warrior/finger-wiggler/thief and wander into a newbie zone and learn how to level up. I don't want to level up at all, unless i'm leveling up a platoon of soldiers from "swordsman" to "Champion Knight" all Fire Emblem style.

The milk went sour years ago. I'll be the first to admit that all these little indy online gaming sites have been retreading all the same old shit for years now, and lately we haven't even tried to say it in new and interesting ways. Short of a couple interesting points brought up in some of Haemish's writings, if it weren't for my love of the IDEA of a virtual world (let alone finding a good one that isn't UO) - there's a good chance I'd have no problem abandoning the genre completely. I am Jack's Nagging Need for Escapism.

Edit: Right up there, above this post, Rasix is very right.

Forgot about Space Hulk. And I just saw an old copy today at work. Point conceded (but not on Dawn of War - I stand by my opinion of that, it NEVER for a moment felt like Warhammer except when I was "painting" my army).

I understand where you're coming from Lum, and I do kinda feel bad for the people there who are passionate about what they're doing who see their work dismissed in a fit of laughter.  That being said, I do think Mythic is a victim of a reputation they earned.  If NCSoft had picked up the rights to Warhammer I don't think that there would have been so much ridicule, but Mythic's only MMO at the moment has been considered by many to have been broken since TOA with various other serious issues going back before that.  DAOC was in fact the first MMO I really got a chance to play but balance issues were a problem for me and TOA finally drove me away.  Imperator was announced close to 3 years ago, and until recently one of the only things that was revealed about the game was the Romans in Space concept which is a large part of the reason people have latched onto that.

Now I'm not a Warhammer fan, but if it had been announced that Mythic had gotten the rights to do a Shadowrun MMO I'd be sobbing in a corner right now because I don't have any reason to have faith in them to do justice to the license.  I'd be afraid of seeing Cyberware pushed back to an expansion years after the game is released.  I'd be afraid of Street Samurai being overpowered one month, and Deckers overpowered the next.  I'd be afraid of the game being vaporware after hearing nothing new of substance about the game for the next several years following it's announcement.

Blizzard has set the bar for mass appeal.  NCSoft has become a model for how a company should approach the market with games catering to different genres, and playstyles, and trying a non-subscription based MMO like GW.  If Mythic wants to get people excited about their upcoming games, they have an uphill battle trying to convince people that they can adapt to the changes in the market that have occured since DAOC was released, but so far it just sounds like business as usual to a lot of us.  I really do hope that Mythic can prove us wrong though.


Edit:  Now Funcom is another company I don't have a particularly great amount of faith in, and they recently announced that they're making a Conan MMO (and I happen to be a big fan of Conan).  In the weeks that followed they released a lot of info about what they want to do with the game, the combat system, what makes it different from other MMO's and all that, and they convinced me to at least give them the benefit of the doubt.  That's the kind of thing I'd like to see coming from Mythic, or really anyone making an MMO.  We know a lot of the stuff that's promised won't make it into the game, but it might just actually get us excited about the game.

Another problem with games that reward the catasses is that if the game has valuable limited shared resources, inevitably the catasses will try to monopolize those resources and the world devolves into a Machiavellian/Lord of the Flies style "Might makes right" sort of place unless there are external factors that prevent this from happening. On my EQ server we got lucky in that our lead GM (who later got reassigned to the Legends server) essentially mandated that the top guilds needed to get along and so we ended up with a rotation list for the main dragons (mandated by the GM even though it wasn't official Verant/SOE policy), a sign up calendar for Planes raids and a sign up list for the last step of the Cleric epic (which remarkably everybody followed). Compared to the horror stories I would read about other servers ours was a relatively civilized place, though of course we still had lots of conflicts.

MMORPG designers have learned that instancing content is one way to solve many of these problems without needing the kind of babysitting/GM attention my EQ server got, though Blizzard seems to have forgotten this and decided to come out with two outdoor raid encounters which of course instantly turned into total chaos, oops. Sigil, however, seems set on bucking this trend:


It'll be interesting to see if Sigil can figure out how to solve these problems without instancing.

I love DOW and havent stopped playing it and mods since release. Ive also spent considerable time making DOW maps specifically my and my buddies playstyle (pm if you want to test my 1v1, 1 vs multiple AI, 2 vs multiple AI maps)  for I love Warhammer, I own a considerable percentage of GWs non game product line. I played EQ, AO and play WOW, I ran a raiding guild in EQ, a small guild in AO and a guild in WOW.




You'd think I'd be excited about a Warhammer MMOG, but all it takes is a few lines about what the game might be and i realise yet again, my love for either the IP, or my love of PVP/RVR, raiding and instances is going to be completley frustrated by my complete lack of tolerance for pointless levelling. WOW was ruined by it, I'm 52 and virtually the entire endgame is on hold for my guild due to me playing the only tank and not wanting to grind to 60, we are now waiting on new joiners to get their tanks to 60, and I've even given out my account details to the guild so anyone with spare time can level up my tank.

Ive killed 1000s of mobs, ive gathered mountains of bones, ears, trinkets, fetishes, pelts, skins and other assorted bits from mobs, I have a pile of boss heads the size of Wales, i dont want to killl 1000s more mobs, or collect another 800 skins, or add even more boss heads to the pile.  Whats wrong with killing 100s more mobs, and gathering just 80 skins etc? its not as if the game mechanics are so complicated I need 1000% more time spent learning them.

Its a cheap, shabby, totally transparent mechanism for retaining subscriptions, and when you hit a gameplay decision thats entirely based around profit and retention thats stopping my own personal enjoyment of MMOGs then it will raise my ire and result in a few crappy, bitter, whiney posts. Accountants should have no say in long term gameplay decisions.

Lol Lum.
So we're not allowed to use Mythic's past performance with DAoC as an indication of how Mythic while handle WO.
So we're not allowed to use Gameworkshop's past performance with WO as an indication of Gamesworkshop will hamstring Mythic attempt.
We should just take hype at face value.
It seems to me that Mythic use to have mucho credit in the community, but over time Mythic has burned through most of it.

I think you ( Mythic ) should be proud that you haven't earned our undying hatred like EA and SOE have. That's no small accomplishment.   If you want your credibility back your gonna have earn it, that's if you really care about what we think which I doubt.  You're just mad some called your baby ugly.

I think that there is some truth in the claims that this place has become a bit of an echo chamber.  [rose lense] back in the old days, there was a lot more diversity as far as types of players posting and we got better discussions as a result [/rose lense].  Because almost everyone left has the same views, we've gotten very lazy in defending or even intelligibly articulating them.  "HURR HURR CATASS LOL!!111!" passes for an argument.  Hell, in half the threads, it's the most cogent argument you'll find.  I think the St Gabe lynching is a good example.  He had potential to be a good poster, but because he wasn't regurgitating the same shit the rest of us have been regurgitating for years, he was driven out  Now, this isn't a debating society, and I like teh hate as much (more) than the next guy but we are very much at risk of degenerating into a circlejerk board.

My problem with Gabe involved using the quote function. That's it. I appreciate different viewpoints. Hell, I even defended you know who.

It's true. The Gabe thing really came down to not using the board properly. If he wants to do that, he should just post at Gaia Online.

As far as degenerating into a circle jerk board, well, MMOGs seem all to keen on fulfilling that prophecy. We're a couple years away - at this rate - from having to purchase ESPN World of Warcraft 2006 just for roster updates. MMOGs have become about as stale a genre as a genre can become. It's also the youngest genre around. It's fucking depressing, man.

I take a bit of offense to the suggestion or impression that this board is all about teh hate, all the time. Take a look around- there are games that get praised and played all over the place. Even MMOGs!

Like I said before, this particular developer is tooting his own horn for re-creating game mechanics that caused many of us to quit playing his first game in disgust. No real surprise that there is some wailing and gnashing of teeth. If the game doesn't suck, you can be assured that many of those ranting now will be playing, and talking about how much fun they are having. Not gonna hold my breath, but anything is possible...

As for Mythic- I was the biggest fanboi in the world when DAOC first came out. Some decisions that were made early on made it obvious that they were more interested in extending subscription times than letting friends group and play together. Between that and the lengthy PvE grind before becoming RvR-useful (not to mention that the realm I chose to play was maybe half-finished at release), I gave up on the game. Then Imperator was announced- with no PvP (the one thing I thought Mythic got mostly right with DAOC). Plus the source material and background was, shall we say, unexpected. Since the announcement, there has been very little new information (at least that I have seen on my forays through the Web), so first impressions last.

On to the Warhammer announcement- I am willing to wait and see what they do with it (as I said in the thread Lum linked to). I was never a WH player, so I don't have any preconceived notions of what I want from the license (contrast that with WoW- I never played the Warcraft games because I hate the RTS genre, so I was utterly uninterested in a MMOG based on them. Strangely, I was convinced to try it out, and am still a subscriber- because the game is fun and caters to my casual playstyle nicely). Judging from what I consider Mythic's spotty track record, I don't hold out a lot of hope for WH. However, if it an interesting and compelling game, I will obviously give it a try.

All we have to judge these titles by is the reputation and previous works of the publishers. It is like movie directors in that way- I have hated everything John Woo has done in America (never saw any of his Hong Kong works). When I see 'A John Woo film' attached to a trailer, my first impression is that I will hate the movie. However, if the movie comes out to rave reviews, I will likely check it out (I am just dumb like that, I guess).

Surprise me. Rise above what has come before. Make something interesting, compelling, and NEW. I love to play good games. Give me one.

I am really trying to figure out where you're going with this one, but whatever. 

I've noticed a lot more noise vs signal here lately, and I think the theme weeks are part of it.  The "echo chamber" comments are pretty right on, but I think every forum community tends to end up that way when you consider group dynamics.  I think the themed weeks or "everyone has avatar style x" kind of stuff fosters the "me-too" responses that end up in any group that discusses the same topics all the time.  It's just here the "me-too" attitude is encouraged more than normal, it seems.  That's fine and all, because certainly there is still good discussion on games here on a thread-by-thread basis.  It's now just becoming more  post-by-post (hence the above signal--noise comment) than thread-by-thread.

Oh well, I have a turtleneck to wash.   :-D

Some of you people complaining about our "dev-bashing" haven't been paying fucking attention.

Tabula Rasa gets much fanboi luv from schild, or at least it did until he learned it probably isn't going to be twitch. Most of us around here are at least mildly interested in Auto Assault, once it got past the "looks like ugly-ass hot wheels cars" stage. My personal review of Starport, an indy MMO was a pretty glowing review, as I have little to say that is bad about the game. In almost every single article I've personally written discussing the business side of MMOG's or hell, even the way I think the industry needs to move in order to stop regurgitating shitty concepts, I PRAISE MYTHIC because they were Indy, they didn't rely on publisher teat and they used an off-the-shelf graphic engine. Many of us like Guild Wars. I constantly praise NCSoft because they seem to know how to create a stable of different MMOG's that would make me want to pay one fee to play all their games. I like WoW and CoH and praise them for what they did right, and damn them for what they do wrong. Most of our game reviews are actually pretty positive reviews, but with honest criticism. I think that's pretty fucking unique in the world of game reviews. But when something fucking sucks wet farts out of dead pigeons, like this game (http://www.f13.net/commentary.php?subaction=showfull&id=1110927804&archive=&start_from=&ucat=1&), you goddamn right it'll get some hate.

If you think it's all about "teh hate," you haven't been paying enough attention.

As for Mythic and Warhammer, as a longtime fan of the GW games (and hater of the GW business practices), I was severly disappointed that Mythic was chosen for the Warhammer license, because I don't think it's in their comfort zone. It's like hearing that the Cubs made a big trade for a great starting pitcher, something they already have a good bit of, but traded away their best bullpen guy to get him; the Cubs need bullpen guys more than starters. They'd be weakening an already weak area to strengthen an already strong area, instead of strengthening their weak areas. And every announcement out of Mythic has, to me, really been disappointing. Imperator will have no PVP, the strength of DAoC, and a setting that elicits no emotional reaction whatsoever. That means you have to really impress me with stuff to get me to care. Then they pay for a license that really doesn't fit them. Had Mythic announced they were doing a PVP-only game set in the 40k universe, ok, I'd be for that. Mythic can do some good PVP, especially if there aren't levels involved. I praise the level 20-24 battlegrounds CONSTANTLY, because they were some of the most fun PVP I've ever played. But WHO isn't going to be that, or it won't be mainly that. It will be a level-based PVE grind with some PVP on it, JUST LIKE DAOC. How am I not to judge that as something I don't need or want?

What exactly do you expect us to do to get more devs to post? Most of them are busy people. This board doesn't really serve their interests, and won't. Ever. I'd rather they post at a game developer's board where they can talk to each other about how to unfuck the industry. We invite any dev reading this to post. ANY OF YOU, EVEN THE ONES WE HATE. Like McQuaid. He reads this site. People at Sigil read this site. People at SOE read this site. We WANT them to post, but we aren't going to kiss their fucking asses to get them to do it. And if they act like a cockmonkey, or like MORE of a cockmonkey than anyone else on the board (see SirBruce or Serek Dmart), they will get it in return. They aren't going to be treated special by me because they are a developer, they'll just get more questions.

We're not going to coddle developers. We're not going to fellate them, unless they do something worthy of it. You want that, go to P2P.net, or some other place that tries to suck up to developers for exclusives or beta slots or whatever. Go to Gamespy. I've tried to get an interview with Brad McQuaid, and he has refused. He doesn't want to give one, that's fine.

St. Gabe, use the quote function. You're free to disagree with me anytime you want, but don't expect me not to disagree with your disagreement. That's silly. I don't expect you to alter your writing style when replying to me, but I do expect you not to make your posts hurt my eyes. I see you've gotten over the italics thing.

If you can't post your minority opinion and take the criticism of the majority, well yes, you're minority opinion will be silenced. But it isn't the majority's fault for disagreeing with you, or calling you an idiot. Your voice isn't being taken away, it is being self-censored.

I will only analyze my own posting in the thread Lum quoted...

After a bad joke about Mythic possibly cutting more races from WO then Horizon's had cut at release, that nobody laughed at  :cry: I had this to say:


On Mythic:  Many people here cut their teeth on DAOC and therefore I find this board has a very large segment of people who will say pretty nice things about it compared to other places I've posted in the past.  But the fact is Nobody including Gabe has ever said "TOA was a good expansion" nobody, ever, that I've seen.  

Velorath makes a damn good point about Funcom and Age of Legend, they have told us not only that they are making a game with an established IP (who isn't?) but also that it isn't going to be the same old same old.  

There is no faith left in the avg. MMOG gamer we've been promised bigger, better and different and gotten clone after clone after clone with a new paint job of Shiney.  So it should be understandable and expected that a press release that offers no information about why a game will be bigger, better or different is met with heckling and "L0L1 Romans In SpAcE!?!??".

I don't really think you can call the people who read these forums (and actively post, can't really say about lurkers, eh?) or any other forums like Corp or Grimwell or TN or wherever "average" gamers by any means.  I think the fact that some of us are driven to near histrionics by the games industry sort of makes "us" decidedly non-average.

We're a bunch of hardcore gamers. But we're more across the spectrum than your average power-guilding WoW Junkie. At least I'd like to think so. I know every week all of my consoles, sometimes even the NGage (waiting for Rifts), gets play. MMOG's are maybe 10% of the time spent playing games. But I still own nearly Every. Single. One. (Somewhere).

You don't get it.

Read corp sometime.  You will find savage criticism and developers posting.  

That word does not mean what you think it means.

Also, avoiding the issue doesn't help.

Side Note:  I thought things really started going downhill here when you got that intern job, stated posted stuff like "I make video games", and then quit a few weeks later...

Right, but what average gamer owns every console ever?  Hell, I have a PS2 and Xbox and I think I'm "excessive."  Granted, I won't buy the PSP till the price point drops, but that's me being cheap.  Well, that and I don't see where and when I'd use it seeing as how I have a home office and don't really fly all that much.

f13 has definitely gotten more rabid.  It's one of the reasons I take a vacation every now and then.

But then I mostly hang in the Politics forum so my definition of rabid might be suspect.  :-D

I still dont see how the argument that forums about MMOG's have gotten more "rabid" due to MMOG's failing to deliver anything innovative or interesting.  Why should we be pleased that we're getting more EQ clones?  I just fail to see what there is to be happy about.  Almost every game that tries to be different cuts all the good stuff from release or is just vaporware the stuff that does come out in the same old same old. 

Every once and awhile there is a fanboi thread about Hellgate, Conan, Tabula Rasa whatever.  However, eventually somebody throws the wet blanket of reality on it (all you have to say is Horizons really or even better Mourning) and it kind of brings you back to being a cynical asshole towards the whole genre.

Somebody prove everyone here wrong, please...  but until that happens how can you act so surprised by "teh hate" being the common denominator in most discussions.

I think people are purposely missing the point here. This is a problem that has nothing to do with swearing and nothing to do with Raging Douchebag week. The problem is that "teh hate" started as tongue-in-cheek but now the tongue has divorced from the cheek.

It's like that guy that always makes racist jokes to imitate racist people as a joke, but after a while you start realizing hey maybe this guy actually is racist, because he's enjoying it too much. Being dumb and spewing the hate at some point was a pursposeful affectation (if that's a word) but now it's now gotten ingrained in people as the real deal.

The thread about Hollywood vs. games was a good example. On one side you had someone who worked in the games industry, and he was just dismissed out of hand because the accepted explanation was "devs are stupid" and anything else was clearly incorrect. That's weak. Or look at the thread about unionization of game developers. "Devs are pussies." Ok, that's a great explanation!

People here severely underestimate how difficult it is to run a company, publish things, create fun games, or undertake engineering problems. "Devs are stupid" is not the answer, that's just very lazy and uninformed thinking. It's like two guys in Arkansas who have never seen a gay guy complaining about the radical homosexual agenda. Just playing games doesn't make you an expert on game development or running or small business or lowering production costs or anything like that.

The tone here *has* changed from Waterthread. That isn't to say that it's all bad or that everyone here is worthless, I think every poster here adds something at least some of the time. This isn't personal and there isn't reason to take offense. I would just say we could do with a little less finger pointing and "ha ha!" and and a little more rational discussion.

Edit: As far as MMORPGs always failing, WoW did a lot of good things for a lot of people, including a much shorter levelling curve. CoH also had a number of plusses. Neither of those games is for everyone but I don't think you can claim that no progress is being made. People complain about "progress quest" so much but I made it to level 18 in WoW during 4 or 5 days of playing Beta, so at least that one concern was addressed.

I'm dissapointed to see the thread go this direction, although it needed to happen.  Being that my stuff was what a lot of "Me toos" were directed at, I want it made clear that I don't intend any disrespect towards McQuaid himself.  He's got a niche he's aiming at, however foolish I personally think that aim is I can see there's a market for something akin to it.  However, I don't hate him or his endeavour to create a 'hard' virtual world.  Oh no, my hate is reserved for the mindset that he seems to have fallen into that "Time = All that Matters."

  Those of you thinking I was saying "omg noez not a  game with challenge!!" I'm not.  I enjoy a challenge.  I don't even have to be the best at it. If I did, I'd never play MTG or FPS games because I suck HARD at those. But I still play and enjoy them because they're fun and a challenge for me.   But when Challenge, or achievement is tied solely into time played (in a session, over a subscription, whatever.) then I have a big problem with it.   Advancement can be tied into time played, and I wouldn't ahve a problem with it.  You've been there longer you get to see/ do more. Great, I'm fine with that because I can get there eventually too.  (Which is why I don't toss loads of hate at Eve.  Been playing the 14 day trial and finding it's actually fun.. if it's going on the laptop as a second activity. But that's another thread.)

As for you, the administrators.  Take a look at who's saying the Hate's gotten overplayed of late.  Then take a look at who's saying "no no, bring it on. More hate! They all are cockgobblers!"  Decide which one you want posting more, because sticking your fingers in your ears and saying "You all just don't get it." like you've done in the last few posts isn't doing yourselves any favors.

Do the developers actually say anything of note there though?  Maybe I've just missed it in all the times I've checked out corp.

I'm not seeing much of the echo thing here either, at least not to the extent where I think it stifles discussion.  I seem to recall a decent split on WoW, and Schild of all people was giving EQ2 the benefit of the doubt for a while there going against popular opinion.  A lot of people here have the similar opinions on the state of the industry, or what they think is wrong with the current MMO's, but when it comes to actually judging the games AFTER they've been released I think most people here give them a fair chance, and in the end I think that's what's really important.

Edit:


Are you talking about the Not Ready for Closeups topic?  If so, having just gone back and reread it, I think you're vastly over-simplifying that discussion.  Now I don't agree with a lot of what was said on each side, but I didn't see anyone simply being dismissed for having a different opinion, I didn't see the majority shout the minority down, and there was much more being discussed there than just "Devs are pussies."

I do read it. Savage, you may have. Good, not so much.

I don't think many people here have illusions that creating games (that get released) is easy. I know how hard it is to get a game made. I don't remember anyone specifically saying "Devs are stupid." Pussies/Weak-Kneed, yes. Lazy, yes. But stupid, no, not really. Making games is HARD work. And it requires a lot of it. So you have to wonder why some of these games are being made at all. Sure, there are some necessary evils - EQ2 (which yes, I did defend for a while), WoW, etc. But the majority of MMOGs on the market and coming out Need Not Exist. They may add one or two nice things to the genre. But one or two nice things spread across 50 games does not a revolution/evolution make. I don't really have much else to say on the developer subject other than "No, I don't want to play Level Grind #27 for Rehashed Raid Content #6. Sorries."

Mobile phone games. Which was a segment of the games industry I wasn't even talking about in said article, since mobile phone games are actually done with really small budgets, and yet are really, really profitable. It might be a good idea if some of the game devs funded their good games with really cheap mobile phone games. But that's not an area I see many game devs exploring, because the games are so simplistic, you might as well be making games for 3 generations old hardware.


Since it was my article specifically mentioned, as well as my contributions in the Unions thread, I'll answer this. I'M NO EXPERT ON GAMES, NOR DO I CLAIM TO BE. I'm an opininated asshole, and I write that way. I do not underestimate the effort it takes to do any of this stuff. But I do say that these are the things I observe, these are the conclusions I've made from it, and this is what I see happening because of it. In the threads you mentioned, the things I see happening appear to me to be SO FUCKING OBVIOUS, even to a non-expert like myself, that I cannot understand why someone who actually has more information on the subject cannot see the obvious. And maybe it isn't obvious, unless you are looking at it from the outside in.

Again, you and St. Gabe, in this thread and in those two threads mentioned oversimplify my points, and thus argue against the points incorrectly. "Devs are stupid" was not the point. "Devs are risk averse." That's a point. "Devs are often so caught up in ivory-tower wanking that they miss the forest for the trees." That's a point. "Devs don't need an employee's union to give them mandated 40-hour work weeks, they need an alliance of development companies to set the proper tone." That's a point. But you and Gabe have both gotten caught up in hyperbole and missed the fucking point.

This isn't a binary thing. It isn't just a matter of "We want more teh hate" crowd or "We want more devs" crowd. We want discussion that isn't constrained by arbitrary rules of niceties nor overburdened with e-peen stupid. We'd also like teh funney, because we get bored at work real easy.

Put me in the camp that thought this thread was about ridiculing McQuaid for thinking there are 250,000 catasses out there. That is the delusional part. I won't argue that Vanguard is likely to excel at one thing EQ1 did well: interesting and engaging zone design, something many of the newer MMOGs are seriously lacking.

Oh, and if that bit about debuffing a tree so you can harvest is true, then some dev at Sigil deserves a Retard Medal.

I started (and responded to) a few threads on Corp and got some good responses from Ubiq and Stormwaltz, until I went pscyho on them.  :lol:


Seriously though, in the attempt to learn C++ on my own, I've gained a great deal of respect for the difficulty of making games.  :-o  Not that it makes me like grinding any more than I ever did.  :-P

As far as Vanguard is concerned, I bet it gets 250k easy. I've been reading the official site for awhile, and I think they have  a lot of good ideas, except for the whole tree-debuffing, must-play-for-10-hours-straight-to-do-anything stuff.

I guess that is where the split comes from, I dont think WoW did a lot of good things for anyone.  I think they promised some good things and failed to deliver.  A casual friendly game where raid content is almost the entire endgame?  PvP that frankly was just as obvious of a turn flag on as EQ1 but with better class balance.  CoH had plusses, agreed I never played it because I had just gotten off SB and was not ready for any kind of grinding whatsoever I really need to try it out as its the only major MMOG I've never tried.  WoW is a good example of everyone, myself included buying into the hype finding out its pure hype and quitting.  Sure it did good things to the genre by bringing a metric fuckton of new players into it from FPS and RTS genres who soon will begin clamoring for MMOFPS and MMORTS games which is fine by me.  But I dont think WoW really did anything for the more jaded MMOG crowd but fool us with promises (and the fact blizzard used to deliver on said promises) and the new Shiney.

I've got some hope for WoW and will pick it back up when they release their first major expansion, hell if they would just make it so on pvp servers ALL contested zone graveyards could only respawn one faction or the other and control over them could change hands  and balance some other stuff accordingly it'd be a pretty damn good game.  But I dont agree that it was any kind of step in the right direction for MMOG's in general.  Nobody has successfully stepped away from the /played > player skill formula even in the smallest way, except for EvE which is its own discussion into much more complex problems with MMOG's in general.

Yeah, Matt is posting over there. Good show that.

Moron.

I don't agree with 2 of your 3 points above. Actually I don't agree with any of them. PUBLISHERS are risk-averse, not devs. Most devs are *not* caught up in ivory-tower wanking. (SWG being the exception). In fact, most devs could afford to ivory-tower wank a lot more. And an alliance of dev companies that set the tone wouldn't accomplish a whole lot compared to a union. I don't see what's bad about a union, given that software engineers typically work many more hours than teachers, constuction workers and a bunch of other people who do have unions. And forming a union is possible; crossing your fiingers and hoping for some alliance to form is not, nor is that something that Joe dev can work towards. You are just calling things as you see them, but not everything you see can be taken at face value.
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As far as MMORPG advances and WoW, I don't like WoW. But it IS more casual friendly for at least some types of players. If you are unhappy with what happens at level 60 roll a new character, or quit. That's what casual gaming is about. If I play a game for 3 months then get bored I stop - why should a MMORPG be any different. In WoW you can have fun from day 1, and when it stops being fun you can do something else. That seems pretty casual to me.

Yes, WoW could use more stuff to do at level 60, but that's a separate problem. WoW has a lot of failings but it certainly did address the Progress Quest concerns to some degree. It's not like I'm a WoW fanboy, I wrote the review that said it was bland when everyone else was still hyped about it.

Devs are pretty risk adverse. If you go to a publisher with an idea and they say "Gee Will Wright, that's pretty good" and then it ends up flopping like a beached dolphin, you're fucked. Take a look at Troika.

This is what I say, blaming Halo and Medal of Honor for the lack of Xbox RPGs as one example.  Stupid console FPSers, RUINING MY LIFE!!!1!

We must agree to disagree. I see almost all labor unions as destructive, parasitic entities that fluff their leadership's egos more than their worker's interests. I see very little good that comes out of unions in this day and age. But I see a conglomeration of developers being much more effective, because not only could they put more pressure on the retail market to treat their products right, but could also make better margins out of any products the conglomeration sells as opposed to what they'd get from publishers.

Schild what makes you think Warhammer will be turned based?  

I don't own the new version of WFRP (http://www.blackindustries.com/wfrp_corebook.htm) but I do own the original and I think it would translate to a mmorpg well.  I'm also of the belief that games entering development after the release of WoW will no longer use EQ as the template to copy, which is a major change.

So Mythic could be onto a very good thing with the warhammer license, bit too early to tell though from 7 posts by Mark Jacobs on the unoffical Warhammer forum.

No no no no. I WANT Warhammer to be turnbased. Instead it will be some level grinding RvR variant of DAoC. Not Warhammer.

I'm only going by his press releases. If people want to issue them, I'll take them seriously. Unless they're about Hardware. Then I just pretend they don't exist.

The point is, taking off the training wheels does not mean adding camps and six-hour two-digits-no-of-players raids.

Take Anarchy Online. Curse its warts, but it probably has the steepest learning curve in the genre. It's not friendly in any fashion, there is no big exclamation mark over the heads of NPCs with quests, there is a ton of terms to get familiar with, multiple distinct professions, aggro mobs that will chase you clean across a zone if needed be, and multiple ways of gimping your character unless you are careful.

Over the years, Funcom did add a fair bit of camping (Hecklers, some "bosses"), but that's not what it started out as. Just a hard-ish MMORPG with content spread out across levels so that catasses really didn't have any particular advantages. In fact, when they introduced the level 25-60 static dungeon Temple of Three Winds, many 61+ character wailed in the forums, complaining that there was content their characters could not get at - because they were too high level, and they wanted the level restrictions lifted. Funcom did not bend to the pressure (as they didn't for the less-than-25 Subway). Cheers to them for that.

Funcom, at least from where I am sitting, seems to have worked hard to get AO respectable after the horror that was the first few months. I couldn't go back to it because I thought the setting and conflict was a tad silly, but they at least tried to keep the game moving forward. Good on them.

I live in IRC with about 30-40 of the most jaded MMOG people you'll ever encounter. Here is what we learned from WOW.

We learned that this is The Best the industry has to offer, and that this is going to be The Game for the next several years. Blizzard quality launches are not common in mmorpg games. WOW basically raised the minimum "specs" of everything in development. If a dev team doesn't rise up to the challenge, it'll be obvious at release/late beta.

Do you honestly think that any game that is in development/been announced will compete with Warcraft?

I've not played WOW since early Feb  and I still think this is true. It's not necessarily a good thing, since it means that a lot of projects are getting canned. But then again we don't have to see gigantic turds get published. (Horizons)

Since then I've re-tried 6 different MMO games, and just couldn't get into 'em again. I don't look forward to any upcoming mmorpgs. I don't think anything will be 'ready to compete' for 2-3 years.

Enjoy the break.

Ah.  Brad has decided to make EQ-raid-level content for an existing game, but use his own game to do it.  Very interesting.  Instead of instancing in the traditional model, players will "zone" into a different MOG.  OK, not really, but it's funny to think about people getting to the end of WoW, cancelling and immediately installing Vanguard.  Genius.  I suspect that Catass Jr. won't be put off by bad design, just like his old man.  It's not about the design, really, it's about defeating the challenges first.

But AO has the biggest, most horrific grind. Wose than any camping or lengthy raiding. What is it now, 225 levels? Even at launch you were facing an EQ-style grind but with 200 levels. And after the first 40 odd, they're BIG levels and the total is way bigger than the EQ1 grind. And the 25ish they added on are nightmarish.

I was in the AO beta and bought the game at launch. I loved Rubi-Ka, the backstory and the kooky originality and atmosphere. It appealed to me as a creative person (I particularly loved the original intro movie). But the grind turned me away and after I left due to the terrible launch the first time, the grind is the reason my two attempts to return failed. The amounts of repetitive activity and time required to level up felt worse than any six-hour raiding game.

That is Schild's uber-hate influence. His personality. I recall that when Joe posted he was handing the whole thing over to Schild, the immediate reaction was "WTF? Is this April 1? Why Schild of all people? You can't be serious. What are you doing to this community?".

It settled down when Schild proved able to run a solid (gothy-looking) website. Good work Schild. But as he became more hands-on with the content and went from Waterthread.F13 to just F13, people allowed themselves to be influenced by Schild's opinion style, which is a hardcore version of teh hate.

Tale, meet Haemish.  Haemish, Tale.

Sidereal snuck in on me. This is directed to Tale.

What the fuck are you babbling about? I like more games than 90% of the people on this board. I play every system - including the gamecube that I so often bash. Way to miss the forest for the profanity, man. Just because I'm passionate about gaming doesn't mean I'm filled with 'teh hate.' I was all in favor of getting rid of 'teh hate' (god, I fucking hate that phrase) when f13 started. Let's say it was my little pet metaproject. Check your facts before you start saying shit like that. Do me a favor, and find someone who likes a wider range of games than me. I'm also more willing to forgive a lot of shit in gaming. It's not my fault the MMOG genre has an awful case of rigor mortis.

Aha!  It was YOU all along!  I knew it!

The problem as I see it isn't so much about "teh hate" as the fact that views about things here often get very polarized. I.e. things either suck or are the second coming of Robot Jesus -- there's often no middle ground and therefore a lot of what would otherwise be rational debate and discussion about things turns into "That sucks", "no you are an idiot, it's awesome", "no you are an idiot", etc. For example with regards to Imperator (if you ignore today's new thread) for some people it's basically "It's Romans in space -- it's going to suck" and that kind of kills any sensible discussion.

It's not surprising that things often do get polarized since many if not most of us are passionate about games (which is why we're here), however the frequency in which this sort of thing happens would probably seem very high to an outside observer and I attribute that to the tone and style here which is set by the dominate personalities on these boards and I think that's what Tale was getting at.

We met earlier in the thread, and in several threads before that. I've read and enjoyed Haemish's rants. But I've already been the whipping boy on page one of the thread, so why stop now?

Schild, there's no need to get so defensive. Yes you like games and you work harder than anyone on F13, but the personality you project influences the site in the direction people have described in this thread.

Haemish's rants are hardcore tongue-in-cheek hate, except maybe in the one I'm about to receive. Schild's have a constant harder edge. And when the chorus chimes in, as I pointed out on page one, it becomes an all-round harder version of teh hate than Waterthread or Lum.

I'll admit. My MMOG stuff has a harder edge. I expect more from these people. I respect 99% of the MMORPG developers. Seriously. It may not seem like that, but I do, immensely. But really, WoW should be the last level grind. No one is really going to be able to take a large population from them - not if Guild Wars couldn't. But it's not the last level grind we'll see. So it's just a bunch of sharks trying to bite those last pieces of meat. And really, what's exciting about that? And that's why my shit has a harder edge. I see a grim future.

I wish I didn't.

I'm not sure why some people are trying to turn Imperator into the poster child of misplaced hate here.  Blame Mythic for announcing the game maybe a couple years too early making "Romans In Space" a joke on more websites than just here.  Until recently, many assumed it was just a pet vaporware project of Mark Jacobs.  You can talk about Schild maybe going a little crazy at times when it comes to say... movies or Nintendo (I think maybe some people might take him a bit more seriously than he intends though), but I can't say that I've seen a lack of debate or discussion on any games where there's been actual info to discuss.  That's why we're all here isn't it?  Otherwise we could all be saving time by just yelling at our computer screens like crazy old men while we're playing.

But next week is coming!

(http://members.ii.net/~svandore/tinykitten.jpg)

(http://www.stud.ntnu.no/~shane/stasj/pics/dyr/cats/unger/cat_0186.jpg)

That should be enough liquor.




For monday.

(http://img208.echo.cx/img208/4952/lotrmmog3kr.gif)

Best. Game Parody.  Ever.

Since we've become rabid and all about teh hate, can someone please tell me, link me to, or show me ANYTHING about upcoming MMOG's that would give me some hope? Please? Anything?

I don't care what game it is, just show me one game that doesn't look like either: 1) an EQ/WoW/DAoC clone in new sheep's clothing, 2) an innovative game that will never come out, or 3) an innovative game that will come up but be horribly buggy, unfinished, unbalanced and altogether shitty? Give me a REASON to hope for the future of MMOG's. There are some sparkles out there, some maybes, but nothing that is piercing my well-earned skepticism towards the genre.

And here's another thing. For all the hate, angst, and negativity that I've spewed over the years, I want one fucking developer to prove me wrong. Do it. PROVE ME WRONG. I want you to prove me wrong, because I love games, and I love the concept of MMOG's and if you prove me wrong, I will play. It's been done before. CoH proved me wrong, and I played it, only ending my subscription last month because of Guild Wars. WoW proved me wrong on the numbers it could garner. Both of those games gave me good gaming experiences for the amount of time I was subscribed.

Prove me wrong, devs. Prove the hate misplaced.

TwilightWar?  They bought the HL engine and have done some stuff with it, in two years it might be good...  They just need some money-hat backing right now.

Auto Assault?  meh... I dunno grasping at straws already.

Conan?  Because this time in the early dev stage they aren't lying to us about any features that we wont actually see for 1-3 years after release  :roll:

I tried.

I hear there's a free trial for M59 and it's a whole month long!

I played the free trial of Puzzle Pirates and enjoyed myself.

Nope. None.

That's sort of the point though.  Move on to something else.  Battlefield 2 comes out this month, and it looks to be pretty fun.

I have it on pre-order and I plan to install the server on our box here for some beatdown if anyone else plans to play.

It can't be long now. WoW and Guild Wars are both popular steps away from the bad. Once the devs work out where the filling will come from we might see an end to the transition and a MMOG that is actualy good. I hope.

WoW is not a popular step away from the bad. It's a lateral step back in the direction of EQ from the bad though. It's the best of it's type, but it's certainly not something that will usher in a new generation of GOOD mmogs. Remember how long it takes to make one and how long it takes Blizzard to make a game.

Maybe, in my lifetime, I'll see a second generation MMOG.

But no matter how dark the darkness there is always a glimmer of hope.  Right?

If gamespy says that thanks to WoW nobody will clone EQ ever again it must be true.  RIGHT?

Nope we're fucked, still, and forever, at least if one wants to follow the teachings of the f13-orange-name prophets.

Not that I disagree mind you, but it just makes a guy wonder if he should buy a ps2 or something and submit to *shudder* single player games.

Because of MMORPGs (specifically, Star Wars Galaxies - which I had 8 good months with, and yes, I mean good) I've learned to love my consoles again. Really, I'd like a mass consumption MMORPG to come out just so I can see what it's like. Sure, there's an argument to be made that WoW is mass consumption, but i mean mass as in the people who buy things like Madden every year or preorder Zelda 8 months in advance. I want to see a game made for this. This grind shit wouldn't cut it.