f13.net

Fucking fuck.

Heh, is this a record for fastest game to be buried in the graveyard?  :drillf:

Pirates was in the first month. Conan was 2 days after the first month. So this is on average with new MMOGs.

Depressing.

Pretty short month, eh Schild?


Maybe.... maybe it's not as bad as we think it is.

/shrug

I've got nothing. You shit the bed on this one Mythic.

it crashed spectacularly too. i don't see why we should even support this sort of games being made.

I was hoping for move grave dancing fun. :(

Medicore pvp + craptastic pve that released 4 weeks ago < Craptastic pve + craptastic pvp that been around for 5 years.

Dammit.  This on top of everything else and the fun over in the WoW thread is making me consider resubscribing.  Thankfully I'll be back on my feet again and busy enough that maybe I can resist.

 :cry2:

Too early. 

Aww. Really? Fuck.  :tantrum:

I'm looking for a leveling out, haven't seen it yet.

I liek grafics
(http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=warhammer+online&date=mtd&geo=all&graph=weekly_img&sort=0&sa=N)

Consistently wrong.

Just keeping ahead of the trend.  Look in front of you, not at the ground.

I agree, however, my weight added to this won't help.

I think so too.

Guys, moving a forum from one place to another takes minimal effort. Much like not announcing something like this armor bullshit and secretly removing it from the game.

Don't blame me or debate it, blame Mythic.

So Cevik was right?

and what's the armor bullshit?

This is why I never, ever join you guys in MMOs anymore. You have shorter attention spans than I do when it comes to MMOs and I get accused of having the attention span of a crack-using ADHD child.

Yea, this design decision is TOTALLY our fault. Hell, I'll take personal responsibility. I wish every game had a PvE grind as bullshit and random as this one.

Doesn't make him less of an asshole. 

You should. Even I'm having fun in WoW.

I have decided that I will not buy any more MMOs untill it hits the marker of keeping this crowd entertained for at least 2 months. Then I will purchase and enjoy.


P.S. I have never played WoW, Should I try it out?

If you enjoy Diku mmo's, Yes. 

Damnation , and I had just talked myself out of buying a copy of WoW and two-boxing the bring a friend promotion -

This armor announcement combined with the stupidest "healer" tip I have seen yet gives me great pause to even bother anymore ,

Wondering what beautiful PR blunder MJ will make in a post about this latest moronic decision of theirs

To Penn:

If you wait, you may will in almost all likelyhood miss out on one of the best parts of Any MMO.  The first few days, when everyone is a newbie tend to be fun for all, even in games that later prove to be unpleasant.

My most memorable times in WoW were in the first two or three character creations I did where the cinematic takes you over a live scene of the newbie area, with everyone running around crazed killing anything that moved.  I still regard watching newbies fall out of the Wood Elf city in EQ as one of the best parts of that game.  And in WAR, if you were behind the initial population surge, you had much less fun in oRvR, PQs and Scenarios by most accounts.

I think you'd be pretty safe with spreadsheets in space.  They've been at it for what, year+?

I'm pretty sure that the first E in EvE stands for Excel. 

Have their been any , any dev posts/remarks anywhere about this latest nugget of gold ?

Or are they in complete bunker mode ?

Yes you should. It's very good, I don't particularly feel like playing it anymore but it's good, really good. For what it is.

They appear to be firmly entrenched in a secure, undisclosed location with Vice-President Cheney and other evil bastards.

You should, at the VERY least, give the 15 day trial a go. 

The PVP IMO is a joke, but the PVE is second to none.  Heck, one should try WoW just to understand why/how the rest of the industry is flailing somewhat.

Fuck I just don't get it. What with WoW lowering the grind bar consistently, their current ZOMBIE!!!! event and WotLK coming I would think Mythic would do whatever it takes to ensure the WAR core playerbase is confident in the future of the game. And then they do the armour bullshit on top of the other issues. WTF? Seriously, I'm wondering if MJ sold EA stock heavily short before launch?

I'm sure they've addressed all the concerns on their official forums.  :dead_horse:

Downloading it now. Ive been an MMO masochist for so long, I just want a little fun..........

To be fair, in my tinfoil-hatted 20/20 hindsight, I seem to remember WoW making "huge" announcements on Friday afternoons.  The weekend would be spent with the forums aflame more often than not, and responses would begin on Monday.

I expect MJ to start making drunken midnight posts tonight, however.

Oooh.  Good thinking.  I'll have to make sure to be able to make drunken responses.  It's always more fun that way.

I think it's a tad too early to put this in the graveyard.  Even if it's certainly going down the drain, it's more poetic to put it in the day that WoTLK is released.

Hmmm true, it is another Friday isn't it. I was pretty pissed up in that last thread, i'll be sure to grab a bottle on the way home!

Oh god , drunken , more pissy than usual  MJ posts tonight , trying to explain how required armor sets are a good thing, would be golden

 I can only hope

I'm just trying to find a silver lining in this cloud of bullshit.   :awesome_for_real:

Just a couple observations from a newbie to F13.

First off, any forum that doesn't have half a page of "NERF XXXX CLASS NOW!" threads garners a certain amount of respect in my book.

Secondly, although only my roommate can compete with the prolific amount of cursing here (and he'd crush you collectively), ideas are expressed with much more intelligence than most anywhere else I've gone.

That said, I think that relegating the game to the likes of AoC is a bit premature. 

I beta tested Warhammer since Oct. 07, and there are a number of things that I really couldn't see being a problem which are glaringly obvious now.  Scenario popularity being one.  Travel time (we did testing in phases of certain areas) and exp gain for PvE (I earned more then) being a couple more.

There's a few things that I see are problems with the launch that are still plaguing them.  Player limits on servers as they relate to the spread of players across the 3 factions.  I dunno what the hell happened in the planning of that but it seems to me a wall of fail.  There's a few more that are covered in more colorful language here that I won't bother repeating.

They goofed. There is a core desire for success and an acknowledgment of the challenges which, to me, give enough hope to say "Graveyard might be premature, but the discussion of it isn't."

BTW, if AoC is in the Graveyard, where is Vanguard? /snicker

Be aware that the zombie invasion event may make your experience over the next 2 weeks a bit, um, non-standard.

True dat.  But it's the only half decent MMO with a meaningful death penalty so the PVP can be genuinely heart racing.


It's really fun until you hit the level cap.  Quit soon as you reach that.

Can't really bury something that was never born.

Anyone wanting into WoW, let me know and I'll set up the whole adopt-a-newbie thing for you.  There's just three weeks until the expansion hits, so if you don't wanna wind up in a very empty low-level area, best to grab some fast levels ASAP.  If you can at least hit 55 with one character by expansion time, you'll be able to find lots of death knights in need of groups.

Although it has to be said, playing as a lowbie and questing in any of the level 15-30 areas the zombie event gets old fucking fast. WoW is a better game as a level 70 at the moment.

Thanks for moving it. I wouldn't have known about the CoX Halloween event if you hadn't.  :awesome_for_real:

:awesome_for_real:

Now you know why I didn't bother bother buying the game after playing the Beta.

I'm going to say that Mark Jacobs just crossed f13 off his list of places to defend his game.

You know he's going to get drunk some Saturday night and post here about a new type of server.

Hey, maybe that'll help convince him to set up some official forums.

Can we have this board's subtitle amended to "A challenger disappears!" please?
kthx with love.  :heart:

Sadly , I'm logged in atm trying to salvage some last bit of fun out of the game for me to convince me to stay

I've seen zero chat in the zones I've been in  , less guild members than normal online , and not a damn live person other than the ones huddled around the scenario quest givers

And WoW trial downloading on the other computer (the wife recognized the WoW emblem in the downloader and I believe is currently loading a gun , for her or me I don't know )

Please, he never came here just to shoot the breeze anyway, just to pimp his game.  He'll be back the next time he wants to promote a game or play the victim of attacks by the other big, bad meanies on the internets.  The reception he gets here is still at least 10x better than anything you'll find on VN, even with someone as bitchy as me pissing in his wheaties.

Romans in Space: BE THERE.

I so wanted that game  :cry:


Well, maybe not *that* specific game.

This (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=15076.0). Ya gotta read it. It's also in its spectacular myopia. EWspider may be succumbing to hyperbole, but given everything else I can totally see it. This being Graveyard'd right now makes perfect sense if they're truly considering this considering the alternative WAR players having like all the time and even more very soon.

Eh, I'll wait for the Mel Brooks spoof, Jews in Space.

Maybe after the WotLK influx dies down.  I've got a little more WAR left in me, though the flaws are starting to eat at me,  and some single player games to get through before I'll be up for another MMO.

If it was enough to make him stop showing up, I'd still take it over the alternative.

Kneejerk.

Think of it this way:

Leaving it where it was just means more assnuts coming in and crapping all over the game.
It takes minutes to move the forum, as schild said.
Once the furor dies down, if there's still critical mass of F13ers playing, it moves back.

Would be fun to wager on that third stage ever occurring though.

This makes me glad I bought an open CE with no key on the cheap since all the in game benefits are shit now, -1 sub Mythic.

Off to download the WoW patch, at least there there's groups to be had even if no one wants my gimped enhancement shaman.

I'd rather feed my nuts to a pitbull while they are still attached than play EvE. It was the most soulcrushingly boring MMO I've ever played. I literally fell asleep during my few attempts to play. Not hyperbole, literal nodding off at the computer. I was tired anyway, but still...

For the most part, the in game benefits for CE/pre-order were shit to begin with.  The unique faces tended to look damn silly, the camp was on an hour timer, and I believe the trinket was a 5 minute buff on an hour cooldown as well.  The pre-order rings had like two charges, and the cloaks/trophies were a bit mehish as well.  The comic and figure were nice, to be sure, but overall, I've never been more disappointed in a CE's goodies than I was with WAR's.  And that was before the game ended up being shit. 

I give it a 30% chance at best.  Some kind of odds are in order for the betting IMO.

Don't enjoy flying around .4 space for an hour and a half hoping you find some tard bot-mining an asteroid field while afk?

Thank God.  If this game had lasted another week or two I might have actually bought it. 

(I too am following the "does F13 get tired of it after the free month is up" metric of whether to bother with any given MMO.)

So you're never going to play another MMO again?

As long as he always intends to join Bat Country and waits until the game is a month or so old, he'll never have to.  It's a circle of joy.

This is the right time. If Funcom was competent enough to pull out RIGHT NOW some non-uber guild PvP content (simple lower levels conquerable Towers/Keeps), close and delete all the PvE servers, and a "Welcome back! programme" they would win back lotsa people. Too bad they are no competent enough.

Or maybe it's better for the Lich King storm to pass.

I am just speechless at this. And mad. But not so mad that I'm not going to go play a zombie.

Seriously. I'm really disappointed in this. 1-20ish is the best game I've ever played MMOwise. But this... god, I don't even know how to properly verbalize just how bad these decisions are.

Do we have a new Chosen One to get excited about yet?

The bolded statement reminds me so much of Age of Conan's Tortage.  It starts off so good, and then...

See, I dig that. 1-20, both games, people like them, fine. But Mythic seems to take the part that people are bitching about the most (PvE) and then MAKING you do it to do the part people like. That's not precisely what other companies do. Well, other smart companies.

I'm not aware of anything coming up in the near future. Unless the looming WAR vs Lich King showdown goes way different than anyone is expecting, it's looks like the entire first post-WoW generation of MMO games will have failed to outperform EQ1. I don't expect anyone to beat Blizzard, but vaulting the peak EQ1 bar would be a nice way for someone else to at least prove they aren't a fuckup.

I'll go hang my hopes on ChampO then.  :why_so_serious:

Darkfall?    :uhrr:

IZ IT REAL?  :grin:

I'd have said SWTOR but what little info they released doesn't sound good.  The screenshots make me cringe too...  I also don't like the way its acronym works out, I say we keep calling it KotORO.  That was really my last hope, now I'm worried Schild's "it's not really bioware - it's a rogues' gallery of devs from really bad MMOs" doomcasting is true.

I'm not doomcasting it. Other devs have gone onto other things and made great shit even if you hadn't heard about it. Wizard101 for example. Anyway, point being, I just want people to be informed since half the internet is just OMGBIOWAREBIOWAREBIOWAREADOIAJJDFASDOFAJOMFGAJSAHALP.

it's too early to tell, but tell me if you forming a 1 month guild again. i want to pew pew too.

I don't really think Bioware is such a good company to be doing MMOs anyway.  They've always excelled at storytelling but their games always have terrible combat systems and terrible gameplay balance.  It doesn't seem to me that it's a good idea to head into a new field that's just going to expose your weakness and hide your strengths.  Unless Bioware manages to completely turn the market on its head, which is incredibly doubtful.  For all its faults I'd have more faith in Bethesda.

Starcraft Universe/Diablo Online

I would try em.  For 1 month at least.  :awesome_for_real:

Honestly, this is an issue for me. My wife and I met through WoW (not kidding), and we've since dropped it after doing the entire "go hardcore, be the first on your server to kill Illidan, etc etc." We're looking for something new, and WAR was meant to be it, but we quickly saw the numerous levels of fail the game exhibited. We played Guild Wars in the past, and right now we're actually going through Neverwinter Nights again, but what is really on the horizon that looks good? Sorry, just can't get excited about a Star Wars MMO, and the wife has zero interest in it.

It feels like there's this huge space available for a competitor, but no one has really stepped up to the plate successfully. What really is there on the horizon?

I honestly think that one person could fix this game and make it everything everyone wanted it to be. 

That one person would have to be in an appropriate position of power, have a workable vision of the future, and NOT BE A COMPLETE FUCKING ASSHAT at the same time!

Unfortunately Mark Jacobs does not appear to be that man. 

All this crap seems to be coming from people who are in a meeting and probably dealing with some impossible asshole who is running the show and calling the shots.  Wards on armor sets being a requirement?  Sounds like somebody just wanted to the the hell out of that room and whatever idea they vomitted up was good enough for the rest of the committee, who also wanted to call it a day.

"just add an arbitrary cockblock to endgame progression, that always works.  they love that.  the customers, they LOVE it, now can someone call MJ and tell him how awesome that idea is so we can all get the fuck outta here, its ten past five already, and i have to pick the kids up from soccer"

I see too many committee-style decisions which appear to be made by a bunch of people who clearly don't represent the player base, and in fact do not play the game live at all.  Even if they do, they manage to display such a mind-numbing detachment from the game that they wouldn't know NOT-FUCKEN-FUN if it turned up for dinner and took a steamy dump of INESCAPABLE-GEAR-GRIND-LOL right on the table in front of the board of EA directors.

... to be honest you could take 10 of the kids who are wagging school to play the game RIGHT NOW and at least nine of them would have better ideas that what we have seen from Mythic in the past week.

... they would even do it FREE.  Hell some people not only think about solutions, they discuss them with others in an intelligent manner in a public and open forum (omgzforum!) and Mythic doesn't even have to pay them to do it... or even say thank you! 

they could just go right ahead and FIX it!  but nooooooo lets not fix the future of our game, lets deal with the here-and-now cockblocking of progression!  That's what people want!  Not what they are all saying they want all over the freaking internet!

FUCKERS!

My solution: keep rolling alts up to level 20 until something drastic happens.  If I get to more than 5 level 20s I think I'll go buy an xbox or something.

Don't press enter a bunch at the end of your posts. Also, your froth seems a little incoherent.

And never, ever say "fucken" again, that word isn't for you. It's for Grunk and I had to check your IP to make sure you weren't him. Though, given his absence, I assume he's back in rehab.

Zupa,

Your comments sound so grossly exaggerated as to the point of sounding like the ultimate anti-fanboi. You say near anyone could make this game better, and while you readily point out obvious and already well commented failings, you fail to provide any semblance of an original idea. You're basically exagga-bitching. I also firmly believe that any idea you propose after this message will be incredibly full of holes; including lack of vision, consideration for scaling, technical viability, balance and originality.

But go ahead, prove me wrong.

I can't say challenging the poor guy was a good idea.

After all, he did say 'fucken.'

I should stop making "in" jokes with new people.

I'm excited about the prospects for Traveller, Riverworld, Luther Arkwright, Eternal Champion and Rim World MMOs. The fact that nobody is working on them is a bonus given the current state of the industry.

GURPS Online is going to be AWESOME!

You're missing out on what's most likely the only time these games will ever be fun.  Regardless of not making it past the free month, I do think I got my money's worth out of both AOC and WAR.

What bothers me the most is that the issues with the game seem so obvious, and as such relatively simple to identify and resolve. 

Unfortunately Mythic appear to be missing the obvious issues or their obvious fixes.  One example would be server population density and the current exp / renoun bonus model, and the upcoming server transfers. (and of course the no-scenario server idea but let's not take that seriously for now)

Obvious problem with solutions that will obviously fail at resolving it. 

So, this has been troubling me for some time. Server population, even during launch, was so RETARDEDLY (not a word!) low that the game felt empty then. I get that in RvR you want a more manageable server pop size, because obviously 20,000 people trying to take Praag would be bad. But, given that there are 9 tier 4 zones, plus fortresses and cities to conquer, scenarios on top of that, it seems like Mythics biggest fuck up was gross mismanagement of server populations.

Right now I login and wander high-end t3 and low-end tier 4. I see no one. PQs are empty. I queue for scenarios and on prime time sunday night I had to wait 15-20m for a game to start. We did get 1 warband together and took 4 keeps... we saw maybe 15 order the whole 2 hours we rampaged.

So there a I am, 4 people in my 200 person guild online on a sunday evening, wandering around looking for something to do and seriously contemplating logging into WoW for some PvE because I'm just that bored. If the rate of attrition is as bad as it seems to bem Mythic's going to be need to cut 50% of their servers.

Another thing I don't understand -- sharding and RvR. Given todays technology when it comes to instancing, it sees to me that using world instances or virtual shards, or whatever you want to call it, is a much better way to handle server population  -- especially in a game where server population determines if the game is fun or not. Sharding is great in WoW, most servers are PvE and PvP servers tend to have high populations. But in WAR without people, you have no game (lolpve)...

I'll stop rambling now.

i was surprised i ran into T4 PQs that asked me to kill only 40-80 mobs instead of the 150 they put in lower tiers. Seriously. Wtf. Is there even a point in making kills higher? cause it hurts more than it helps.

This brings up the interesting discussion of whether anything WILL be as popular as EQ1 (WoW not withstanding). MMOs remind me of slap bracelets but on a longer time line. Everyone went bat shit insane over them at first and by the time companies jumped on the bandwagon and got their 'innovative' leopard print and Simpson character versions out it wasn't a cash cow anymore.

Agreed but doing so more than three times and the game will really start to lose it's appeal and then you're screwed.

I have a feeling we're already screwed.   :heartbreak:

It's just a matter of time. The reality is, everyone is still trying to out-WoW WoW. In Paul's own words, they have tried to be Zeppelin to WoW's Beatles, but they turned out to be The Monkeys.

Simply put, WoW is the king of Diku. With basically 8 years of development now and some of the best minds in the industry and near unlimited pockets, no one is going to usurp their position using the same formula. If WoW is a fridge, with a lot of "normal" refrigerator space (PvE) and only a little freezer (PvP), then WAR is just a fridge with a shit ton more freezer than refrigerator. That's not innovation, and they're not going to take away anything significant from the WoW crowd using that formula.

Eventually, someone will actually innovate, and innovate well. A paradigm shift will be required to go to a better place that WoW cannot follow.

I would argue WoW became king by taking some stuff OUT of DIKU.  Such as annoying death penalties.  People keep trying to copy WoW but do not copy WoW's sensibilities and perceptivness.  The reason WoW is more successful than EQ1 is precisely because its less DIKU.  Or perhpas less MUD-like.

I played an LP MUD and I disliked the DIKU might as well be D&D (or some were d&d) MUDs as rather confining and everyone being the same.  But most of the stuff WoW changed from EQ were things I always disliked immensly but tolerated when I used to play MUDs.

There is more to WoW than its DIKU formula.  They know people better than a lot of these shut ins.

Exactly. Being the "king" of Diku I didn't mean they implemented Diku to a T. I mean they perfected it. Taking out the insane death penalties is one excellent example, as you mentioned.

WoW's development team took a look at nearly every aspect of the EQ and Diku formula and asked "Do we really need to do it this way, is there something better?" Rested XP to help people out, for example, was a great innovation.

That being said, the next competitor needs to have a serious look at the conventions WoW has and ask if that's really needed. Do mobs REALLY need to drop trash? Should NPC's really be mindless pez-dispensers? Could we not implement real acting (think: Half Life 2's Alex) into quest givers? Do we really need dozens upon dozens of quests, or could we just do "mission" based gameplay? What about providing the SDK to actually allow user-created content? What would that look like? Are there other carrots beyond gear? Could we make gear and stats independent? Should end-game always be 10, 25 or 40 people picking on 1 boss, or could we provide epic encounters where you're actually outnumbered? Dramatic overhaul, and questioning every convention that exists.

Looking towards LP would be a good idea. Right now, everyone compares their product to WoW. However, when WoW was being made, they were comparing themselves against EQ. EQ was comparing themselves to MUDs. Innovation on the foundational level of MMO's will be required to make any dent in WoW's marketshare, not just readjusting what aspect of gameplay is the center focus as WAR did (ie: PvP over PvE).

Yea, but money and time are constants, or frankly it always costs more and you have less time to do it.

Regardless, to do all this super neat stuff you need more time and more money and right now there doesn't seem to be a guaranteed path to success, even if you did everything the way everyone said you should.

That's a pretty grim outlook for new MMO developers.

You know, the same thing could have been said about search engines. Look at the position Yahoo! and Altavista was in before Google came onto the scene. However, Google wound up doing search better than any of them could, without all the "extra". No more constant porn in search results, no more 404 pages and dead links. I felt horrible back then when the younger sister of a friend of mine was trying to use the internet to do a research project. She was looking for "pictures of beavers". Well, you can imagine what results she got =(

Google didn't have a ton of money, but they had a superior idea and implementation. AMD didn't have nearly the reputation of Intel, but they managed to compete on Intels weakspots and make some pretty good early moves. Same with ATI vs. nVidia. Nintendo doesn't have the deep pockets like Microsoft, but they're out there butting heads, largely because Nintendo decided to go down a new road, rather than trudge along the same beaten path.

Sure, it'll take money to compete with WoW, but not as much as people think it will. It WILL take billions if you want to out-WoW WoW (since you have to make up for their 8 year headstart), but if you truly come from a position of innovation, it will likely take only a modestly increased budget over any good game developed today.

My favorite point is that Blizzard didn't always have deep pockets and a throng of loyal fans. Everyone starts out small.

I disagree. I think that this is a sign that indy and niche developers have a market (created in part by the popularity of WoW) to test new ideas and gameplay designs.  Unfortunately, everyone seems to be so fixated on catching the big fish that they are missing the tonnage of chum available for a small but steady profit.  Hell, if a niche idea catches on, who knows.  You could always sell the rights or even develop the concept into something more mainstream.  As Ratman pointed out while I was typing this... even Blizzard started small and built up.  

All good points but remember Blizzard did have a lot of cash prior to WoW.  Hell Diablo is still selling well.  Blizzard delayed until done and the problems they had at startup were not related to bugs, per se, but scaling.

I just wished I liked WoW, then my life would be complete and I would worry no more.   :grin:

In Blizzard's defense, they didn't start to undertake an MMO until they already had a very nice buffer of cash built up from the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft RTS games.

Also, those games were pretty damn good and successful, so they had a lot of the bright minds already in place before they undertook WoW. On top of that, they had a pretty damn long time to create, test, and release WoW because there was really nobody else out there to do battle with. There was no juggernaut dominating the MMORPG world and quite a few people were already starting to get burned by their previous MMOs, thus looking for the next best thing. It was almost perfect timing.

So now, while WoW has become referred to as the 'exception' by MMO players, its being referred to as the 'rule' by new developers. Warhammer simply had an identity crisis midway through development and release.

WoW is so dominant that it should be practically irrelevant to new developers trying to compete. You need to design a fun, rock-solid game. Given that you will be cannibalizing WoW players and former WoW players, it needs to be as polished as WoW in it's area of focus. That is the only relevance WoW has. It's there, people play it. It's not going away. It's not being drastically changed. If your game takes 3 more months, 6 more months, 1 more year to develop, WoW will still be there and will be pretty much the same.

What really matters is the other games that are in development. The 1st one to ship that stable, polished client with fun, engaging gameplay will be the 1st one to sustain 1 million users.

Edit: As a further point, I think the most likely candidate to hit that mark is SWTOR. Blizzard, too, had never made an MMO before they launched WoW, and this allowed them to challenge a lot of the assumptions about what an MMO had to be. Bioware has created some amazingly fun games, and they have the potential to do very much the same thing with a very popular IP. But they'll probably just fuck it up.

You are all correct, but unfortunately not saying anything that hasn't been accepted as axiom for four years.

WoW is unique. There's only second place for competitors, and second place is measured as 10% of #1.

The time is ripe for indies. But then, it's always ripe for indies. Has been since there's been a software industry, including paper goods from the 50s and 60s.

You want to go after WoW though, you'll need a few things:
- To map their exact launch strategy to hit all territories
- An already popular gamer-centric IP (optional: matching popular company name with an embedded audience of fans)
- 4+ years of solid development with at least a solid year of substantive end-to-end beta testing with real players
- A staff that's comprise of both development experts and those who play other games. Street smarts.
- $75mil+ minimum.
- Such strong confidence in being right you or your publisher have the patience to wait for you.

I'm not waiting for a specific game to come along. I'm waiting for an entire multination organization/alliance that has the same perfect storm of factors with a track record of being able to leverage them.

I'll play them all anyway, just because I can. But just making a good game or just having a good IP aren't anywhere near enough to be a serious WoW contender.

You don't need to hit all territories initially. WoW didn't launch in Chinese-speaking Asia until later. NA and Europe are enough for an initial launch. WoW also launched at the same time in South Korea but it never really did well there, by Blizzard standards (AFAIK it's never broken 1 million "subs" there).

While this may be true, I think his point is that you are competing with WoW as it will exist when you release your game, not the WoW of 2004

No that's not what he's saying. Otherwise the budget and development times would have to be much larger.

More than 75 million?

Yes.

Blizzard did have a ton of online experience with battle.net before WoW launched. Has Bioware done any online games at all?

Yes and no. Largely the original Battle.net team left and formed Arena.net, which you could likely say has far superior server management and content distribution technology than WoW does even today. I think that team leaving hurt Blizzard something fierce, especially recalling the incredible server downtime and problems with content distribution they've had.

It definitely hurt Blizzard.  Guild Wars has had probably less than 24 hours of down time since release.  Most MMOs go down once a week.  Furthermore, they manage to handle a large player base with minimal segregation.  You can pretty much run the game on dial-up too.

Yes, that is what I'm saying, and why I said "$75mil +". I assumed also that everyone is aware that Blizzard didn't directly pay for the rollout in China. And I assumed everyone saw the launch "strategy" part. You don't need to hit all worldwide territories at the same time, and in fact may not want to. Their staggered launch included press release after press release that continued driving first-market awareness.

These details are important because even people in the industry don't accurately track how the growth happened nor how the critical territories and partnership/licensees(ors) helped make that happen.

Very true. It's like the myth that WoW succeeded as well as it did because it was polished. Polish helped, but a large number of factors helped pull WoW to where it is (the Warcraft brand, the Blizzard brand, broadband adoption hitting a decent penetration rate, a large marketing budget, a new title with playable on most PCs, et al). But it is easier for people to think of only one or two factors as being the reason why WoW blew everyone out of the water, and still does, on their subscriber figures.

Bioware hasn't. As far as I understand it, though, Bioware Austin is primarily working on SWTOR, and that studio is headed by MMO veterans. Granted, they are SW:G veterans, but I remain hopeful.

My problem is that once I've sunk a month into the thing, I'm likely to keep on playing for a year, whether I'm enjoying it or not.

I did that once or twice, not a year, but I played several games (Vanguard the worst example, played that for 6 months or so and stopped really having fun sometime during the 2nd) quite a few months past the time when I stopped actually really wanting to play them.  When I quit, I always felt like I'd wasted a huge chunk of my life doing something that, deep down, I didn't really want to be doing, just because I had already invested X hours of my life into it and felt that it would be a waste not to continue.

I don't do that anymore. :)  You shouldn't either!

Fuck GURPS, I want Car Wars online.  Any game where you can make a roll to see whether your wheelchair mounted LAW rocket pierces an SUVs window and repaints the interior in a team color yet unseen by Home Depot is a game I want to be a part of.

I think MMOs will need a huge jump in technology to really change.  To add the story and interactive nature that people desire will require a new generation of computers and software.

We really just have Co-op oblivion at this point with a very limited ability to change an in-game world.

I disagree. 

1) People want to have fun. 

2) If you create a good ruleset, players will forgive the look (to a degree). Personally, I'd play a pvp game with stick figures if the mechanics were good.

3) Players say that they want to affect the world, but they really just want to a) have fun and b) feel like the main character in the story.  Make players feel like the hero and they'll forget wanting to change the world. Give them worldly objectives instead.

The current engines already exist to make good games.  Designers just need to stop getting in the way of the player's ability to have fun. 

I'm not talking about graphics.  MMOs will change when players can really experience epic stories by BEING their class.

I agree that having fun is important, otherwise MMOs wouldn't even work now, but I'm talking about how we have fun.  MMOs need to Cover up EXP with meaningful progressions, making every quest a story on par with final fantasy like narratives, and then teaching a player their class in a subtle way that makes them an expert.  Think about it.  We learn to play our class on the forums, reading peoples tips and builds.  Questing now is only there to serve as a way to fill a meter.


MMOs are basically FPS Multiplayer games with strategy interjected.  Strategy being: filling your niche and tweaking your build.  You get to a top rank, tweak your build, and play.

And I'm not saying PVE is that important, it's about really making things massive and interactive so that playing WITH people is an amazing time.  That includes PVP.

You said that MMO's need a jump in technology.  I disagree.  It's not technology holding back the medium, it's thinking. 

If you aren't talking about graphics, then how the hell is "technology" holding them back?

I came from an era where text games held my imagination better than most graphical MMO's.  Technology isn't what caused stagnation in the MMO industry, it's the lack of creative idea generation coupled to investment dollars all chasing the next_WoW.

making them more sophisticated.  more complex code AND graphics for more complex games.

there is no room for imagination in most mmos today.  its about being the best and fucking up the other guy.

which is fine, i'm all for that.  but it could have both.

yes, and those ideas wont happen until depend better mmos.

No, they don't. That would suck. I hate it when games try to tell me stories, especially to the extent that Final Fantasy does. That wouldn't take new technology, anyway. That's stuff we've seen in games for decades.


I would argue that introducing storytelling into the game would conflict with interactivity. I already have an amazing time playing with people, if the gameplay mechanics are solid and interesting. I don't want to read a bunch of stories or watch some cut scenes first. I just want to play the damn game.

Thank you for this.  You said it better than I could. Storytelling is fine in a single player game where you interact with the environment.  In a multiplayer game (especially one bragging about being MASSIVELY multiplayer), I want to interact with other players.   

thats not even what im talking about.

it proves my point that people can't even hold the concept of a better MMO in their head because of things are done now.  They fall back on old ideas like "too much story = bad pvp" or whatever.

Again, it will be a long time before a company beats blizzard because the fans will have to be sick of the scope of mmos now.

Then tell me what we need more technology for rather than just waiving your hands in the air.  We don't need photorealism to make a good game.  We have technology in place to make a good pvp game.  Hell, if someone would just make EvE more like Elite, I'd pay money to play it. 

Well, perhaps if you could actually describe what you're talking about we'd conceptualize it. You're essentially saying "They need to be better!" You use abstracts like "more complex code" or "interactive nature". Those words don't mean anything.

Keep in mind some very sophisticated systems have been tried:

SWG: Player built, run and managed cities. Political positions (Mayor).
AoC: 1-20 Story Driven progression, Day/Night Cycle mixing SP and MP play
Shadowbane: Resource management and control and player run destroyable cities
EvE: Fully functional capital market and economy

You can argue that these failed due to poor execution, but that's not a technology issue.

Reminds me of yesterday at my work (Im a desktop support tech). This hot secretary got a minor virus on her machine, but I decided to fuck with her by saying shit like...'oh fuck, now I think I'm going to have to quarantine your network segment'. She was like, oh no that sounds horrible...I'm soooo sorry!

It's like in movies when the hacker always has to find a way to bypass (or backdoor) the firewall. Good stuff.

Give me the swords and sorcery version of Eve and I'd never look at another game again.

L2R

Ah ok. So you think all MMOG's should be like Final Fantasy. Because that's the only fucking salient point in the above. Unless you consider vague abstracts like "meaningful progressions" and "subtle ways" salient. Which they're not. You act like you've posted some revelation - you haven't, in fact you haven't even added much to an old complaint. Learn to write new fish.

Quick , someone skateboard around the Gibson

No, I'm saying MMOs should have more than just grinds with 3 trees to spec in.  I used FF as an example everybody knows for story telling, not that that should be the end all, be all of the game, but a part of the whole.

Stay with me now because I know i'm using ideas that go beyond spamming worthless shit on the forums or crying about how you can't level fast enough.

You all don't understand! The things need to be more MASSIVE!!!

Despite being total sarcasm, that's an interesting point. During the end of my time with WAR, it felt more like a bland TF2 with a GIANT lobby. Unfortunately, they decided to fill that giant lobby a goddamn bunch of necessary bullshit to compete. /snore Imagine having to grind on AI to unlock the weapons for team play in TF2. That would be lulz.

Be great if you did use ideas. Right now your just saying bullshit we've all heard before. How about you explain what you mean without the empty platitudes? You know, actual systems and mechanics that you think would work instead of the fucking worthless buzzwords like "meaningful progression". Believe me kiddo, we've heard all that before. "Interactive questing! Involved story telling! Meaningful progression! Guiding Narrative!".

Who here believe anyone in an MMO reads the quest text, especially if you get red circles and arrows and a little guy on your shoulder shouting warmer, colder?

Children read quest text and some, but not all, roleplayers.

My son is 9, he plays WAR with me.  Like his father he could care less about some silly text (which I force him to read anyway because his reading needs work).  Red circles and arrows rule!   z

I was bored of Tor/Serpents on my second character, after ditching my Witch Hunter to play a Swordmaster, so I decided that I'd supplement my leveling with quest grinding.  It's a grind, no doubt, but once I reached the t4 zones my levels just started to fly.  It's fast by an MMO's standard, but only for certain classes.  My Swordmaster could aoe down groups of quest mobs and solo through the second stage of a PQ, not many classes can do that, so I can see how leveling through PvE can be frustrating.

I was lucky to roll on a server with a decent population, and playing Order we get instant queues and have plenty of keeps to take, but there isn't really much impetus behind taking a keep when the Lord drops completely random bags.  If every BO were a mini PQ with a potential blue/purple bag and every Keep were a gigantic PQ, with similar mechanics as the Witching Night event, then I could see a pretty huge influx of players to the RvR lakes.

Completing the Witching Night PQ has dropped us a Gold bag every win and at least 5 blues and purples, and we've got just under a Warband there.  The last time we took T4 keeps with a groupl of 10 people, only 3 ended up getting a bag above blue in 6 keep completions; that's a pretty fucked up disparity.

I'm sorry, but adding items REwards as incentive to do any RvR at all is just bad game design. Especially when the items are only a few stat points and resist points better than your green.

It either turns into people doing the RvR for the item rewards, because they're actually BETTER than their current loot, or people not doing the RvR because the items suck. They need to find a better way to do it, dangling the item reward carrot as the end all/be all fix for everything is old and tired. Why can't they find a better way to push people to RvR similar to DAoC?

edit: typo

Thank you for your anecdote.

I had a bit here talking about your son needing more patience, but I really can't be asked to give a shit about his vocabulary or attention span.

Edit: And yes, I know I'm a dick.

The item wards wern't added last minute, they were actually planned; which is simply an additional kick in the nutterbutters.

You're right. And everyone who raided Serpentshrine Cavern were there because they were really concerned about the water supply in Outland becoming monopolized by Lady Vashj.

Right?

More hate, less content.

More learning to quote :/

I totally wiped raids because I was secretly a Naga sympathizer, and not because I sucked.  I swear!

I never noticed before this, but you really can't stand to be told you are wrong, in any context.  This wouldn't be surprising if you weren't wrong so often.

I don't mind being told I'm wrong, I just mind being told by a sample size of 1 that I'm wrong. Go play a kids game, see how long those kids sit around the quest givers. His kid not reading is probably more a byproduct of him not reading the quest text rather than the game providing lame context. I would recommend Wizard101 and Toon Town for examples, but I haven't messed around with toon town so it may be a shit example.

Edit: Another great example is that newspaper from Club Penguin - Penguin Times I think or something of that nature. Pretty sure they put out a press release that it's the most read newspaper in the world or someshit. What's the percentage of adults that reads anything from an "adult" mmog I wonder. I'd imagine it's 1/10th that of the kids and their overactive imaginations (a healthy thing, btw) reading stuff like the Penguin newspaper.

I don't think you're wrong nor do I think my sampling rate of one is right.  /shrug

Here's the link to that story. (http://www.latimes.com/technology/consumer/gamers/la-fi-clubpenguin30-2008aug30,0,5441892.story)

Penguin Times has a distribution of 6.7 million and attracts 30 000 players submissions DAILY.

Some kids sit down and read everything. Some don't. Just like normal players.

Back to WAR: the actual way lore text and mission objectives are presented makes it clear that the mission text is just fluff. It's in a paler colour and has a very tenuous link to the actual mission objectives, which are spelled out in black at the bottom of the screen. A lot of the time I just accepted everything, then checked the map to see what I should be doing.

The mission lore makes no sense to me. It's like "There are gods, and then there are ELDER GODS. Do you see what paint is on my face?! I wish I knew what my mother looked like. OBJECTIVE: KILL TEN RATS!"

If you want to be able to progress solely through RvR, you need a mechanism that rewards players in a similar (and probably better) way to PvE. It also encourages players out of the safety of PvE.

I think there would be a decent case - if RvR is indeed the core of WAR, hahahaha - to say that RvR should contain the best loot and rewards in-game.

I also read a few before getting over it.

"Blah blah blah sorrow, blah blah blah darkness, blah blah blah revenge, please return this book to the library."

If WAR were a PvP game at the core, PvE would be something you did WHEN THERE WAS NOTHING ELSE TO DO.  Instead PvE is the source of the best gear in game (granted, they put the pve in some contested zones... but meh).  Something is wrong with this picture.  

I really think they spent the last big chunk of beta dev time on developing the PvE itemization to cover the gaping lack of RvR content and itemization.  The renown sets are just embarrassing and were itemized in a MUCH earlier incarnation of the game (pre-January full beta relaunch).

Lol, I don't think he was trying to refute your assessment (which you have debated nicely in the post above).  I think your comment about kids reading in games prompted him to tell a story about his kid, reading, and playing the game,... cause parents love their kids. 

So he tells a nice story about his kid trying being like his old man, lol, and then you break out the blackjack and apply some f13 'justice', er, hate.  I couldn't figure out why you were being such a gratuitous dick at first.  Now it's just funny.

I've read every single quest dialogue/text I've encountered in any MMO(G/RPG) I've played since 1. january 1998 - though I might skip it if I'm on my 5th character, doing the same quests.

huh, I think the quest text is great


certainly made my questing a lot more fun once I started reading the quest texts

It wouldn't really work, would it? Auto-attacking very slowly with your greatsword while somebody else auto-attacks relatively slowly with his daggers. Meanwhile, several minutes away by witch rebirth, somebody is shooting another person slowly with a crossbow because they fell asleep while harvesting dirt.

However, much of what is good in EVE should stolen by somebody wishing to make a game that doesn't involve always being in a spaceship or vehicle.

donkey caravans ftw. lol, going town to town selling gold n silver. Native barbarians blocking a bridge? Coooool.

I was being too lazy to type out all the things I'd like to see stolen from Eve and put into a Swords and Sorcery game.  The combat system isn't one of the things on my list.  Off the top of my head:

1.  Sandbox
2.  Central safe area
3.  Outer regions open PvP and incentivized
4.  Thriving economy (how to implement this in a fantasy game would certainly be a challenge since Eve's success comes from so many resources being lost in PvP)
5.  Resources to claim and fight over in the outer regions

etc.

Me, too.  I'll readily admit I'm probably in the minority.

Strangely, it's part of the reason I don't like grouping.  I want to read everything, and I can be a bit slow at reading.  Everyone else is <click> <click> <head to red spot>.

Here you go (http://www.petitiononline.com/bbuo/petition.html)

I always read the quest text. The problem is that the quest text is often not that good. The quest text should actually explain what the objectives are in context of the world. They often just throw out some fluffy story full of Warhammer style, but leave the directions in meta game speak. While the meta game speak in black text makes the objectives clear (most of the time), it's all too easy to just follow that text and skip the lore. Which means the lore as written is a failure not because it isn't interesting, but is separate from the game experience. To be fair, WoW isn't really that much better, which is obvious since this system was ripped wholesale from WoW with the red blob on the map added.

(http://i19.photobucket.com/albums/b190/16509/ForumLulz1.png)

Fuck this kid is worse than HRose, at least he clarifies afterwards so that we can see into the method of his batshit insanity.  Please, explain how "BEING your class" is different than "filling your niche and tweaking your build".  Are you talking about Morrowind/Oblivion style leveling where your skills improve as you use them, and thus players are encouraged to cockblock themselves?
Which makes me wonder why people put up with and even rationalize gear/level grinds and other forms of catassery in MMORPG's when the shit just isn't fun and is a blatant time sink.  Can a game sell well which uses a short level grind as a form of gating content while you are learning your class, and gear as a form of play style customization rather than an alternate form of progression once you are max level?

Quest text isn't read because there is no reason to read it (because the quest summary) and players just want to get their grind on.  Having voice-overs and giving out temporary buffs (or exp?) if the player sticks around for the text would solve some of this, having the actual instructions for performing the quest spelled out in the "flavor" text would solve the rest.

P.S. My first post, so: MARK JACOBS HAI LOOK HERE!
P.P.S Tried to cut down the size of my novel, it's hard with the quotes and image.

Eh, not so much on the voiceovers. For one, listening is much slower than reading. For another, even EQ2 which launched with a large amount of voiceovers couldn't justify the expense of doing it for all quest givers at launch, and certainly couldn't thereafter.

The best way to "solve" this is to not look at quest text not being read as a problem. Look deeper. If the lore doesn't matter a whit, then you might as well just hand out MS Outlook accounts and fill people's Tasks daily. All this talk of IP over the years has made me smile. It has never mattered. The genre has devolved to those aforementioned Outlook Tasks with the only "choice" being whether to do it or not.

If you want people to care, then provide actual choice. Rip stuff off from RPGs. Yes hard/complex/expensive. But I'd argue there's a heck of a lot more replay value in making the other choices than there are in simply playing a different class.

For stories to matter you need to make choices that matter in the context of the story. Otherwise, you're just one of the millions of assembly line workers waiting to rotate to a different station.

Darniaq, JRPG's have consistently proven that people don't give a crap about choice. What most of them want is bishies, boobs and lots of agnst, not choices. Angst = epic. Just look at most of Shakespeare.

VA's vs Reading. Passive > Active. VA's win. You'll still run into the people that were so lazy that they couldn't even be bothered to hold A to play the audio logs in Bioshock, but those gents should be, in theory, the minority. Since VA's cost more than writers, and AoC has shown that if you're gonna do VA's with quest text, you better do it all the way or get ready to eat some flak, odds are that most mmo softhouses simply won't bother with them. Infinite Undiscovery also got flak for this (and also for being a shitty jrpg).

What you're saying though is the very essence of why MMOs are the way they are. If players don't want choice, then there's no reason to give it to them, there's no reason to write good story, and there's certainly no reason at all to spend extra buck on voice acting.

At the same time though, we wouldn't have gotten Fallout 3 if there wasn't a history of such games stretching back to the 1970s in which players could live out the results of their actions.

WoW probably makes more money per month than the combined unit sales of all Western RPGs in the last four years. But that hasn't proven to suck up the total will of all gamers everywhere into the one game to rule them all  :grin:

Yet.

 :grin:

Or it could be argued that people who like JRPGs don't give a crap about choice and just want bishies boobs and angst. Those of us who hate JRPGs generally hate them for the lack of choice they tend to give you - oh and the weirdness.

I think the argument that technology needs to progress for decent PvP is actually accurate.  The barrier that needs to be overcome is enabling several hundred to several thousand concurrent users play in the same area simultaneously.  That really is the elephant in the room with WAR, they cannot enable enough folks to be on a server to ensure a large enough population to create a viable PvP environment.  If they did the game would be a slideshow (I remember a few battles against Six Mouths being an excellent example. 

The state of technology now simply does not allow enough concurrent users for a large scale RvR/PvP game to be viable.  Developers are forced to heard players into scenarios/BGs because that is the only way to ensure that players will have a stable game experience.

Of course companies will never admit that... Why, I have no idea.

I see your point. However, technology isn't the only problem. I could run DAoC right now on my computer with 100+ people fighting at once and be fine. The problem is, is that as technology increases, there is more weight put on prettier graphics than there is for 100's of people being able to play in the same area.

Prettier graphics = more people look at the game and want to play it = more money. You can have this pretty graphic intense game on the front and simply say "play with hundreds of people in battles for cities and keeps!" on the back of the box, and while that's true, the fact is your computer is going to run like shit in order to do it. However, a new MMO that shows a game with 3-4 year old graphics on the front, but on the back says "play with hundreds of people in battles for cities and keep, SMOOTHLY" isn't going to sell nearly as well, even if it runs a lot better.

Nobody wants a 3-4 year old graphically dated game even if it runs smoothly in huge fights. People want pretty shit, even if it runs like dogshit in large fights. MMO are never going to change from this.


You can compare music, and MMOs in a very unique way.

30 years ago, before the advent of the computer, CDs, mp3 players, ect ect. listening to music was an experience. People that were big into music would hound around record shops, pick up the latest albums or pick up albums from bands they've never heard before. They would go home, sit in their room and listen to the whole album. They would look at the artwork on the vinyl packaging, read the lyrics, daydream, but they would sit there and actively enjoy the music.

10 years ago, before the advent of WoW and the mass-marketing of MMOs, playing a MMO was an experience. People would set aside hours of the their time to explore everquest, or UO, or any mmo out at the time. They'd use the chat in game, find groups, adventure into dungeons with the group, kill dangerous monsters without knowing how difficult they are. They would learn about items and quests from the players, and trade with tells. It was an experience and it was fun, not because of the next best item drop, or because they were rewarded for every action, but because it was an experience. They would hear about the scary Albion or Midgard realm, and how they were out in the RvR zones and taking keeps. People would band up and go out there and stop them? Why? Because fuck Albion or Midgard or Hibernia! They were your enemy! They should be punished and killed and stopped from taking your keeps!

Nowdays, music has almost become background for people. Nobody listens to full albums anymore. Everyone has thousands of MP3s on their ipods, and if you were to play a song at random they probably don't even know the band or the lyrics half the time. Artwork is all but gone. Packaging is non-existent with people buying mp3s online. People have music in their phones, with shitty tiny speakers, or ipods with shitty 128kbps transcode mp3s and crappy earbuds. Those truly in love with music are flooded by the retards that have multiple Ipods but whos whole music decisions come from MTV or other mainstream source.

MMOs are the same way. The market has been flooded with people not really playing MMOs for the experience, to explore, or group up and to share items and stories. Everyone's on their own now. Solo grinding to 50, having every quest marked out with circles, fucking arrows, and if that's not enough you can check websites to see the exact fucking /loc. Nobody does shit anymore unless there is a carrot and a reward in the form of a shiny new bullshit item they can show off. Christ, look what havok the scenario endgame scoreboard has caused. People pointing out class imbalance, tier imbalance, XP and renown imbalance. The "Waa he earned more XP than me but I played better!" bullshit. Everyone wants to win and win now. Nobody wants to open RvR because there isn't a big enough carrot out there for most people, and its not fun for the others. Instead of fixing the not-fun part, they decided to add more carrots to chase after.

Its frustrating to watch the MMO field deteriorate from what it used to be into what it is now and I never see it changing.

Speed reading is fast, careful reading takes more time, listening is the longest of the three options.  But people with short attention spans might listen, and many would listen if your NPC granted them a small amount of experience for listening, or if you gave them a small buff to increase their grind time on that specific quest.  Beyond that, it's in the hands of your storytellers,  make of that what you will.


Warhammer chose the most shitty engine possible to test large scale pvp on.  Seriously, when a engine publisher fails to fix a well documented CTD (Alt+Tab lulz) in 6+ years they have no right to be in business.

double post

This patch has added horrid stability issues for me. Long load times, crashes. DC's, the client forgetting my keybindings (shit you not).

Over the last year I've begun to wonder if the technology barrier is actually just a red herring.

• Let's say that barrier wasn't there. We're all on T3 connections, have Falcon boxes with 24" monitors and all live alone in a soundproof room so we can blast the audio to hear every footstep.
• Now imagine the user experience. A battle populated by thousands of random anonymous non-accountable webtards. Then scale that back to the most recent pickup raid you were on.  :ye_gods:

I don't think we're far away from big-scale battles technically. PS could do it well enough, as could SB. Better UI and more engine-appropriately-styled graphics and they could have nailed it. And that was years ago.

Nah, where I see the real problem is that few people outside of Eve are addressing the Command and Control structures absolutely necessary to getting people to coordinate in a large battle. So instead we get games that compartmentalize battles whether onto separate servers with player-based longterm advancement goals or into separate zones where each battle roles up into an aggregate representation of your side's net worth/gain.

I'd wonder if this is the case not because of technology but rather because of the players.

For those who haven't seen it, Massive Action Game (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massive_Action_Game) looks to offer a number of things Darniaq talks about and up to 256 players a match.

I think one issue that that players like to feel important, but the larger the battle the less important they probably are. Also, the larger the number of players, the bigger the play area you need for some tactics, which in turn potentially leads to players using guerilla tactics / quick ganking. No-one likes getting killed quickly and people want a 'fair' fight (what fair is, of course, is up to the individual).

Wow, I'm exactly like that, too.  Not only do I make a point to read all the text and dialog, I hate missing out on missions/quests so I specifically go out of my way to do as many of them as possible.  I'll actively slow down leveling so I don't miss missions, including avoiding grouping so I don't get too much experience and/or giving myself debt to cut down on the exp I do get.  I'm sure my in-game friends think I'm asocial or unfriendly or something. 

The best thing CoX ever added to their game was the whole Flashback system.  I group much more now that I can go back and do old missions whenever I want.

I don't think most really want this.  Every discussion of war always turns up something about zergs and imbalance and how people hate getting rolled.

Let's say the engine could handle 500 people in the same place.  What are the odds of that being a balanced number?  What are the odds of the skills or class balance being even?  What are the odds of one side getting rolled?  What are the odds that the rolled won't think it was fun?

It really is. I think part of the problem with the WAR engine is the goddamn particle effects. I run fine on most things, but the sheer plethora of eye-raping particle effects on every fucking character is frightening. Hell, the damn poof of smoke from the horse mounting and dismounting slows my machine to a CRAWL.

EVE proves that large scale pvp is technically possible, so does daoc, SB, Planetside, and even UO & EQ for that matter. Neither are exactly cutting edge in tech terms.

Mythic are targeting 2k concurrent per server because that is what Mark believes is the maximum for community building reasons. Assuming he is right, Mythic need to do more to funnel the 2k into the same places.

Firstly they need more ways for new players to play with old players, basically they need something better than the chicken - they need proper sidekicking (and incidentally, why isn't proper sidekicking compulsory in all games?), and they need some more substantial way for lower tier realm objectives to feed through to upper tier outcomes.

They also need better ways for players to find each other within tiers. Moving closer to the daoc new frontiers realm war map and teleport supply line system would help in RvR. Having a single scenario queue starting random scenarios for each tier would help in sport-PvP.

I play with the sound off so I'd just hang out by the NPC till I got the little popup or whatever that told me I was now buffed and off I'd go.  Pretty much for me the lore of any of these games is meaningless, it either reads like Dirzzit fan fiction or something from the slush pile at  Cracked.  Every once in a while I come across something that is worth the time it takes to read through but it's pretty rare.  For me the story that counts in these games is mine, the rest is just background noise.

I just don't think there is a desire for this kind of storytelling in the modern MMO.

I mean, the writing could be top notch in WAR. It could be really good. My character could have been face with issues of epic proportions.

But I skip it. Immediately. It's not that I read it and then dismissed it as not good enough or not on a scale of my liking. I never picked up the book.

I don't think any amount of amazing storytelling will make people want to pick up that book.

I hope your joking or Mark was just lieing to cover up technical issues. I realize they must have nowhere near 2k per server now but they've split the playerbase up so much with their design that it feels like a ghost town. 2 sides * 4 tiers * 3 pairings * 2 zones per tier = lonely.

Sometimes I wish I had decided to not wait 90 days.  I love it when people who should know better cock up this badly.  On that note: how does the sound engine perform?  Is it like Oblivion where you can cut your framerate in half by mounting up and riding if you don't have state of the art sound hardware?


Of course some people still won't care, but nothing a developer can do will make them care unless they actively punish them for not caring (sticking hints in the text to prevent player death).  But if you give the player the option of staying or going as they please, and then give out a small buff after the NPC has said it's piece most players will stick around if the buff is worth it.  Currently MMO's are built in such a way that actually paying attention to the story is detrimental to leveling time, which is a highly emphasized aspect of the game.  This would redress an imbalance, nothing more.  Actually making the narrative not suck is a different department than the game mechanics guys.

I think the argument that the EVE engine supports large-scale pvp is specious.  I know every 200+ battle I participated in either crashed the node or was lagged so badly I literally had no control over my ship.

Is there a single example of a game able to manage 200+ players in a small area without crashing or absurd lag?  If there is I haven't seen it. 

Until that barrier is overcome you will not see large scale PvP/RvR games that do not use a scenario/bg/mission model.  Community size/management has nothing to do with it (look at eve, they have 100k+ on the same shard and the large bumber of players have resulted in a very interesting community).

I haven't done much pvp in eve lately, since I've been occupied with many new games (fallout 3, ra3, and previously warhammer) but supposedly they patched in stackless io so that it is less laggy now and playable with 200+ players.

I haven't experienced it, but there's a number of posts on the forum praising the changes.

Here is more info on the patch. (http://myeve.eve-online.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&bid=584)

I really liked the flashback system for the little I played since they've implemented it.  With my duo character, we stayed in debt from 20 to 32 to be able to do all the stories, which put us mid-way through the fifth debt badge once they added those.

While I hate levels, I am appreciative CoX has done so much to reduce their impact when it comes to playing with others and not making old content useless.

EVE is fine with 200 players. DAoC was fine with 200 so long as your graphics card could take it or you had enough presence of mind to lower graphics setings, and obv so long as you weren't playing in Europe on an Opentransit day. Planetside is also fine with 200.

Those who played SB also report that SB was fine with 200. Or at least, it was no worse than it was with 20 players.

Eve is fine with 200 players as long as 20+ of them are not camping the gate with Motherships and Carriers with all their fighters assigned out... total lagfest.

DAOC was more then fine with 200, I barely had issues. I could even still land Perforate Artery with a 2h as a Shadowblade there was such minimal lag. WAR, no way... you have to have a screaming machine in order to get 0 lag like that.

Shadowbane would get a bit laggy but it wasnt anything that I couldnt handle. I had a mage/channeler so I just flew up above folks to stay out of the mess on the ground.

Either way, I think the end of DAOC most folks could see what WAR was going to do. Go way overboard trying to make their game look as shiny as possible losing most of their dedicated Mythic fanbois in the process. Hell some of the most dedicated DAOC people that moved over to WAR (from my old server) have already gone back just because playability issues.

Eve has gotten a lot better since then.

I have to agree that the low server population is their biggest game breaker at the moment.

It's not too early, because with patch 1.05 they demonstrate to be the same of Blizzard:
unable to give the classes the intended purpose, they start dicking with them making all equal and boring.

I.e. they designed a variety of casters niches (glass cannon, utility, defensive, with pet, hybrid pet-melee brawler), and FAILED HARD at anything non strictly damage related.
Now, you'd believe that someone borking on utility / pets etc would fix it.
But no, the obvious fix is to still leave everything broken but put all on the same (too high) damage done, insta-killing diversity, niches, flavour, everything.
This is why "early" was the time to move the sub forum and not at WoTLK launch.



If I recall correctly, it got five charges.



Issue: the 10M or so "new playerbase" who WoW kind of made out of previous thin air, have a mindset to want such kind of gameplay.
Put something innovative and they'll just reject this and every time you'll see "but WoW did this feature like that and was fun => this new game sucks".

It's sadly why all go for WoW clones: you know you'll fail, but fail mildly by doing so. The CEO and his 4-5 friends will still keep their new Porsche in the end. No investor wants to have the current today's MMO insane expenses for 3-5 years and then fail HARD because you tried something new.
I have seen an overhyped-almost-vaporware MMO with EQ1 playerbase expectations go so fast down the drain that at launch it only got 35k subs and after 2 years there were 500 players left.



They took a pragmatic approach at the imbued idiocy you get when you mess with millions.
It's why their game actually works for the millions. Basic-easy rules, inane carrots everywhere to corral the huge sheep.
While I hated the "everything-canned-and-guided" approach, this results in a game compatible with what humanity brings when you have to deal with the millions.



The big problems are:

- it's hard and costly to license a solid franchise (this brings lots of fans though and it's kind of required if your target are the millions).
- the non indie MMO makers with any hope, experience and budget are an handful at best, the indie developers tend to cater to "another" kind of player base instead.



Yes, and it's the fact THERE IS NOTHING ELSE TO DO.
I play on one of those former 700 queue players and right now when I meet an enemy in T4 I almost want to hug him for proving there's at least two idiots who CBA getting there.



It's not MMO deteriorating, but the playerbase growing from 15-50k to millions.



Technology does not matter, when someone with Quake1 graphics, canned grinds and "farm 10 boars x 1000", no world persistance etc. etc. can dominate everyone else by ten times the playerbase.
They "got it" where it matters to attract all those numbers. Where it matters is NOT just technology, but using technology as a means to leverage on that intangible something they got and none else does.

Brucetastic!

If WAR was a book, it would be published on gridded paper, hand-texted by five-year olds. The actual story might be intelligent and captivating, but it does absolutely zilch to promote reading it. It doesn't even lamely ask you to.

They could solve a bit of that by allowing us to open the Tome during loading screens >_>

Some of the other points you said are fine, and I even agree with them. This chunk above though just seems to be a wistful tear for the days of Everquest 1.

I used to play EQ1. Loved it. Was very good at it. It was a horrible grind, but at the time, yeah I enjoyed it. Well, most of it. I didn't enjoy losing my level, or my corpse, or being LFG for long, peroids of time.

These days I'm no longer unemployed or a university student. I'm a professional in a full-time job/career. My relaxation time is far more valuable to me now. Gone are the days where I'd be willing to /hail every npc just in case they might have a quest to talk to me. I still read the quest text in WoW, because I enjoy it, but I'm no lonbger willing to tolerate much of what I tolerated in EQ. I like to play when I want to play. Fuck, in EQ1, I 2-boxed a druid/SK combo so I could log on and solo (being Australian, I played largely in non-peak times).

So yeah, as I've gotten older, the genre has matured and moved on. If you still like or prefer the older style of play, EQ1 is still there, with most all of the things you either loved or hated about it. I'm past that now though. My wife plays WoW with me, she was never interested in EQ, but when they gave us all the expansions and a month or so of free time earlier this year, I planned to show her the basics of how to play and give her a tour of the places I used to spend my time. Guk, PoJ, PoD, etc etc. I never got around to being bothered. I guess that illustrated to me more effectively than anything else that the old style of play doesn't hold anything for me anymore.

But if it's still your thing, you can always go back to it. All the older games are stil around for the most part. I just prefer the one that's currently the most polished, I can get home from work and get some stuff accomplished in a short time, then log off.

Reading text is something you do when you're not playing the game. I think there's got to be a better way of communicating story in a video game besides cutscenes and walls of text.

I think we've found one of the few gamers left in the world who has not played Half Life.

HL2 still had cutscenes. They weren't as bad as other games' ones but there was still al lot of you being locked in place while whatsername or her dad or the other scienticians babbled on and on.

They didn't feel like cutcenes though; at least, not to me. I think it was because there wasn't a camera in control of your view, and you were free to wander around the room and look at things while the scientists babbled on and on.

Heh. Maybe it might be kinda cool if the story was interwoven into the game, while you actually played the game. Has anybody thought of that yet? Cuz I think that might be kewl zomgz.

"Stay awhile and listen...."

They were worse.
No way to skip it.

I'd read my tome too if it wasnt constantly screwed up. Most times the War Story page is completely blank. I cant even look through the other quest lines except the one I am on because I cannot click it. I cant see how many of each mob I have killed either, just gives me a blanket total, say 1500 Elves... awesome. I know I have killed 1k DE but thats only because of the tome unlock that told me so.

I'll make another post about trying to claim a T4 zone this weekend and the buffoonery that followed.

Planetside. With a "standard" or better machine.

Actually Diablo made you click an NPC, read/listen to their stuff, then go back to the dungeon and get back to playing. Same as the rest. (But at least there wasn't so much of it.)

I hereby claim this idea for myself! Anyone who wants to use it must give me a quarter! And I shall call it... "E-mergent Content!" See that? The "E" makes it technological!

There is plenty of good PvP out there.  The problem is the old MMO companies are too busy clutching their old models, which seem to hurt PvP more than they help it.

Guild Wars had excellent PvP, Planet Side was PvP oriented, Subspace/Infantry/Cosmic rift has massive PvP (100 people in a zone) in 1996.  Heck, sub-space may have very well been the first MMOG (barring MUDs.)

The server model doesn't work so great with PvP.  In PvE MMOs you can always go do some PvE alone.  You absolutely need people together to PvP, so you need a more flexible server model.  It doesn't matter how good your PvP oriented game is, if someone cannot find people to play with or against your game is going to suck for them.  Subspace/Infantry handled this by each major map being broken down into multiple dynamic servers.  You character transfered between them seamlessly.  It was like picking a server in an FPS.

Instanced PvP thrives as it is available and interesting.  There is nothing wrong with your main PvP type being 6v6, 8v8, or 12v12.  You just have to put the work in to ensure you instanced/session based PvP is solid (which Mythic clearly didn't do.)

MMORPGs are failing as PvP games because they aren't being designed as PvP games.  They are being build off a PvE infrastructure and PvE concepts.

I played like, the tutorial missions and then dropped it. Just didn't grab me. Then again, I got HL just because I was interested in playing the Evolution mod thing with the aliens and marines.

Portal was kinda cool in that you never stop playing, but there's some story in there. Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past have minimal text and no voiceovers (I don't count "Tee Hee or Hey!", but still tell a story.

You should honestly pick it up again. My wife is a big Zelda fan (She has a Zelda jacket. Yes i have a wife that is exceptionally geeky, I love it), and she was entirely compelled by the story that was Half Life 2. The game itself presents a world where introduction of story is about as natural as it could possibly become - you never leave your character, people are literally talking *to* you (making eye contact, a big part of the design which Valve really wanted to get right), and the story is moved forward through natural means, and the closest thing to legitimate "acting" i have yet seen in a video game. After all, Half Life was the defining FPS shooter that said "You can have a story in a FPS, too" as opposed to the Doom and Quake games out there which basically plopped you down in a world with a gun and said "Go".

Nebu: We're talking about the single player communicating story sans cutscenes and walls of text...not multiplayer

My error. Deleted.

But but HL2 is so cool you are running around then the G-man pops up in the corner of your eye and then you turn to look and he is gone.

The story is so subtle but there is so much if you take some time to look.

Its such an elegant presentation.  Its awesome.

Just wanted to circle back on this...  In retrospect, the timing of the move to the Graveyard was pretty dead on.

Don't feel bad, that happens a lot.

This whole thing has made me desperately sad - I was hoping this would be the MMO that I could finally not hate - I've been involved with TT and the various 40K books and games over the years, and the fluff's interesting, and all mythic had to do was make the game like Tier1 & 2 all the way through.

Tier 1 - awesome
Tier 2 - good
Tier 3 - yawnsome
Tier 4 - we stopped playing.

 :heartbreak:

(http://img521.imageshack.us/img521/5808/hehdr3.png)

Me thinks someone should be having some words with the curse.com ad network guy.

Heh, also on the VN boards the WoW banners are all over the top and side. They have the Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead and the occasional WoW add even on the Warhammer Vault ;)

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/games/warhammer%20online/dealoftheday.png)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox/ref=cs_top_nav_gb27

Sup guys.

Edit: Ok, that was unfair. Nonetheless. Just sayin.  :oh_i_see:

Gotta boost those box sales for the Holiday season. Makes it looks good on the quarterly report.

I very quickly glanced at that ad for WAR that Schild posted and had to read it again as I thought the top line said 'Dead of the Day". I guess that's pretty much what my subconscious thinks of the game. I'm still going to stick with it for a bit longer, but I see it headed down the same path that AC, FFXI, and AoC took in my gaming library. It's about to become a new beer coaster.

At our local Gamestop Wrath boxes are flying like mad, you cannot find a Wrath collectors box yet you know what sits behind the counter still? 5 Collector's Editions for WAR, right next to that shit-tastic Tabula Rasa box thingie they tried to push out to people. I wouldnt doubt those CE boxes for WAR go on sale soon, like Trippy said to boost holiday sales numbers.

Man, the stuff I miss with AdBlock Plus.  Dang.

My thoughts on warhammer?

(http://stashbox.org/294305/snapit.jpg)

Damn, you're pretty serious about this shit. Hopefully your family/friends are still alive.  :ye_gods:

That seems like a balanced and rational way of dealing with your feelings towards a computer game.

Should I have greened that?

The best hope I have for this game is that someone sometime soon figures out how to make a private server. Then it will be worth playing. Problem is, I doubt anyone would waste the time and energy to come up with the code.

Uhm, don't step on any slivers of DVD and/or dreams.   :ye_gods:

Waffel wins.  None of you can approach that h8.  Congrats.

As a collector of MMO's, that was stupid.