f13.net

Ummm, wow?

http://citystateentertainment.com/camelotunchained/

Mark Jacobs is going to attempt to remake DAoC with his new company utilizing Kickstarter.  Obviously the content within DAoC and what Camelot Unchained proposes to use is Public Domain, but will EA stand by idly while MJ basically does a remake of one of their IPs?  Assuming of course CU ever gets off the ground.  Maybe he'll attempt to make it just different enough to get by, or maybe he's banking on EA not caring since DAoC is hardly a cash cow these days.  Should be interesting regardless!

"Unchained"  :roll:

Almost seems like he's daring EA to take notice doesn't it?

Eh, I figured hes sitting around going...

Need a name...
Camelot ...Camelot ...uh.....
*Django Unchained Trailer comes on*...
UNCHANGED! Unchained!
Camelot Unchained!

 :awesome_for_real:

There's an interview up on Massively:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/02/05/rvr-unchained-mark-jacobs-returns-to-camelot/

"Do you see this as the spiritual successor to Dark Age of Camelot?

No, not really. While legally I would be able to make a spiritual successor to Dark Age of Camelot, I would rather focus on making this game great rather than on it as a sequel. I want this one to stand on its own, even if it does draw on some of the same literature and traditions.

I'd like it to be very clear that we are not making a sequel. I won't try to tell DAoC players that our new project will meet all their desires in this regard. I have always valued their trust, so while I want the people who played my past games to look at this one and get excited, I won't go around shouting that it's the "spiritual successor to the greatest RvR MMO evar!" I'd rather simply say that we are working on a great concept for a new RvR-focused MMO that draws on some familiar European myths and legends, then go from there."

Emphasis mine.  I guess that answers that question.

So he's drawing on WAR then?

The people who made DAoC are now making TESO, Mark Jacobs made WAR.

Gave the same eyeroll to "Unchained" as everyone else. At least it's just a working title.

Other than that, I'm very interested in seeing how this turns out. I like what's he's said so far, now let's see if he can actually do it.

The Abe Lincoln gag got me. Bravo!

Which are the people who made Trials of Atlantis? I don't want to play that game. I want to play the game made by the people who made Shrouded Isles.

I'd like to get excited over this, but he's always been great at talking about what is planned (for DAOC, for Warhammer, for this new venture, whatever).  I'm too cynical after the Warhammer debacle to do more than eyeroll now.

I missed out on DAoC. I played it when it was first released, but it looked to me too much like an Everquest clone and I didn't last long. It was only much later that I heard how much fun the RvR endgame was supposed to be, and this was when the game was pretty old and I didn't fancy starting out as a newbie.

So maybe this will be a second chance!

After the debacle that was WAR and Jacobs dickish insistence that the game was just fine, needed no EXP adjustments and left people stranded at Tier 2 with nothing to do but repeat the same shitty content, he can go fuck himself.

Ahahahahahahaha...

People who fund this get what they deserve.

I will buy it.  I will play it.  I will bitch about it. 

I know myself all too well.

Nothing at all, followed by disappointment?

I doubt you will ever get what DAoC had originally ever again. Different time/expectations and all that. It's similar to how some people have all that nostalgia over the old EQ raids or whatever.

We can't go home again.

I wish him luck, but I won't be playing.  I'm just not into subscription games any more.

At least "the team" page is kind of entertaining

Mark's

Michelle Davies

This.

But if they can figure out how to combine the greatness of tier 1 PvP/RvR with long term character advancement...  Maybe that's asking too much.

If they promise to leave out the /face command, I'll send them a little money. You never know where the next decent PvP game is going to come from.

Get rid of /face and /stick and I'd love the game.  Also, LESS FUCKING CC PLEASE!

The 2nd pointless PVE expansion with ill-fitting lore was bad, but you really miss the first pointless PVE expansion with ill-fitting lore?

/face and /stick weren't a problem, the problem was the interrupt system. There are a million twitch PVP games you can play - like literally every other game - if you don't want /face and /stick.

They probably won't be in, but I'll consider that a mistake.

/stick to an enemy made assist trains overly potent.  /face was a crutch used by keyboard turners and people with poor situational awareness.

This game will also fail if they don't make positional data server side.  I would think that WG has proven that keeping these things server side does a lot to limit cheat programs. 

Yes.

- I didn't give two crap about the lore
-added classes was good for rvr
-UI changes and QOL improvements from additional mod ability, to being able to purchase stacks of items
-added leveling areas, made leveling faster so you could get through PVE faster.
-healing improvements which improved RvR healing and RP gain for rezzing
-class changes that improved warriors/hunters, sorc and theurg.  Nerfed stealth class RAs, LAxe nerfs which brought out the whiners
-introduction of respec stones
-first-party windows mode (instead of daocx)
-NEW HATS!

please hire PB please

Prediction: Within 48 hours of release there will be an obvious bug and they will announce they are "collecting metrics" on the problem.

Assist trains were potent because a character being hit by someone couldn't function. If a healer could heal through being attacked assist trains would have been much less useful, an active interrupt system would have meant spreading people out against targets, which means more people live longer in a fight, which is just generally a plus. /stick in particular also tends to make melee a little more viable which is often a problem in these games.

The thing I like about /stick and /face is it slows down the twitchy aspect of things and you get a more strategic pace in your combat. I'm not interested in testing the skills that removing them tests - bunny hopping, circle strafing, etc., all that stuff is lame IMO.

Circle strafing and window dragging were only effective because the positional data was client side.  If the positional info was client side you wouldn't need /stick and /face. 

I personally liked the interrupt mechanic.  It forced casters to think a lot more about positioning in a battle.  I played casters, healers, and utility classes a lot in DAoC and interrupts never bothered me.  They were a strong reminder that my situational awareness and spacing needed more work. 

When I heard about this I couldn't wait to read about the thread on here.  Then I was disappointed when a few people were excited.

Sigh.

I've always suspected you were a Dumbo Nebu, now you've confirmed it.  :oh_i_see:

Circle strafing is obnoxious as hell in *every* game. Maybe less in GW2 since every attack seems to be an AE of sorts, but still obnoxious.

He is nothing without Paul Barnett, I hope they merge to form greatness again!

Feel free to disagree with me.  What's with the insults?

Anyone who liked the interrupt system in DAoC is crazy, I am sorry. So many balance issues connected to that stupid fucking mechanic.

From the CU site:


Indeed.

From the Massively article:


So, will CU be going for something like a $US5m Kickstarter (or even US$1m+)? I think Jacobs over-estimates how interested people are in DAOC RvR that's a long way away. Or maybe I underestimate player naivety.

Also, didn't Mythic trademark "realm versus realm" to stop other companies using it? Why yes, yes they did (http://www.mmorpg.com/mobile/forums.cfm?ismb=1&threadId=147854).

Finally: sub-based = pretty high chance of failure. Because if CU isn't fantastic at the sub price, you can go off an play something good enough for free.

If I remember from every other DAoC discussion that has gone on here, he's probably still bitchy about thanes and just taking it out on you. But hey, at least there is no rehashed debate about what number of realms for the best RvR in this thread...yet :why_so_serious:

Assist trains worked just fine against people who could fully function as well and not just casters. For example - sometimes it was best to drop a det tank first, who did not suffer from having to worry about cast interruptions. Removing the /assist key won't do much now due to voice chat being even more used now compared to back when teamspeak and ventrillo were first coming out. It would still be beneficial, no doubt about it, since the ability to disguise oneself as a different class was huge (Firbolg heros using smaller shields to look just like their group druid for example) and would only make it take slightly longer to call a target but for my time spent as a main assist that was the only challenge I ever had while trying to call targets when first moving to voice chat.
/Face, while it was a crutch for keyboard turners, was also great for smart casters who wanted to keep line of sight, so it did have its good uses as well. Though /face would be pointless in today's games with autofacing and more lax line of sight checks being the norm.
The interrupt system was undeniably more difficult to be good with compared to today's games, but it was fine if people, you know, were coordinated and worked well together in a team game :-o. As stated previously it did require smart positioning from players when going into a battle.
As for living longer, that was never an issue most of the time for good groups facing each other on even terms, and there were plenty of long lasting fights. Yes there were plenty of steamrolls when outmatched/outmatching, the worst ones were actually at the hands of casters (pbae bomb groups). For the most part short fights were usually the result of outmatching or being outmatched or one team not having any RAs up as they just finished a fight and are getting in another fight right away.


So, serious question, were all of you zergers or something? Not just Ingmar and his crew, I'm only quoting him because everything in that post (and the last ten+ posts, and just about every other conversation when pvp of any kind comes up on these boards) makes it sound like that was the case. That would make quite a bit of sense why there's a lot of difference of opinion. It sounds like a bunch of RR2s in merchant gear wandering around complaining about mechanics when you lost to the the RR8+ group in custom gear as you roam Emain with only a single healer character, on caster speed, and no CC, purges, det, etc. I'm not saying DAoC was perfect, but besides some class balances for hybrids I was perfectly happy before ToA. It had a slightly higher barrier of entry, but there was a firm ceiling to how much gear could give an advantage and it was obtainable by anyone.

All that said, and as much fun as I had, I don't think pre-ToA DAoC would work today. The big money is in making the zergy sheep happy as possible (good luck accomplishing that, there's always something for them to bitch about). Even if everything was moved to server-side checks, even if all CC was removed, and even if the assist trains were removed and the interrupt systems were dumbed down to cater to the lowest common denominator, today's players just don't put up with game systems which require teamwork, strategy, build planning, etc. DAoC was a competitive game for the many who truly excelled in it, and it was not friendly to casual players and/or many people with schedules which did not permit many hours to play.

Random thought - while it would mean less server persistence, an ELO system could be sweet if implemented somehow

Apparently they forgot about MOC for casters.  It was a nice strategic ability that dealt with interrupts when you had melee on you or got in a bad situation.  Remember Sorcs when ToA came out?  MoC + SoI + LT for the win.  Kill 8 people at a time.

That would awful in the best of ways.

Plenty of people want DAoC again, not many would pay for it now though. RMT would be needed imo. If they did it some weapon glows, armor dye unlocks, xp potions, etc for real cash it could be sustainable. Maybe they could even go old school ala The Realm with a $4.95 sub and then add in some light RMT hybrid.

Yeah, MOC was huge. Also, people always forget about how important guard was. It's like most never played with a shield tank.

Ingmar was the thane, not Fordel. Fordel was a stinky furbolg hero.

Shit, thanks. I'll have to update my stalking notes! Though, if he was a firbie hero, I don't see what he has to complain about :why_so_serious:

I did not forget. I did say, "So many balance issues connected to that stupid fucking mechanic."


EDIT: Quoted myself PROPERLY, I had the "stupid fucking" in the wrong place.  :why_so_serious:

Nah, that's Ingmar.  Fordel was a Hibtard. :P

PS: As far as this bit of vaporware goes, I'll just continue my stance of pointedly never giving a dime to any game with Jacobs' name attached to it.

Also, a reminder: Midgard "zergs" on Igraine were ~10 people. So no, I am pretty sure I was not a zerger. I totally would've been if given the chance, though, I found 8v8 goddamn boring (I vastly prefered keep sieges) and I got sick of hearing them cry when they got "zerged" by another realm actually daring to move in a group bigger than 8 and not giving a fuck if the enemies they saw were only there to farm RPs instead of actually attack their realm (especially when they were Mids, because seriously, 8 people COULD be a keep attack force if it was Mids. :P).

Understandable. I can't say for sure either way. I wouldn't buy some $50 box or pay a sub of $10 or more, but I'd be open to the idea of MJ making something aimed at a smaller crowd that is not trying to serve corporate overlords or take on WoW.


Yeah, I think the "zergs" for mid on Bedevere were 10-11 people as well, but when needed the 8mans would get their shit together and tear it up before returning to our regularly scheduled farming program. It really was down there as lowest/next to lowest pop servers but you wouldn't be able to tell based on organization between premades.

IMO the MoC/kill 8 people! thing is a really good illustration of why the interrupt system was so bad. Because casters were so useless if someone was hitting them, their abilities had to be beefed up to the point of being dangerously overpowered when they *did* work. (And that's not even getting into gating stuff like MoC behind a bunch of RP grind.)

IMO MOC was a fallback tool on a long cooldown. If someone/group was only able to kill people when MOC was up, the problem is not with MOC and/or the interrupt system, it was with the players relying on it and thinking they were useless until it was up again.

Bad Mechanics are Bad. It's really not that hard to figure out. Casters either did NO damage, or they did ALL the damage (or possibly still NO damage depending on which era of resist stacking we are in). It was a fucking Binary system that made for awful, awful gameplay.

Bitch about needing less CC, but keep the interrupt mechanic that basically kept casters constantly CC'd.  :uhrr:

Since I never said anything about needing less CC, I'm guessing the part about bitching about less CC was aimed at Nebu?

As for the first part - true, for casters/groups that were not that good, adaptive, or coordinated. I guess it really is that hard to figure out for some.  :uhrr:

MMO devs need to take a step back and look at the damn market before shooting off another project.
Just how many subbed MMOs are people willing to pay for at the moment.
So stupid of these guys to keep diving in and flushing cash down the toilet.

I played casters in DAoC for nearly 5 years and had very few issues with interrupts.  Placement, knowing your range limits, and moving constantly while panning were key.  I found playing melee far more frustrating with all of the snares and stuns in game.

Yes, DAoC had some severe mechanics flaws, but I still found the system far preferable to many since.

Ohhh, sweet Lucifer's fiddle, I had to listen to this conversation twice a week for the entirety that my friends played DAoC.

Let's be real folks, this is never getting made.

What was your main?  I'm going to guess an Enchanter.

For the most part, enchanters had no real role in an 8v8.  I would have liked to try one though.  I played runemaster, shaman, healer, and theurgist mostly but also had a scout, ranger, hunter, blademaster, valkyrie, friar, skald, vampyre, and valewalker over RR7.  Once I figured out theurgist, that class was pretty ridiculously overpowered.  Especially with the range advantage that Albion got.  You could extend people like crazy and kill large numbers with a small force.  Still preferred mid though.  I loved playing that realm.  A good pac healer could really make things happen.  

Keep in mind that 99% of my play was solo on a stealther or in 8v8.  My play was probably a different experience from most people as we has a pretty tight 8v8 group with scheduled times.  I'm sure my gaming life will never be like it was back then and my view of things now would be pretty different as a result.  Rose-colored glasses from playing in groups with some very good gamers and all that.  

I've never played DAOC, but what was it about the interrupt system that made it so stabby? Did every melee attack count as an interrupt / hard pushback on cast times or something?  :why_so_serious:

Basically, if anyone so much as sneezed at you, you had a three second lockout to deal with. There was a point during the game where unsheathing your weapon while you had someone targeted would interrupt them.

If you were a caster there were many ways that you could have your cast time completely reset (worse than pushback).  This was to offset the distance that melee had to cover to close on a target.  The trade-off was that an uninterrupted caster did insane dps.  If you positioned well, kited, and used terrain, you could kill people insanely fast.  If they found you, you were toast in seconds.  It was the true example of a glass cannon in ways that were far harsher than mmo's since.  

You didn't have to read this thread.  You knew what was going to be inside.  

I'm just excited about the possibility.  WoT is the only PvP game worth playing right now and I'd love to think about an alternative, particularly one with nostalgia attached.

Now I had a Theurgist alt too, and I agree it was incredibly fun..  in PvE (relative to the rest of the classes in DAoC PvE, of course  :why_so_serious: ).  The reason I asked is I spent 99% of my time on my Minstrel or Ranger, both solo or grouped.  The only caster class that ever gave me trouble was a buffbotted Enchanter, and it was entirely because of the BS interrupt system.

Yea, making every single attack do pummel/kick as a side effect sounds like :ye_gods:. Those things have cooldowns in other games for a reason!

If there's an actual interrupt button the guy with the swords has to push at the right time, it's a lot more engaging -- it also opens up mind games like juking, casting different spells to draw out the interrupt, etc. Ditto with interrupt immunity auras (on a decent cooldown) requiring the guy with swords to use a CC ability if they want to get the caster interrupted.

This is exactly why Fordel called it a binary system.  Casters had to blow people up insanely fast since they would be rendered completely useless (outside of one cooldown) if a melee got on them.  It's a very poor way to balance a game.

I really cannot stress how binary the system was Zetor. A Caster either did nothing at all, or they literally 3 shot you. Maybe it took 4 or 5 if you were a tanky type or had some kind of cooldown available. A caster could spend entire fights trying to find 3 seconds of space, then once they found that space they obliterated 1-3 people near instantly.


Like, the only things that ever compared in WoW were things like 3 min mages using stacking trinkets and shit. Except DaoC casters could do this at will if they were allowed to cast.

It created some interesting combat strategies though.  Groups had to start using dedicated 'peelers' to keep healers and casters free.  Groups had dedicated interrupters and buff shearers as well.  While it was a very flawed system, it made for years of group building, theorycrafting, and strategy sessions that kept me well entertained.

Yes, the game was flawed.  Overcoming the imperfections and competing against players dealing with the same limitations is what made the game so enjoyable.

None of those things remotely required the casting system to be as utterly retarded as it was (is I suppose, DaoC isn't technically dead yet is it). They all exist in every other MMO with group PvP.

I agree, but it's what we had to work with... so we did the best we could.  I liked the idea of the interrupt system far more than the implementation.  I just wasn't offered an alternative that I enjoyed as much at the time I was nose-deep in DAOC.

I spent more time and money on DAoC than any other MMO in my life.  I have a biased view.   

Which is why you are a confirmed Dumbo!  :-P

 :heartbreak:

Now I never played casters outside of PvE, but was it really that bad?  On my server (Tristan) all of the top 8man groups were caster based.  I remember shortly after clustering began some people from the other servers were shocked to see full groups of RR9+ casters running around.  Hell we even had a RR8+ alb stealth group.

It wasn't unusual for a fire wizard to take me from full to dead in 2 nukes. Fully buffed, in a 99% spellcrafted suit.

Am I right in assuming that all the 'high-skill'/'zerg-busting'/'8vmany' roaming teams consisted of 2-3 people who locked down the enemy zerg with long-duration AOE mezzes, 2 healers to keep everyone alive, a tank to keep the healers alive, and 2-3 wizard types to completely obliterate an enemy force that couldn't fight back? :why_so_serious:


(well yeah, the specific number distribution is probably off)

We had different group builds for zerg busting and for 8v8.  The builds also changed every patch as adjustments to classes changed which class was ridiculously overpowered each patch.  That's how we learned to power-level toons from 1-50 in a day and most of us dual boxed two accounts.  Every patch we'd re-roll class or even realm to keep up wiith the changes, shifts in realm population, and the power curve.  I loved the days of getting RR5 in a weekend.    

It's starting to get a little weird to think about how seriously I took this game in the height of its popularity.  That's a place in gaming that I'm never going back to.

After the way Jacobs crushed my dreams with WAR,
I won't be funding this kick starter.

Also, people complaining about CC and interrupts in DAOC must not have gotten very high RR, and/or didn't have any good 8 man to run with.  Haha, even a good two or three man group was fun at high RR.

Don't worry, this game will be nothing like DAOC if Jacobs can help it....

That and proper magic resists in their gear.  Our healer/bard/minstrel was such a good demezzer that it was never a problem.  It was always 9s stuns that pissed me off the most.  Slam FTW!

Eh, it's a philosophical debate. I much prefer the Darkfall model of what the mechanics of combat should look like in open-world PvP (not based around tab-targeting and hits automatically connecting, lots of movement and few ways to restrict another's movement), even if I quibble with their implementation.

Nebu confirmed FOTM reroller!  :why_so_serious:


Zetor, group comp was entirely dependent on which patch cycle was live. Like for a good half year, it was possible to passively have something like 50-65% magic resist. Then Hibernia had access to a RA that temporarily boosted that resist up to like 90-95%, and a casting class that could debuff enemy resists back down into negatives. During that time frame Midgard and Albion just largely abandoned DPS casters entirely, Alb group maybe had a Sorc CC. While it wasn't uncommon to see a Hib group with 2-4 casters each, either AEing shitty alb clumps or debuff assisting organized squads.

But yea you mostly got the jist of it. Like this was roughly what most Hib 8man's looked like for years http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k30BBCCmQQY more or less. The main thing to keep in mind, is your average 8man squad had more buffs/healing/cc available to it then the 20-30 random folks that didn't have one available. This is on top of the obvious coordination advantages of having a set-team provides.




Blackwulf, did all that jazz, got the lousy T-shirt that goes with it. Still doesn't make CC and Interrupts in DaoC any less retarded.

You didn't already make that connection when he listed 13 classes with over RR7?  :awesome_for_real:

Yall forgot to mention Spamnesia and the other fun things that basically made DAOC combat revolve around who had the casters who were able to actually function at the moment. Or that magic relics didn't seem to give a +% bonus to spell damage, but instead just flat out capped spell damage on every hit. So a realm with 2 relics would go from balanced casters to even your AE nukes taking a huge chunk out of people.

Or the way they dealt with debuffs (a Con debuff was basically an instant cast giant nuke), or any number of things that made DAOC a mechanically flawed game.

It was fun, we had a blast. Give us a game with DAOC's mechanics again with another name and we'd all pan it in a week and call it the worst shit we'd ever played. Because it was not a good game. It was just the only game in town for one interesting mechanic: RVR.

Only reason anyone ever brought a Champion with them in a group.  :why_so_serious:

Everyone in this thread who thinks this game will be good, or hopes for it to be good should get the grief title of "Blackwulfed".

I'm pretty sure no one here actually thinks this game will even exist, let alone be good.


We just want to bitch about DaoC more.

The best part of DAOC was Thid alts and /20 or /30.

Something we agree on.  Yay!

I loved DAoC up until ToA (I quit literally the day before the expansion went live after having seen what they were planning). Then loved it again with Catacombs and the "Classic" servers. So, I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out.

As far as classes go, I played a Druid and a Mentalist the first go around. Then a Theurgist, Infiltrator, Reaver, Healer, Shadowblade and Savage the second go around. The guild I was with made a move from Albion to Midgard, thus the mix of classes I had. Never had an issue with casting spells outside of trying to cast when hitting lag and the server telling me I was still moving when I wasn't. Other than that, it was like Nebu said, just had to have situational awareness and understand where to place yourself to avoid the train.

Tristan was my Hibbie server, and it was odd being such a friendly yet very competitive beast. Hibs were really good with our caster groups that started pretty early on compared to anything I had seen. Of the servers I played on, none really ran caster Luri bomb groups like Tristan. The next one I saw that did it successfully was a guild, KOWW, on Mid/Bed after the Spiritmaster buffs. Those became a bit more common, but still nothing like Hib/Trist. The Alb stealth groups were incredibly common though on just about every server.


The basis was CC, Heals, Speed for most of our groups. What we willed it with after that varied quite a bit actually. Unlike Nebu, the people I played with didn't reroll every single time a new fotm came up and still had no problems. Shit, even after LAxe nerf we still ran Zerkers and even shadowblades (which a lot of groups frowned on assassins in their groups because they played with bad ones, but a good one positions wisely is a great boost to a group).

Something about wasting an entire 8man that you knew (damn I miss communities in games) who were equally buffed in Thid, while solo, that never got old :grin:

So totally this. I could play that for months, but once I leveled out of it, my will to live a virtual life in Camelot dried right the fuck up.

Oh a fellow Tristan Hibbie, why hello there.  But even with Hibs having high RR bomb groups, what about the Alb caster groups there?  Holydot's group was one of the more known ones, but there were multiple back then.  Hell Mid had some damn good caster groups too on that server. 

I can't really comment too much outside of what I saw from the sidelines though.  I did the solo stealther thing.  I would feed intel to certain hib groups though, if I knew they were around.

Hardly played in Thidranki, since Midgard was perma-/30. Caledonia forever!

Yeah, Holydot's group was fantastic. I don't think I ran across another Alb caster group pre-ToA that did anywhere near that good. Alb also had a couple of good infs, 1-2 scouts, and 1-2 minstrels (Killer, Cereal, and I don't really remember the other names after this many years). Mid caster groups I never was impressed by on Tristan.


Autoleveled skills anyways, so /level was irrelevant for the Thid farmers. Sad how fast rerolls got when you could not prevent capping out.

I dunno, dude, the only MMO to come out in the last few years that I've been excited about is TESO, and that's yet to be proven a flop.  In fact, I'm still pretty sure it's gonna be awesome :)

How soon till we see an "Camelot Unchained Junkies" hyperlink in your sig?  :wink: Maybe people excited about this Unchained game should get the title, "Draeganed."

No. Fuck you. :)

This.

Even if they could somehow capture the magic and put out an amazing RvR game from a mechanics point of view...  I think it would still be lacking without the community feeling that DAoC had.  Realm/Server pride and all that.  Seems most MMO players these days don't care for it. 

You're cute kid.  But thanks for reminding me to update my sig though.

The first 20 levels of WAR were good.  That's what gives me hope.  If you take the first 20 levels of WAR, balance it a bit, remove the shitty PvE, and add a third realm, I'll be satisfied.

Forgot to mention: No bright wizards!  Dammit.

I said the same exact thing on another message board, but I stopped at level 11 I think.

DAOC was garbage at launch. Jacobs can't build a full game to save his life.

DAOC, shit uninspiring leveling, remember how many times they palette swapped the same mob model? Hell I'm pretty sure only Alb felt like it was even finished at launch.

DAOC, worst class balance I've ever seen at an MMO's launch. In a post WoW world no game that imbalanced will ever be tolerated by anybody, including all you rose colored glasses guys.

DAOC pvp was so great? Really? At launch pvp where you could literally spend 20 seconds doing nothing but watching the fight if the other side didn't get around to killing you?

Did you guys not play Shadowbane? DAOC did literally nothing better, I'd argue the pve was worse in DAOC and not even because it took that much longer.

Fucking Lineage was a superior game. Fuck Mark Jacobs. Anyone who falls for this shit again deserves the crap game they are going to get. I have nostalgia, for AC1, AO, SB, EQ1, lots of old titles that I probably wouldn't enjoy now but there were aspects of them that were really cool but the way a handful of posters get around here with DAOC is just crazytown. The ONLY thing about that game you can say is great was the pvp and the pvp was fucking terrible unless you were willing to grind the fotm class through the worst pve experience I can think of in a sub fee game.

Hoax, man, climb down off that fence. Pick a side. Tell us how you really feel about this  :grin:

Ahem.

In other news, Mark Jacobs is Bold! And, a Risk Taker! Just Ask Him! (http://citystateentertainment.com/2013/02/foundational-principle-1-be-willing-to-take-risks-even-if-fortune-doesnt-always-favor-the-bold/)

Shouldn't you be playing Wrath of Heroes then?  :why_so_serious:

The only difference between the first 20 levels of WAR and the rest is that for the first 20 levels people hadn't figured out how to play optimally yet.  Depending on how long you stayed around, the first 20 levels largely ended up the same as the rest (read: grinding scenarios).

Er, no. Shadowbane didn't have RVR at all. They weren't the same kind of PVP game so comparing them like that is sort of pointless.

I disagree about the PvP after level 20 and I'll leave it at that.  Nothing I say will change your mind. 

CC was significantly worse.  There were other problems, but that was the big one I encountered (and caused in Tor...).

That's a pretty common Kickstarter dog whistle - "No publisher would cover this! And we don't care if its *spit* popular, we are just going to do it awesome!".

It looks like that risky, bold decision making extends to developing a Plants vs Zombies clone using the mostly publicly available Wizard of Oz IP (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uvewhEm3b8&list=PLM8Uz9REHvcrSKRyQ0YSI_yidRjfzrbh5).

That's kind of what unexpectedly killed my interest in Guild Wars 2 WvW. Not being able to see the name of my enemies led to not giving a fuck, as it felt like they were smart mobs more than players I had to learn to hate or respect.

You actually learn to hate/respect guilds and not players.  It works better that way because most of the time fights are on the larger end of the scale and you'll often not find specific people to learn to hate or respect.

Guild tag and server, definitely. Also, I'll recognize a couple of roamers, mainly Thieves, on sight. But mostly it's about the tag and server.

I am sure it works for lot of people or they would have changed it. It just doesn't do it for me. At all.

I'm with Falc here.  The WvW in GW2 did nothing for me.  I was bored with it in about 3 days.  I'm not sure if my boredom came from a lack of identity or just the mechanics in general.  The WvW just felt really bland.

Oh, I definitely feel the bland. Rarely is there a sense of urgency or accomplishment. No real server pride. It's nothing like DAoC in that regard. Not sure why I do it, to be honest. I just like this style of PvP, so I keep doing it I guess.

I'm just saying that when you've been in the same tier for a bit, there is a certain level of recognition of your enemy that happens. It's just guild tag or server mostly that you get to know and despise, respect, or otherwise, instead of an actual name or group of names.

It's the mechanics.  Every day, every week it's the same exact thing.  I've got people in my guild that play this shit for hours.  You get no rewards, not scoring, no gear, no progression feedback.  Just a points per tick measurement that flips minute by minute and an over all score.

Flipping positions takes a small amount of time.  There is really no insentive unless you get into the meta of playing with friends and getting into the whole competition thing on a daily basis.

On the surface it's very bland and I struggle getting worked up about it.  There is nothing "big" about it.  No moments of glory honestly.  Flipping a keep just means you finally worked your way in and now you move on quickly to the next point.  I kind of likened it to running around and pluggin wholes in the dam all night.

We'll see what happens with the new patch and I've got an idea what they're going to do that I think will be pretty neat.

edit to add:
I play and enjoy it because I really like the combat system.  It's very simple (less abilities) and complex at the same time (relies more on timing and synergy).

I did have one epic moment in GW2 PvP when my server held a small keep/tower thing against BOTH the other servers attacking it at once for over three hours. Last stand kind of moment. We lost, of course, but it was very pleasing to be able to hold out for that long (even for a long while after the walls came down) and frustrate the other two factions.

I think the GW2 combat system shines in 5v5, but is overshadowed by team build synergies.  I enjoyed the sport pvp aspect in GW2, but quit when my regular group moved on to other games.  I think that any new MMO could learn a lot from GW2.  I just hope they don't copy it completely.  GW2 did so many things right but pvp wasn't a shining example of them. 

Sorry but this makes me want to share my favorite memory from that game. I used to roll on Kay server Midgard. Vozk and Thbb my buddy and I had troll skalds. Before they remade thidranki with the robot siege we would bring in our own siege weapons. We found a spot up on the zone wall that we could place a trebuchet that had line of sight on the Albion teleport pad. We learned the timing and every time an alb port happened we would kill 90% of them with a treb bomb. The spam of kills was glorious to behold. The forum tears on VN were life sustaining. I miss those days.

Shrouded Isles introduced new race and class (Valkyns/bonedancers). The new areas were cohesive and fairly pleasant to run through, the new class and race were fun additions.

Trials of Atlantis, on the other hand, introduced massive cockblocks (the Trials) and having to level your gear by killing hundreds of particular mobs. It was the most idiotic way to kill a game I have ever seen. Having to wait for 40 non-idiotic people to kill a mob before getting to go to the next Trial was the height of cockblockism. Leveling gear? Please.

I'm enjoying Guild Wars 2 wvwvw. I do wish you could see guild tags on enemies though.

GW2 for me is a good substitute for DAOC. I never did the rvr for the rewards anyway but for the fun of it at the time. DAOC's pve was bad. GW2 is not.

I particularly enjoy not having to pay a monthly fee for it. The world is huge. I am still discovering whole zones I haven't visited.

 :why_so_serious:

But even so I liked SB. I just preferred old Emain + BGs. SWTOR sub50 kind of feels like BGs, with the added knowledge/belief that there's nowhere for me to go but down once I hit 50.

eta: I just found out about this today and I was wondering why there was no thread about it yet.  :oh_i_see:

My Dwarf RM used to swim around in the Thid circular river 99% underwater and wait until someone was alone near the banks. Bolt, Bolt, cast enemy dead .... submerge again. Good times

Jacobs is up to Foundational Principle #6 already? Did we miss some?

Instead of WoW (or WAR) style balance, Camelot Unchained will use Rock, Paper, Scissors. (http://citystateentertainment.com/2013/02/foundational-principle-6-rock-paper-scissors-natch/)

What's next?

Rule #7: Players think that they want shit in theory that they really don't want in practice!    :why_so_serious:

ugh, rps. Crappy way to balance a game if there ever was one.

Calling it right now: he's going to end up trying to balance three dozen different races/classes.

Even WoW learned that eventually, and they were sticking to it for a great many years.

Then again, he's mr "go back to the well again."

Wait, wasn't a HUGE part of the problem with DAoC was that RPS balancing blew FUCKING MONKEYS? Oh right, it was. It led to stupid shit like casters being gods unless tanks got in their face, at which point they were useless because they were paper and warriors were scissors. Glad to see learning nothing continues to be the main prerequisite for game design.

Jacobs' "I won't bow to gold sellers!" rant in a previous column pretty much points to his thinking not evolving in the past 5 years. The impact of gold sellers started to wane when devs started to sell in-game resources straight to players.

Oh, and 'meaningful choices' combined with limited respecs in what amounts to a PvP MMO = oh, my sides.

DAOC was hardly RPS anyway in a realm sense anyway, which he seems to be implying it was. Everyone had pretty much the same tools, they just combined them differently on different classes in different realms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vX1dPTAQ5_U

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kov2G0GouBw#t=38s (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kov2G0GouBw#t=38s)

(fake edit: I put a timestamp in the URL. If you're watching in F13's player, the bookmark is at 38 sec.)

I was trying to read some of his "foundational principles" and I'm just kind of  in awe that someone trying to raise millions of dollars would put so much really bad writing out on the company website.  I understand if he can't afford an editor yet, but doesn't he have a friend or family member with some kind of degree in English/journalism/creative writing?  I mean, seriously, I head to reread several of his paragraphs twice to make sense of them.

I do like some of his ideas, but others just sound like a rambling discussion you might have with a fellow MMO player after a few beers.  You know - trying to figure what you liked about old games and what's wrong with current ones.  Not really inspiring the donation of my dollars...

Reading that caught me between outright laughter and pity that it seems like a sad pathetic attempt to recapture past glories.

I think the pity part is winning out. The whole thing is just sad.

Lemme see if I can nutshell this.

Mark Jacobs is to Camelot Unchained as Brad McQuaid is to Vanguard.

Mark Jacobs "Foundational Principles" is akin to Brad McQuiad's "Vision"

What could possibly go fucking wrong?

Brad didn't have kickstarter though!

Kickstarter or not, we've already seen what happens when one of "the greats" goes and tries to reinvent the goddamned wheel using their traditional way of thinking and applying it to next-gen hardware, support and the market in general.  It wasn't pretty.   What's going to stop history from repeating itself?

Being fair here, WAR was an improvement over DAoC.  If he could make another incremental improvement over WAR, that would be worth a month of my time.  My fear is that the next step is going to be backwards. 

Meaningful choices and RPS? My fear is that he the step backwards is a quantum leap.

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1217291/Misc/ql_animated.gif)

Kickstarter won't pay for Oxy.

The reward tiers are out (http://camelotunchained.com/en/reward-tiers-matrix/).

Presented without comment - at the $10k level:

Is it possible to use Kickstarter to raise money for another Kickstarter project? Someone needs to throw a pie at Mark Jacobs because AOT DEKCUS.

We'll call it performance art and one of our stretch goals will fund the egging of Paul Barnett.

We should be able to do this for free.

I know so many people that are lining up to throw money at this game. It's sad, and when I call them fools, they yell at me like I'm some kind of asshole. They're whole reasoning is "HEY ITS DAOC2! WINKWINK! Mark Jacobs SAID SO almost."

Then they point to the weird principle blog posts like it's some kind of receipt for an awesome game.

Maybe they'll have a kickstarter for their PAX booth.

I really want this to succeed. However I have zero expectation that it will. I won't throw any money at the Kickstarter. If a miracle occurs and it gets made and it's good, I will play it a lot. Not holding my breath though.

I just enjoy making posts with the word "Kickstarter" in them.  It sends Schild into a frenzy.   :grin:

Made by the same assholes who fucked it up in the first place. Not sure that should be a ringing endorsement for anything. More like telling your priest you got a dose of the clap.

The one thing that gives me any hope at all was the fact that WAR was quite fun in the early going.  It had some interesting classes, solid pvp, and a great deal of potential.  If Camelot Unchained was nothing more than WAR with 3 factions, I'd buy it and play the hell out of it for 3 months. 

Yeah, WAR was fine until they started giving classes options. Jacobs loves the idea of having three realms with each side have different classes.

There's no way he can't fuck up balance.  At all.

This just screams disaster.

edit: What exactly does Counter Revolutionary mean?

Dump classes. Use skills. Allow players to train skills in whatever order they want. Make balance the player's problem, not the devs.

That will work in a PvP game (or RvR, whatever) if you can respec at will. I'm given to understand that respecs will be rare in not-Camelot.

And by "at will" I just mean outside of combat, or only at a trainer npc, or whatever. The point being that there's no limit on how many times you can respec.

That might not be old-school enough for Jacobs though  :why_so_serious:

This should be the $1 level pledge.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolt_in_the_Vendee

So I kinda think it will be hard  for this to compete with established market. There are plenty of high quality games - GW2 of course , where WWW while not ideal but still pretty good as far as those things go . And PS2 which is quintessential large scale  .  I mean when DAOC came out it was breaking  new market. When unchained comes out(if it ever does)?  -there are dozens of products in this niche already including the TESO.

I disagree.  There isn't a decent fantasy MMO with a PvP core right now so this title has a very real opportunity to fill a much desired niche.  The concern is really in how much they will fuck up the implementation of a game style we'd all like to see.

Dozens of products in its niche seems like a massive overstatement, yes.

There's dozens of niche MMOs that have PvP. That part is valid. But that these represent a sizeable enough market to target with a responsibly-budgeted and produced PvP-focused MMO? Nah.

And that's not even a comment on this yet-another-forgettable-kickstarter.

Don't confuse PvP and RvR.

Did any of you (other than me) try out March on Oz? I picked it up during a $0.99 sale, and was underwhelmed. Very similar to PvZ, but not as good.

This KS will not succeed, by the way. $2 mill is too high.

As Baldrake indicated: CU Kickstarter aim is for US$2m (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13861848/camelot-unchained). One day in and it is a quarter of the way there ($552k).

Gaming, thou art FUCKING BROKEN.

A quick skim of the Kickstarter text:

"Mark" is mentioned about 20 times. It's pretty clear that his reputation is meant to bring the cash flooding in on waves of nostalgia.

They're writing a custom MMO engine for this. That's one of the things that Kickstarter is funding.

If the Kickstarter fails, they'll allegedly cancel CU.


Just not on official forums, because those things are terrible. Oh wait, apparently every City State dev will have "a presence" on the forums. That can only end well.


Going back, CU has an estimated development budget of US$10m+, so if MJ is stumping up US$2m and the Kickstarter is expected to bring in the same, that means investors are being sought for roughly 50% - 60% of the development budget. Which hardly seems to make CU free of investor interference, which is a claimed reason for CU going down the Kickstarter path. It's almost like Kickstarter acts as some kind of due diligence process for investment consideration: "We like your game idea, but we're only in if you can use free money to fund 20% of your game's costs".

Plus I personally don't get excited by "I'm putting my own money on the line!" when it's MJ's company and he's the one financially benefiting from it. Is it a risk? Sure, but that's every independent video game project.

I am sure MJ is keen and shrewd enough to never invest his own money. He is project manager/producer, he makes things go and spin , if they dont work out -well to bad for investors. If they do - he gets rewarded. Investors risk their money thats what they do (but they dont do actual projects, if they invest in right ones they gain money, they lose for wrong ones)

I think threeway PvP is the best way to go next to the Shadowbane/EVE model, so I am happy about more games going this way. But I wouldn't put too much hope into a very-low-budget MMO trying to make it right at this point. There's GW2, there's Planetside 2, there's Tera which is about to get its threeway fix, and of course there is TESO which plans to be more Daoc than this (mostly because it was clearly stated in Camelot Unchained pitch that this is NOT going to be DAOC 2). As much as I hope this will succeed, do you really think that 2, 3 or even 5 million dollars can bring 2002 back?



I tend to agree with this. Lots of the good memories are about a ten years old model that didn't necessarily aged well. Just DAOC with better graphics wouldn't be so great now, so this game has to expand and improve the formula. Can they pull it off, with that little budget, where GW2 couldn't or where TESO won't?

I find that post hilarious after your post in the EQ Next thread, Falconeer.

Hmm, yeah I see your point. Just to clarify I love everything old and old school. And I love all sorts of retrogaming. I will almost certainly buy Camelot Unchained should it ever get released. I hope it will be able to bring back some old fun, I just doubt it will, because of Jacobs, and because of the lack of money. So yes, I understand why my position and my posts were confusing. I am the first one who hopes for the past to come back and be as good as I remember it. Sadly, I fooled myself enough times to know a little bit better now.

For the record, about Wizardry (and EQ), that's what it is: retro-gaming at its finest, and proudly so. While I don't think this new Camelot product is going down that old alley and I am afraid they won't have the resources to go down any new one. We'll see. It's not like I meant to piss on DAOC's legacy or anything, just saying that by the time this will come out there will be more than one wealthiest competitor probably doing an expanded version of the same thing.

Lets have a pool to see how much this kickstarter raises. I'm going with 1.15M.

edit:
Also, it's my opinion that hard coded sides in any MMORPG are dumb. Either go free-for all, or make sides flexible after some fashion.

I think hardcoding sides adds replay value.  Don't like your team?  Reroll!

And then you have gw2 release server hopping with 95%/5%/0% scores

Ever since Jay Wilson surfaced I have new respect for Mark Jacobs. He used to be my least liked designer/developer/director/dickhead, not anymore!

Well there are bad ways to do things and good ways to do things.

The "just do it right" argument.  :why_so_serious:

Well if you want to get into an armchair dev argument, you go first.

You already went first.

The reason the "just do it right" argument is pointless is precisely because none of us (mostly anyway) are devs.

Well I never said "just do it right", I just said that GW2 didn't do a very good job of it. I thought RIFT did a pretty decent job of it. Best I've seen anyway if you have to have a three sided contest of sorts.

Rift and SWTOR both had enjoyable PvP but they were still too gear dependent.  Rift suffered from some serious balance issues as well.  The difficulty with a pvp game is that you need to provide an advancement path that a) won't make the power differential too great and b) won't turn it into a WoW gear-fest.

What?  a few instanced BGs is "enjoyable pvp"?  I mean those 2 games would be among the last on my list as "enjoyable pvp".  RIFT class balance pvp wise was also in the "roflmao" category  .


In any case I thing there are plenty of decent quality pvp now(not neccessarily MMOs/fantasy though)  and there is more to come (archeage ,TESO), market is getting crowded, nostalgia alone won't cut it

It wasn't all bad.  I have very fond memories of that dungeon that rotated between the factions.  On a rotation you'd have stealthers of the other faction hiding out, PVPers of our own chasing down reports of enemies and PVEers trying to grab the very nice rewards.  MMOs nowadays tend to be very shy about exposing PVEers to any risk of PVP because sure it's aggravating to have your time wasted by an internet psycho, but it did add a frisson to the grind.  Long as the rewards make up for the added risk it's a nice option I think.

Lately I've been playing a new pre-trammel UO free shard and it's reminded me how fun dangerous PVE can be.  Rage quit a couple of times having been ganked though ;)

You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.

I think PVE with a threat of occasional ganks is still PVE.  Unless you're going to argue that, say, EVE has no PVE.  Splitting hairs really.

Yeah but you're saying a game has good PVE, when actually what you're enjoying is the PVP facet of it. The PVE in DAOC was shit regardless of whether someone tried to kill you or not.

I'm not. One's a method, the other's a motivation. Unless you're implying RvR is somehow a bigger market than the niche PvP, it's splitting hairs on the core point.


iirc that was the Darkness Falls zone? I did like that alot. But I also wouldn't compare DAoC PvE to GW2. Everything about both are very different. Except that occasionally there's groups of mobs standing around waiting to be killed :-)

Not at all. There are almost no games that serve the RvR market, which is a *different* niche market than the "dozens" of other niche PVP games. It is incorrect to say that an RvR game will be competing directly against free for all PVP games and arena PVP games, because there is a reasonably large group of players who are not served at all by those games.

Ah I get ya. You think there's a large potential market for MMO-style RvR.

I'm skeptical. There's been the potential for such a market for 10+ years once broadband became pervasive and we passed the point that just playing on launch month was a high achievement.

I think that potential market doesn't exist. Maybe DAoC never really being huge and them WAR being a high profile failure skewed perceptions. But then, SWG skewed perspective of the potential for a UO-style MMO too. And Planetside 2 is likely no bigger than Planetside 1.

It'd take a company with sufficient skill and deep pockets to even just try any of these old ideas again. But why should they? A decade ago when everything was shiny and new and people would actually pay for this stuff, really??, they could afford to smoke and mirrors the VCs and angel investors with promises of like-EQ-but-better and then like-WoW-but-better and then go on to hail mary into f2p just to keep the lights on.

But things have matured too much for even the most ignorant money people to bite, especially when big budget games in general are contracting at the same time "$3 is too much for an iPhone game" is rising.

So the other option is a small but dedicated team to find a way to do RvR right but on the cheap. Somehow.

Best pvp game available is WoT, but you can't really call it an MMO.  It has advancement, complexity, and a great balance of strategy and twitch.  It is also instance based.  I played DAoC for 6 years and it was fun for its time, but playing on a Euro freeshard lately has reminded me that the game definitely had its issues.

So what pvp MMO's do you consider not ROFLMAO worthy?  I can't think of a single one save Shadowbane... which was laced with other issues.

I also agree that WoT is quite good when it comes to instanced non-fantasy pvp, and there  more good pvp games  -such as planetside2 for example.


I consider GW2 to be probably best fantasy pvp on the market right now. Not without its issues but its a bar other projects have to match at least.  WWW is solid.

Arena really dropped the ball with spvp  though when they could have made it very popular , now it in rather dead than alive . most duelers/arena pvp'ers right now are playing moba (LoL/Dota2) ,wow arena or nothing at all. Which kinda makes me sad cause none of those are particularly great  (well LoL is great but its moba)


I tend to think this way too.  market is just not very large. I mean Planetside2 is great game, yet it is not very big. There is nothing truly wrong with GW2 WWW ,it is awesome in many ways and objectively way better than DAOC ever was or could be , yet community is lukewarm about it . Large mmo pvp market is a myth - it is sizeable , but you really ought to do something exceptionally great if you want capture large part of it as there are plenty of offerings out there which have "good pvp" - even though its not always fantasy and more often than not instanced. 

Most real pvp'ers (as in those who play it for fun)  gave up on ever getting good pvp in mmos and pvp where its good, not where there are elfs.

I think our disagreement is one of personal taste then.  I found the PvP (both 5v5 and WWW) in GW2 to be bland.  I bought GW2 for the pvp and was very disappointed. 

Rift World PVP was bad. I was in a guild that tried to do it but there was no real reason for the other side to try and stop us from roaming the map or holding some point. We even had some scheduled times for this (by announcing it in advance on the forums) but it amounted to nothing. The only  time world pvp was any fun was when we had arranged to fight against some other guilds in advance but even that was pretty meh  :oh_i_see:

I agree completely.  I played on a pvp server for a while in Rift and it was a joke.  The BG's had moments where they were fun though. 

I should have clarified that its best fantasy pvp mmo on current market yet  that doesnt meant its amazing or even good  for me to play as pvp game.  I bought gw2 for pvp as well yet I only play it for world exploration (world and events imho the best part of GW2 by far)

Just if judging objectively GW2 pvp is pretty good if compared to competition. It lacks a lot of focus ,polish and features to make it good spvp game , but as far as www goes  there is no better offers right now if RvR is your cup of tea (they even added www ranks/progression this patch) . GW2 pvp is better than WoW, Rift ,SWTOR, TSW or whatever.   A

I feel it's a huge stretch to compare PvP games like World of Tanks and Rift when trying to determine which are the good PvP games out there.
As far as I can remember no one used to call, say, Quake deathmatch "PvP" back in the 90s, and since the term was coming from MUDs it took the first open world multiplayer RPGs to make the term popular, so UO, EQ and so on. Not a big deal, technically everything that puts two players against each other is PlayerVsPlayer (Pong first PvP game ever?) but do you really feel comfortable comparing Warthunder to Guild Wars 2 to Battlefield 3 to Blood Bowl to World of Warcraft to Day Z? Does it make any sense?

There's plenty of games these days where you can play to kill other players and have lots of fun and/or compete. World of Tanks is certainly one, so is Planetside, so is GW2 WvW, so is Mechwarrior Online, and so is League of Legends, and Day Z and EVE. It's just that the only thing they have in common is the human factor  and the need to kill. They don't do it the same way, don't do it at the same pace, don't do it with the some tools, don't do it with the same rules and don't necessarily do it according to the same ethics. So how can you just name "good PvP games" without separating them in several different subcategories?

I will agree with your statement.  It's the best we have... which is a pretty sad commentary on what the market currently offers. 

I was shocked about GW2 to be honest.  GW's best feature was the pvp.  I found it quite strange that it would be the world PvE that would shine in GW2.  Of course, the craptastic dungeons didn't disappoint.

GW2 probably had the best time played/price paid -ratio of any game in a long while for me and it was all due to the wvw which kept me interested for 6+ months (stopped playing when the wvw-patch came out)

Yes, Darkness Falls - that was a lot of fun when it switched over, although the trains were... well, trains. I saw DF more as wvw than pve but it was both.

I doubt GW2 will be used much as a motivator for new and bigger efforts into RvR really. Not because it's bad, but how do you make money out of it?
It's all about the RMT, which fits very well with sparkleponies, sex/race/name changes and whatnot, but I see those as things a PvE crowd would care most about.
If you start selling things that actually matter to people focused on RvR you very quickly get into Pay-to-Win territory and scare the masses off in droves.

People might be ready to accept slight boosts bought with actual cash in something like WoT, but in GW2 the same would cause an uproar.

Arenanet just saw a gap in the market and wanted to cast a net as wide as possible, but it's pointless to spend time and money on improving and balancing something like RvR 'till it's as polished as it could be. There's no money in it and who cares if those people swim off to a new shiny? It's not like they're losing a sub.

It just doesn't fit the financial setup of these MMOs, even less so in a game that doesn't have a sub and those seem to be going the way of the dodo (and rightly so).

This must be repeated. Seriously, the DAoC PVE was so goddamn bad no matter how much danger you added to it. So few mob models, no mob AI other than ATTACK IN STRAIGHT LINE, just absolutely dreadfully boring.

The only decent pvp game out on the market right now is Age of Wushu. 

The walkthru videos of the game look amazing but the Rock-Paper-Scissors model gives me concern.  I'll definitely check it out.

As much as I like all my PvP-addict colleagues, this statement is just silly.

Silly is being nice.

Oh that isn't entirely true, plenty of mobs could cast spells. They just used the same interrupt system players did.  :why_so_serious:

There was the Sidi boss that just ran away constantly and randomly put 100 stone items in your inventory to overburden you!

But yeah, Darkness Falls was fun because of the other players fooling around, and the one bugged mob with no leash range that would randomly flatten the area. It wasn't fun because of the pve.

I already paid for one flawed follow-up to DAOC with WAR. To be honest, I'd probably do it again for another if not for the fact that there's no way you can fund an MMO with a two million dollar Kickstarter (plus whatever other funding they have). Shame because I loved the setting of DAOC, and it was one of the rare times I really had fun with PVP.

The Kickstarter is roughly 50% of the way to the target with 24 days to go.

I'm not optimistic it will make it.  It started off with a bang, making it to 800k in a couple of days.  It has been reduced to a trickle since.  MJ better do some bush beating on the marketing campaign or he's going to come up short.

As Darniaq said, what MMORPG can be made, and be functional, with 2 million dollars? I think what they are trying to do here is to use Kickstarter to get the word out and then hope at some point to attract some other money during the next 3+ years of development. If they asked for 10M they would have never made the mark but the whole thing would have sounded less fake.

The money is simply to develop 'proof-of-concept'.  I assume that he wants to create the engine and sell its capabilities to investors for more money.  Also showing investors that he already has preorders in the pipeline can't hurt.

The budget is $5 million (not that that's a whole more compared to the budget of say GW2).  Mark Jacobs started by kicking in $2 million of his own money and he has received another $1 million from investor(s).  The Kickstarter is just another source of funding.  As you say, once they burn through that $5 million if they aren't finished with the game at least they should be at a point where they could attract some more money.

How binding are the kickstarter rewards actually? I mean they are selling beta access for certain dates (and even internal testing if you pay enough).

fake edit: nevermind, there's the magical est. attached to the dates so they can duke nukem forever it if they don't get enough actual investors when the kickastarter money runs out

Mark Jacobs talks to Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/sites/danieltack/2013/04/08/mark-jacobs-talks-camelot-unchained-kickstarter/)

To sum up:
- Kickstarter is awesome. We're taking chances. We're edgy!
- DAoC 2 Camelot Unchained has no PvE. It's all RvR, all the time, baby!
- Did I mention that I invented the term "RvR"?
- We're not going to have time or budget to come up with a traditional MMOG endgame. We're counting on emergent behavior.
- I am such a dinosaur that I think this game, that I've already admitted is niche, will stay afloat with a subscription model.

I'm just going to go ahead and save that for later, Mr. Jacobs.

MJ really doesn't have to do much to have a niche success on his hands.  WAR core concepts + less PvE + better balance + 3rd faction + less CC.  I think that would be enough to have a 50-100k subscriber base for at least 6 months. If he's expecting much more than that, he's in a delusional state beyond recovery.

I've been saying for a while now I hope more developers go for this style low budger, lower expectations niche game.  If nothing else, maybe kickstarter will help to encourage that style of development.

I don't think you could call those numbers a success, not even with the niche qualifier.

That's a lot easier said than done.  The fact is that for a subscription game you need longevity and stickyness, which is hard in a pvp-only game.  Once population starts going down, it goes down fast because in a pvp-only game you are only going to have fun if you have a lot of players to play with, and it becomes a snowball effect.

Even in a non-sub game, you need to carefully balance the play 2 win effect against the general game design, and to keep players wanting to log in and play.

Very true.  MMO gamers want a progression pathway.  It's very difficult to give them that while also disenfranchising new players that have to face an ever increasing power creep. 

Can MJ develop a shallow power curve that offers lateral advancement that doesn't kill PvP balance?  I see no evidence that he can.

If they do a lower budget game with a sub that's $5 a month instead of the dinosaur $14 a month, I think they will draw much more support.

200,000 if you can sell an upfront sub for a year at $60 to 1/4, a 6 month at $36 to half, and the rest trickle at $7 per month for 3 months before making decisions. That's $7,650,000 in revenue for the year. That's opposed to a $14 sub which people may play wait and see month to month for 100,000 users which is only $4,200,000 for 3 months before people start making decisions.

I think it's easier to sell a cheaper sub for longer time than it is to get people to stomach the WoW sub price for not-WoW.

Wait.. he's going with a sub model in 2013?

 :roflcopter:

Best of luck.

No, he's going with sub model in 2015  :why_so_serious:

Free Realms was the only game to go with a lower sub though.  I seriously doubt he's thinking less than $12.95 a month.

Then he will fail, pure and simple.

Much better.

No one is going to pay a sub fee for this.  I don't care how small. 

*cough*

Don't hate me because I'm gullible.

My "no one" always leaves out the crazies.  The die hard RVR/PVP folk and "must play every shitbag MMO" folk will buy this even if Jacobs never produces a working build.   We have a lot of category 2 here.  Hasn't the novelty worn off yet?

Edit: I know this is your holy grail and the sequel to that game that's  been poisoning your perception of gaming for more than a decade.  But this.. this thing has no chance of being good.  Literally zero.  You can't make this kind of game for chump change.  And if you could, would you trust the old guard to do so?   :ye_gods:

I wouldn't trust MJ to pick up trash on the street. He'd dump the recycled items on your lawn and claim it's a feature.

QFFT. Kickstarting a low-budget SUBSCRIPTION game? Oh and the sub game has NO PVE (i.e. stickiness that doesn't require other players)? Good luck with that.

It's not about novelty.  It's about trying things until a pvp MMO comes out that's actually worth a shit.  WAR was as close as I've found for the RvR itch that I want scratched.  Enjoyed Rift and SWTOR for Battleground pvp even with their poor balance.  For fuck's sake, I've been playing a 10 year old DAoC free shard lately because there isn't another MMO RvR alternative that I like.  

I think this project is likely to be a steaming pile of crap.  I'll still try it and make my judgement then... if it ever becomes more than vaporware.   When you're competing with nothing, the bar is set pretty low.

I'd be a little less disappointed if you said you've been on heroin/paint/glue/meth/cat urine/bath salts lately.  That aint right.  

A decent PVP MMO in the spirit that you're looking for isn't going to come out until the entire industry collapses upon itself, and we have to repopulate the dead wasteland that gaming has become.   Or maybe it will.. and then my head will explode.

edit:  But yah.. I'll peace out until there's actually some in game footage of this.  I'll leave you to your dreams.  :awesome_for_real:

I'm fine with backing game Kickstarters when the Kickstarter is paying for the whole game. You have to be beyond foolish to back one that will just make a tech demo to go and try to sell to real investors. Pissing money away, just utterly bad.

I might be willing to pitch in for one that will release the source and media.  If you going to ask the crowd for funding then the results should belong to the crowd.

I don't get it.

When I say I miss pre-Trammel UO, my favourite PvP ever, what I am talking about is a certain feeling of impending doom that was with my with every step. The fight itself was poor, but the kind of feelings coming from that experience has been only repeated in EVE, and it's not your traditional fantasy MMORPG so when I say that I miss that it's pretty clear what I am actually missing, and how it is completely absent from any game on the market at the moment.

When I say I miss Shadowbane PvP, I am talking about a nation-based PvP where territorial control, expansion, defense on a vast scale was more important than the single fight, since few things were more satisfying than seeing the actual map of the world changing based on your victories or defeats. Again, nothing even remotely similar seems to be available on the market at the moment.

When you say that you miss DAoC PvP and you've been waiting for such an experience for ten years, what exactly are you talking about? What game mode would I be playing if I entered your DAoC free shard today that I can't find in other games? As usual, it's a serious question not a rethorical one nor it is intended to make fun of you.

Nebu despises CC and wants zerg-ganking.

That's what I've gotten out of the last 3-4 years of his DAOC-pining monologues.

:heart: ukobat :heart:

I'm not convinced that DAOC's RvR was a considerable leap more epic than Vanilla WoW pre honor world pvp, Lineage 2's siege stuff (I only know rumors of this thanks to dat grind) and I'm pretty sure Aion tried very hard to rip off RvR and the reality is RvR isn't that special. If I wanted to pretend some future game was going to get it all right I'd certainly peg my hopes on something like Arche Age before anything touched by Jacob's taint. To me this sounds too much like first MMO bias but its coming from players who I've gotta believe played games before DAOC surely?

I too would like to hear Falc's question answered.

Meanwhile WildStar and FireFall both have npc factions you join and pvp for don't they?

That can't be it, DAOC had the most oppressive CC of any game I've ever played.

Speaking for myself, the appeal of DAOC is a bunch of people with a reason to fight together fighting over control of permanent map features, with persistent rivalries and the opportunity to make a name for yourself and recognize and hate names on the other side. Nebu was an 8v8er so he probably doesn't care about the important part (the keep fighting/control) though.  :why_so_serious:

I'm going to start Kickstarting games that Nebu likes.  I won't advertise them to anyone else.  He can just keep throwing money at me in the hopes his holy grail comes along. ;D

Best I can think of is that DAoC had something that very early UO had:  the ability for a small coordinated group to obliterate a much larger force.   Both did it in horrible ways that we will hopefully never see again. RIP genre infancy.

For me, there are a few things I miss about DAoC's RvR, but I know at least one of those things is never coming back. One of the things I miss is the sense of community we had. I was a Mid, goddammit, and that was my tribe. Albs were zerging tards, Hibs were relic-enabled jerks, and we were the SCRAPPY UNDERDOGS. I miss recognising names that were scrolling by in the death spam as I ran a group out to a keep, and making a mental note to find Nevermore's body to lay down an asshat. I miss rushing to get the deathblow on someone so everyone in the area would see "Fordel was just killed by Sjofn!" (that never actually happened that I recall, alas). I miss Kildorn killing this poor other skald who happened to have her armor dyed like mine 50 times while trying to find ME to kill. I miss "knowing," however superficially, my enemies as well as my allies.

That can't happen again, though, not with the sort of critical mass these games need. And I'm mostly okay with that, really.

The other shit I miss are things like an even playing field gear-wise (I am one of those people who do NOT like the god awful gear progression in PvP) and having a shared goal for everyone on my team that lasts beyond "winning this match." Mostly the gear thing, though. I fucking hate gear progression in PvP. If I get run over, I want it to be because I suck, not because I suck AND my gear is two tiers behind whoever just splattered me.

And deathspam. I really miss deathspam for some stupid reason. Even the spam that told me that "Ingmar was just killed by a hill cat!" was awesome.

Wait, what?  Didn't you have to level your goddamn pants in DAOC?  I remember my friend telling me on the phone how he finally max leveled his dumb flail and was killing entire groups of people by himself with a heal bot hidden in a tower.

See, that's what I remember. They had an EQ-style enchanter, and warden bubble-chants/ stuns, etc.  But any time you talk to Nebu it's the first thing he brings up.  His hate of CC and counters to it.

That came in an expansion, and that is when pretty much everyone agrees DAOC was ruined forever.

Also Lum did it.

I still don't understand why anyone pines for DAoC. That game was such an also-ran in pretty much every respect.

I too sort of miss the community and sense of risk in RvR.   I'm not interested in that anymore, but I could see this project being successful if MJ sticks to helping his customers and not his own vision.  There's nothing wrong in providing a paid for, high quality experience for a niche market and then dominate it *if* you can meet the quality and performance bar your (niche) players expect. IMO MJ will get distracted and lose focus once people pile in.  He'll think it's 1999 again and forget he's niche and then it'll be all over.

Also, I bet this KS is only to prove and match funding to other investors.  He won't get far on only $2M and he probably has other stuff lined up.  There's lot of money in VA banana stand.

The community of DAOC can be found in any game with pvp, Tera (what I happen to be playing atm) has awful pvp systems but the top pvp guilds of a server still all know eachother very well. It doesn't even have fucking factions and there is still that knowing the enemy stuff. EVE is single server on a scale we may never see again and people still recognize the names of enemies and friends. I have no idea how you can say that is dead and gone. It continues to be one of the only reasons to bother w/ MMO's for pvp instead of a lobby+fight system (MWO et all) which otherwise holds a ton of advantages.

As for the whole no gear progression in DAOC, what I remember best about DAOC is that it had the worst class balance in pvp I'd seen. It was arguably worse than the EQ1 Zek servers. Which is really saying something. I also remember that it wasn't enough to have one account and one max level of the right class. Because buffbots and healbots were so ridiculously strong they were almost necessary if you liked winning. So yeah I'm with you that gear progression sucks for PVP games but I hated DAOC for having so much timesink and horrible boring timesink at that (worst PVE of my life) before you were PvP ready.

The Community aspect and the "Feeling of belonging" is where Arenanet dropped the ball with GW2. I think what you have mentioned about enemy names, fighting for a faction while having more than one enemy, and creating a strong sense of community could have easily been achieved there. Server transfert and "GenericName" over enemies is what killed it before it even had a chance.

Some of those things don't even need a RvRvR game to come back, and certainly not DAoC 2. They just need someone to remember what made group PvP fun back in the days and implement a few simple community features to support that.

You got pretty close once! http://www.nexuszero.net/Img/SjofnRvR.jpg  :why_so_serious:

-edit- I think my favorite thing about that picture now, is that it isn't re-sized or anything, that's just the resolution I used back then.  :ye_gods:



DaoC was inclusive, was my big thing. (until ToA at least, then the fierce pant leveling competitions started). It wasn't just about the top guilds or whatever, you didn't need to be part of any club to be relevant to the general cause of your realm, since you were automatically part of a even bigger club that everyone joined.


It's also never coming back, people are too savvy to the genre now and will just find a way to get onto the winning team and snowball it all into ruin. Imagine Mid Igraine, now add in servers transfers and shit. No one is staying on that horrible fucking realm.

What? No. Certainly not true. WAR probably would have had it if it didn't suck, GW2 could have it if the servers didn't rotate, it ALMOST has it now. But any game? Not really.

You summed up exactly how ridiculous the game was after ToA. #1 you had buff bots in towers (always a problem), #2 PANTS ON HEAD LEVELING UNDER FULL MOON WHILE IN STORMY WEATHERS.

The only bigger MMO fubar would be SWG's and it's various 'revisions'. ToA was THAT bad.

I imagine this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=Tu9s-rf_VTw#t=72s when I read Rasix's story.

The guild I ran with in GW2 was trying together a few $1000 to donate to the kickstarter for this game. It was lulzy. These are the same people who are trying to get into TESO as well. They're all PVPers who hear RvR and thing the game is going to be gold.

Also, maybe I'm missing something, but isn't RvR just a 3-way open world PVP game? I never got the excitement that it brought, like it was something uniquely special.

RvR is almost entirely tied to DaoC nostalgia. 

No. It has hard-coded sides and permanent objectives.

So did a bunch of the WoW zones in Burning Crusade.  Yea, granted, they weren't designed to be a fundamental part of the game, I know that wasn't what anyone means when they say "RvR."

Why do people even care about what I think?  

For the record:

- Yes, I hate CC in PvP games.  Anything that renders players unable to act is bad.  I can tolerate short cc as long as it breaks on damage.

- I hate stealth in PvP games as well.  Initiative is impossible to balance correctly.

- PvE in PvP games is fine as long as the PvP isn't helped by or dependent on the PvE.

- I liked DAoC for the sandbox PvP (solo, zerg, small group, BG's, or 8v8 were all viable)

- I hated ToA.  It was the dumbest idea I've ever seen, particularly in a PvP game.

- I liked the depth of DAoC's combat mechanics, the resist trees, and the ability to make use of crafted gear/gems to tailor your suit.
  
- I like that players had a specific role on a team.

- I like that the 3 realms had very different feels yet were reasonably balanced for 8v8.  My guild did well in all 3 realms.  

- I liked the graphics style and atmosphere of the game.

- I loved the player housing.  

- I enjoyed the PvP advancement system.  I would have liked the power curve to be a bit flatter though.  

There is so much more... including just plain nostalgia.  There is also a MUCH MUCH longer list of the things that I didn't like.

Can I be done now?

I am with you here 100%




Except for battlegrounds, to me "sandbox PvP" can only happen in a free for all PvP game, where the conflict between players is only managed by players and their choices, not managed by the system. But I digress. Using your quote, is that something that has to do with RvRvR? Is it something that is still present in DAoC these days? Is it something that was pretty much hardcoded into the game, or were it some random circumstances, including player behaviour that wasn't tainted by today's achievement mentality, that allowed for that to happen in that game at that time?



Is that something that hasn't been replicated in any other game so far, or that requires RvRvR to happen? Or Marc Jacobs?




Is that something that hasn't been replicated in any other game so far, or that requires RvRvR to happen? Or Marc Jacobs?




Agree 100% with you here.




Well graphic style and atmosphere are tied to emotions, so in my opinions they are gone and would never come back in any DAoC 2, or 3, or 4. And they definitely have to do with a "first time" kind of bias. Same way we love the graphics of 80s games. At least that's true for me.
Housing, is that something that hasn't been replicated in any other game so far, or that requires RvRvR to happen? Or Marc Jacobs?




Is that something that hasn't been replicated in any other game so far, or that requires RvRvR to happen? Or Marc Jacobs?

Anyway, reason people care about what you think Nebu (or I do) is because you don't have to agree with someone to respect their opinion or the way they deliver it. You know more than enough about games, and give enough fucks about PvP that even those who disagree with you want to have your angle on PvP games. If anything, it gives them (me) perspective. This is why I asked you that question and why I used your reply to ask a few more here. Don't mistake this for an attempt at sirbrucing you. I don't plan to dissect your nostalgia and I get pretty annoyed when people try to tell me that I am wrong for liking something. I am just interested to see how much of that ten years old fun can be realistically retrieved and implemented in other games, and how much of it simply belongs to the past in a way that only a time machine could fix. I know so many people who spend hours every day celebrating DAoC's glory and how it was the best PvP ever (it was very popular in Italy, they even translated the client, never happened before or after until WAR), and while I totally see why it was awesome at the time, the problem is that they are unhappy with everything else that is not DAoC that gets released today, and I am now pretty much convinced that it's not because of the incredibly unique features that DAoC had, but because some golden memories are simply unbeatable.

That post just caused a flashback to the old TL Reports.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone who followed the pre-release interviews. The devs said they discovered 80% of their GW1 players barely touched pvp at all so they put more attention into PVE for GW2. Pretty sure I've linked the interview this came from before but I will post it again if anyone asks.

Here it is. 1:30 is where the quote is.
http://www.g4tv.com/videos/51704/guild-wars-2-pvp-system-dynamic-content-preview

Because you are the Bat- er, Jackalope-Avartar'd Science Dude.


No.  You genuinely love games.  You don't post about liking games as some sort of statement.  You don't need to be 'right', you state your peace and move on.  Need more Jackalope.  (this is actually the answer to both questions)

Because we love your scruffy little avatar.

You must have liked other things because that paragraph describes Planetside 1 and 2.  I know you didn't mean to compare SB to those games but if watching the map change with your victories is a key element of your PvP enjoyment, PS2 will give that to you.

I think the part PS2 blows is the time scale. It is all so temporary and arbitrary.

That can't be it, DAOC had the most oppressive CC of any game I've ever played.

Speaking for myself, the appeal of DAOC is a bunch of people with a reason to fight together fighting over control of permanent map features, with persistent rivalries and the opportunity to make a name for yourself and recognize and hate names on the other side. Nebu was an 8v8er so he probably doesn't care about the important part (the keep fighting/control) though.  :why_so_serious:
[/quote]

This.

It was *always* temporary and arbitrary.  I quit playing PS1 when I realized that every night I was fighting the same battle on the same continent over the same patches of land.  It really struck-home when I had a day off, played mid-day and suddenly there were new hotspots. I realized it all depended on the time of day and what faction was online at that time, the "winning' faction for that time-slot always getting more powerful because nobody wanted to play the losing side.  Game over.

Tabled, need specifics.


Well, you couldn't transfer in DAOC so you had to deal with it. Usually dealing with your faction getting shitslammed meant:
Doing some PvE (crafting, leveling alts, farming for gold, etc)
Doing some battleground PvP
Taking a small group to Mid/Alb, taking a few keeps to piss off the opposing forces and holding them as along as possible

Hell, it wasn't uncommon for two realms to semi-team up to help vs. the realm that was doing the curbstomping.

But maybe nowadays people simply wouldn't accept that one of the three realms is perceived as more popular and powerful on a specific server and would bitch about needing a transfer. Despite the kickstarter, I'm pretty sure we'll never know since CU has nothing else to do other than PvP.

Falc,

I don't want a rehash of DAoC.  I'm playing DAoC on a freeshard now and can VERY OBVIOUSLY see the the shortcomings of the game.  What baffles me is why no one seems to have created a better PvP MMO.  WAR was a close attempt, but still lacked on many fronts.  Perhaps there's just not enough of a marketshare to drive innovation in this area.

In Shadowbane you didn't have three factions, you had countless ones. There was also a complex sub-infeudation system where guilds could swear loyalty to greater ones. All these guilds had their own logos together with the Nation logo (nations being the greater guilds, so again no limit on the number), and the logos appeared to everyone else on the global map. And the changes didn't happen multiple times a day. They happened over days or weeks, or months. Because conquering a territory was serious business since you even had to pay (so invest resources) to lay a siege. The sense of "belonging" to a nation that you could experience there had been topped only by EVE, in my experience. Although, obviously, in a very different context (spaceships vs. our old beloved medieval crap on foot).

Also yeah, as Merusk points out, Planetsde really had no point. Shadowbane, of all games, really made you feel you were fighting a huge attrition war that could be won through a military effort, but more reasonably through diplomacy, treaties, alliances, backstabs and so on.

(Before you even start, I am not talking of launch-Shadowvbane, nor SB.exe times, OK?)

If anything it baffles me that no one has really tried to introduce the politics element in MMORPGs with PVP since it's clearly so succesful in EVE (and again, that's pretty much the Shadowbane model). Age of Conan had something similar... in theory. But it never really made it into the game. Tera would be the closest (you even have elections for provinces), but the concept is severely underdeveloped as of yet.

A workable political component would require a playerbase mature enough to appreciate it.  Try, if you will, to imagine the LoL crowd with politics.  The thought is enough to make me quit gaming forever.

Its happens in EVE (as was mentioned), and even happened in Darkfall.  I also understand one is emerging in Age of Wushu.  The people that take part will always be the people who care about such things. 

The problem is that there are a lot of people who are willing to JOIN a faction, but running them is a serious commitment.  I don't know how many times my old EVE CEO got woken up at some ungodly hour to try and avoid war with some good old fashioned diplomacy (at which he was damn good I might add).  Entire factions of good people can fall apart in these games when the leadership has to (or chooses) to quit, and that in turn tanks the enjoyment for potentially hundreds of people.  When the enjoyment of your game by a large percentage of your playerbase rests on the shoulders of just a few, it is a pretty tenuous position from a game design standpoint.

I honestly dunno why there is some illusion of how free faction pvp works. I played a lot of hardcore "territorial control" pvp in top tier guilds- from Asheron Call and  Shadowbane to World of tanks and guild wars 2. And  watched countless more. Every time its exact same scenario in every game - there are certain powerful factions emerge which control 90% of land/resources. After initial period of land grabs/wars status quo emerges , which is periodically shaken when the old superpowers burn out  (and that inevitably happens with almost every single one ), new eager ones take their place , they burn out too and so on and so forth till game is dead( state which most "hardcore" pvp games such as Shadowbane and Darkfall reach very very fast)

The speed of burn out is directly correlated with intensity and "hardcoreness" of competition tier. Guilds in tier1 burn out really fast as its basically 24/7 job for leaders to maintain vast network of mega alliances and managing their mega zerg, combined with the members burn out whose role is relatively simply but still above and beyound what is called "casual play" and consists of logging in day in  and day out for various military/farming events.

If game doesnt die  too fast these alliances basically settle in long term in cold war state. In which they effectively farm on their territory and no one wants to start another fkcing war as everyone is damn tired of it. Newcomers have little room as everything is already divided between the big guys and at best there is "Africa" - no man's low value land where the newcomers can engage in their little warfare games, while big guys just collect the rent .

Politics/wars in MMO are just the same ugly boring thing as in  "Real Life" - just compressed in time. Tons of hard work and day to day menial shit. very little fun.

Funny how that mirrors real life history, just in fast forward mode.  People will be people.

That's OK. What you describe is not bad at all if you ask me. When a "Nation" becomes decadent and starts to crumble a new one takes its place. In the meantime there's intrigue and attempts of different kinds at dethroning it. And usually at least two factions form up, with multiple dwindling appendixes. What's wrong with that? All the drama, and the fighting, before and after and during, are THE PvP Political game. Ask EVE. But ask your experiences too. They will always be niche, for sure, but what you described is a success to me, while for some reason it feels like a failure to you. Fair enough.

EDIT: I disagree on the 90% domination part too, usually it's a little less dominant than that. But even if that was the case, the "succession war" (when the dominating faction starts to fall) is another massive landgrab and chaos ensues and if you are into that kind of drama, it's great stuff.

Sounds beautiful and fun and I wish it was in every MMO. Why is that illusion?

Let me tell you how every game goes, its new and exciting to explore its systems and hopefully fun, then it gets old, then maybe you stick around for the social connections, then you quit. Does that mean anyone playing games is living under an illusion they won't get sick of the next one and quit it?

Politics/wars in MMO are fun because you get to actually fight them. Heroic shit happens that you are a part of or witness players become famous for xyz and that's super cool to be a part of and witness as well. Its fun to be part of the all powerful winning most of the time evil empire and its tons of fun to be part of the resistance to that hegemony.

I have no idea what point MadMax is making. All of that is much more than area/BG "sport" pvp which is a fucking joke in a MMO. Why? Because if you want sport pvp do yourself a favor and play games that only provide that and do a better job than any MMO has ever come close to. Example: People will play Defiance and they will say they are pvp'ers and arena players. Except why not play TF2 or Tribes or <insert any fucking real fps here> all of those games are better shooters and provide better sport pvp.

EVE is very successful at what it is. The question is whether you can create a PvP-centric game that has some kind of world-progression in response to the massed action of players that has a different mood or feeling to it. I fundamentally think it's possible but it will take a very, very different design paradigm that doesn't involve the PvP itself, but instead is about world design. You have to have a responsive, deformable, dynamic world and the AI to sustain that--if the world matters more than the characters, then the conflicts will be about the world more and less about epeen and corpse rape.

Surely there is "more". But is it fun to average player? I mean when I  first started joining the big war guilds it was all new and exciting. part of "history" ,part of something big!  But there is nothing big really for average member and for leaders its a lot of work. " big" consists of logging in at 4 AM to go to another fucking siege/event/whatever 4th monday in a row. It consists of waiting 6 hours for anything to happen. It consists of getting ppl getting  angry over meaningless pixels in a video game and being  at each other throats  , sometimes some ugly internal and external drama which often ruins friendships.

The  big political/territorial game is not fun. The leadership plays them because they enjoy those sort of things (funny fact - in all my guilds  a lot of  leadership are business owners, former military  and such- they enjoy  power play and being in command) heck you know this guy who was ambassador for goon clan in Eve , killed in lebanon embassy attack (sad part) - I  was not surprised he was diplomat in RL . All those things mirror RL in many ways and well if you enjoy them might as well do it in RL- at least it pays in RL dividends  and not in records in some database.



Well exactly lol.  I want pvp for fun and while all this "permanent territory control and epic wars" sounds good on paper - I seen  it already. Its not that great on its own. The fun part was supposed be  during big events - something which you can't experience in FPS, but its usually unplayable  lag/zergfest .So in the end you have to ask yourself really whats the point?

Yes, this. I have negative a million interest in player-created factions driving PVP. They have to be built in to the game and limited in number for me to want to participate.

Nevermind. Redundancy.

The other thing is that there was a drastic shift in emphasis in GW1 from pvp to pve post-release. I didn't really expect GW2's pvp to be anything but fun for awhile and then kind of taper off into meaninglessness.

Thidranki. I think that's the name of it. It was the level 20 battlground/siege area in DAoC. When they added in that thing that let vet players make a level 20 character instead of having to level for the first 20 levels in shittastic PVE, and everyone had a smurf or new character in Thidranki, that was some of the most fun PVP I've had outside of Shadowbane when it worked. Gear was fairly even, one objective everyone fought over, well-designed map. It was just fun.

Then I leveled out of it and had to endure the PVE again and the DAoC suck was fulfilled.

It's not impossible, just very difficult. PlanetSide had stealth balanced about as good as you can hope for.

Tera has no stealth at all, and the CC is more than bearable. Sign that is IS possible to make PvP games like that.

Another issue that PvP games need to tackle is keeping thier data server side (rather than client side).  WoT has shown that hacks can be all but eliminated by doing this. 

So did Shadowbane.  Having a dedicated anti-stealth class that was well done and very fun to play is by far the best solution i've seen anyone come up with.

I'll all for that... or, you know, no fucking stealth at all.

Why not get rid of healers? they cause as many balance problems as stealthers.  Or range classes, balancing the benefits of range and the ability to stay at range is just as hard as balancing initiative.  It is a playstyle people enjoy and it has a place in a fantasy setting, balancing is hard is no reason to get rid of it.

I can see ranged classes and healers and react to their actions.  Stealthers... they're invisible until they choose to be visible.  Not the same problem at all. A good stealther will have initiative 100% of the time.  That's never going to create a fair encounter and precisely why people like playing them.  They will always have the initiative advantage and good players know how to maximize the benefit of that.   Stealth exists because it makes paying customers happy, not because it makes pvp better.

... and I'm back to a discussion from 2004.

Yes stealthers have the initiative advantage, healers have the advantage of being able to heal themselves, range classes have the advantage of range... etc etc etc. 

With stealth, you either kill the victim in one shot (overpowered) or you don't (gimped). I've yet to see anything in the middle really.

Invisibility is an idiot mehanic that has no place in PvP games at least until the day designers will give the classes that can't disappear interesting tools to counter that. Age of Conan dealt with stealth in a cool way since all classes could go invisible (even though for different amounts of time) and all classes could dispell invisibility every 15 seconds or so. That should become the norm.
Unfortunately, there's too many out there who enjoy PvP only as long as it is unfairly rigged in their favour, so too many crappy designers design around that. Still, there are a few PvP games where there's no stealth/invisibility mechanic, and they seem to work very well, and no one complains about healing or ranged.

Minstrels in DAoC couldn't one-shot anything yet weren't gimped.  Same with tank specced Shadows in TOR.  In games where stealth is frustrating, they tend to give the stealth class huge upfront damage and/or enough CC to completely lock down the target.  That's really frustrating when you're the target, but for me at least the frustration is due to the huge initial damage and/or not being able to respond due to the CC.  The stealth itself is just a vehicle for those other problems.

Yeah, the problem with stealth is combining it with huge burst damage or huge CC.  Stealth can be a good mechanic that adds to the complexity of the game, but stealth should be a tradeoff, implying less direct combat capability.  Without stealth we lose stealth and anti-stealth subgames, decision making when scouting enemy positions, offensive feints (assuming that stealthers have scouted them), scouting enemy positions in general, and a higher level of uncertainty in general.  These are good things that help gameplay stay interesting and keep the game more than just numbers.  Stealth in DAOC was bad (except for minstrel as was pointed out).  It's just not the way stealth should be.  I believe stealth in EVE, for example, is done much better (although I'm not an EVE player so I can't say for certain).

Stealth for scouting = good.  Stealth for killing or gap closing = bad. 

Stealth + damage + CC = VERY FUCKING BAD.

Which brings us back to the fact that in this very thread you have suggested you are excited about the third game made by the man who has introduced for sure the #1 worst CC at launch of an AAA western title (DAOC) and I think WAR is up there as well though I had the smarts to not pay any money for that pile of shit. Also I always felt that DAOC's stealth classes were much more abusive than anything I'd seen in EQ1, AC1 or AO which might have come a bit later. What was that one stealth archer that could practically one hit cloth users from stealth at certain BG brackets? That was good times.

Mark Jacobs doesn't know shit. RvR in DAOC wasn't that special and it pisses me right the fuck off when people act like DAOC had some magical formula. DAOC's RvR has the same drawbacks as Planetside and the same strengths. DAOC did a much better job than Planetside 1 & 2 of not having you fight for the same shit every single day and it did a much better job than games like WAR (another jacob game) and WoW and Aion that only had two factions which means any balance problem in class/race power or population is a huge deal.

DAOC was a pretty shitty game. Horrible class balance. Horrible pve. Horrible CC systems. Horrible stealth systems. Buffbots. Healbots.

Not once did I say or even express that I was excited.  It's a new option.  That is precisely how I am treating it. Well... if it ever exists.

I still can't understand why these numbnuts haven't figured out how to balance realms yet. It's so, so simple. Just have two regular and one mercenary faction.

Realm A and Realm B stab each other in the face. When a merc faction group enters a combat area, have the server ally them with whatever side needs more people. As long as one realm doesn't outnumber both the second realm plus all mercs combined you'll always be able to roughly balance things out.

And what do you do when everyone decides being a merc is the coolest and rolls there?

Yeah this solves nothing. You still need the exact circumstance of "side A + mercs = side B", that's no more likely than "Side A = Side B", unless you can add mercs to both sides at the same time - in which case you come back to the "I can't play with my friends" problem.

What about three sides ABC, low-pop sides are opened up to players from other servers (same side, so only A players can reinforce A-challenged servers) being able to port in (during times of action) as "reinforcements".

Would need some incentive to encourage folks to help out (but maybe this is as simple as giving the reinforcements intel on which servers were in need a reinforcing).  Probably need some de-incentive to discourage folks from never playing on their own server.

Are you people completely illiterate? Being able to split mercs to both sides is the entire point. And it solves the problem of splitting people apart because those people who don't want to do that can just stick to realm a or b.

I want to do that (be a merc), so does my friend I made while mercing, Ingmar.

Why can't we play together?

(the point they are making is that the only way to balance realms is to put hard caps in place, which also piss people off. Hell, look at PS2: they put massive XP bonuses for being outnumbered. Still doesn't matter and the players themselves choose to make massively unbalanced continents)

So join a combat area with him while you're grouped.



Fucking illiterates.

Goreschach's idea has legs. I am sure players would find a way to exploit it and software house XYZ would take years to fix the loophole, but the idea is good.

I can't envision the idea of a merc in DAoC (or a DAoC-like world with 3 very different factions), especially as it works within the 8-man group mechanic.  An Alb 8 man functions differently than a Mid 8 man and a mid 8 man functions differently than a Hib 8 man.  How do you create classes that fit seemlessly into all 3 realm's groups without making them overpowered to the point that everyone prefers to be a merc?  You've got racial resists to consider, racial benefits, RR5 abilities, etc.  The only thing that I could see working in all 3 realms would be an MA or assist dps, but even that would have limited utility in things like extension or keep take groups.

I am literate by the way.  

So now we either sit in a queue for an opening (waiting), or we unbalance the sides by joining in grouped increments.

This is what people are talking about, illiterate. You have to force people to either queue, or wind up with unbalanced forces.

This is one of the problems GW2 has: they balance the teams by capping player participation. This annoys the shit out of people who go "I would like to RVR. Oh look, a fucking queue."

Balancing teams in an MMO is fucking difficult unless you treat combat as a non open world experience. And people are buying in to RVR for the open world experience. This is the problem people are trying to express to you.

Where did I ever mention queues? As I said in the first post, this would only roughly balance the player numbers. If one side has maybe a half dozen more people than the other, then that's still a far better setup than the typical open world rvr 'matchup' of fifty people getting ganked by a hundred.

Illiterate.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82533/inigo.jpg)

Hush, you. This is the internet.

But team balance isn't as clean as "we need to clear this up by a few percent", team balance (if you played daoc, or PS2, or any other 3 team game with no hard population caps) is:

60% Realm A
30% Realm B
10% Realm C

There is no minor math that fixes it. You either Queue someone, or split someone. You don't just go "B and C are allies magically!" and have anything but a still terribly unbalanced system AND lack the dynamic of a third team spoiling your plans.

Fair enough, if the split is that bad there's nothing you could do about it. But that's an extreme example, and barring some kind of pre-existing balance issues I doubt you'd often see one out of three realms with only 10% population. Not saying it would never happen, just that it would be rare.

And before you tell me that this happened regularly with midgard, keep in mind that this probably had more to do with a smaller starting inequality compounding on itself as more and more people on that team left due to being chronically outnumbered.

edit: Even then, 60/40 is still a far better split than 60/30, 30/10, and 60/10. Because, lets be honest, that whole 'the two smaller factions will team up against the third' is a load of crap believed only by sociology majors, mmo developers, and people who have never spent 5 minutes in an online game, ever.

:facepalm:

An "extreme" example that existed on over half of DAOC's servers at its peak. And it wasn't just Midgard.

I'll try and remember to take a continent screen picture tonight if I log in to PS2. It's really not that extreme an example, players kind of fall into the idea of the least effort required for a reward.

Anywho, I never really believe that a third realm makes things inherently more fair, just a bit more interesting (meaning a third party is out there doing it's own thing). From DAOC experience when you have a 60/30/10 split instead of ganging up against the 60, you have the 30 and 10 basically fucking each other and trying to avoid the 60. A reward system to encourage beating up on the winners would be useful, and the idea in theory of forcing the smaller realm into an adhoc alliance with the other small realm is decent. We're mostly just whining about historical experience with extreme population mismatches and the various ways people tried to avoid that in later games.

It's really hard to try and get the populations matched up without eventually turning players away. And it's really shitty to want to buy the game and be told you can't play on server X with your friends because there's a massive population fuckup on that server. I don't really have a good way to solve that.

That's because, despite years of armchair designers going "GOD YOU GUYS IT IS SO SIMPLE TO FIX", there is no good way to solve it. You have to cut the baby somewhere.

The dissonance is between "match" and "world".

What you describe is fine for a server reset that occurs every four hours. But the promise of RvR was combined with "MMO". You can't have a win condition and a game mechanic that promoted constant fighting and positively-reinforcement constantly-forward character progression and expect a natural balancing of population through equally well-designed content for all races and realms. Shit, fucking bottomless-pit Blizzard couldn't pull that off for launch year WoW.

You either give up permanence for match based fun or you give up the idea of balance in favor of a permanent win condition.

Anything else is a decade long running argument of what could have been if onlies...

If so many people are "illiterate" maybe you should try making the effort to write more clearly.

PvP thread, unchained.

You'll have to forgive Ingmar. If the game isn't WOW and very very casual, then he thinks you're an idiot and all your ideas are fucking retarded automatically.

Yep, you got me. Nothing says casual WoW gamer like 40-60 hour gaming weeks and 0 hours of WoW since 2011.

ToR is Space-WoW.

And poorly executed at that.

To me, it's much better than WoW, but I would never hold up either as my example of how to do PVP/RVR which is what we're actually talking about, which makes this whole derail even stupider.  :oh_i_see:

I love that all these years later, we can still count on INGMAR DOESN'T EVEN RVR LOL posts.  :oh_i_see:

If the evidence that Ingmar doesn't stick merely to the most mainstream of titles is that he doesn't play WoW anymore he plays ToR...  :uhrr:

Can we maybe stop making this thread about me now? I wasn't even the one tossing insults this time.

The last page and a half of this thread needs denning...  :facepalm:

I like turtles

You would, mainstream reptile lover.

Aaaaanyway....

http://www.polygon.com/2013/4/14/4223160/camelot-unchained-dev-says-free-to-play-model-headed-for-disaster


See guys, Mark Jacobs is an innovator. Free to play is just a fad, monthly sub is where its at!

Man.  These old developers really need to find a new line of work.  Or put down the crack pipe.

I think he's partly right - the way most F2P/freemium models are going at the moment is such that your game experience is so crippled unless you pay that they may as well be sub-based games.

Several of my friends have said that they'd rather have a good game, that they paid a monthly sub for, if that meant they got *everything* instead of being nickel-and-dimed every step of the way.

Where he's wrong is in thinking a remake of DaoC is going to be the success story that comes out of that crash.

Now we all know that Mark Jacobs has never been wrong about ANYTHING in relation to subscription games.  :why_so_serious:

Romans in space.

Pretty much where I'm at with them. I like the idea of F2P games. I dislike most of the implementations because in order to make money the things they sell need to be good enough to be worth money. Also, some of the companies absolutely don't understand micro transactions, and you wind up with things like $20-$60 items and such. Just sell me the fucking sub and put it all in at that point.

The only people to get F2P right are Arenanet. Both GW and GW2 are completely, fully operational and fun to play without spending one penny extra beyond the box-charge. I haven't checked out The Secret World since it went F2P so can't comment on their implementation but I know the F2P of City of Heroes was horrible and I've resubbed to SWtOR because I found the penny pinching bullshit their F2P model espouses just made me monumentally angry. I don't mind if you want to charge me for new things, but charging me for shit I used to be able to do, or massively increasing the in-game currency cost of items and then crippling the ammount of currency they can own (so they'll go for RMT as an 'alternative') for nonsubbers is where I draw the line.

I think some of the non-MMORPGs have got it almost right.

Path of Exile's implementation is fantastic - only cosmetic items or bank/character slots, but the free allocation of bank/character slots is decently generous. I hope it turns out to be a viable model financially.

World of Tanks is pretty good too. You can play free no problems with some caveats - high tier tanks are expensive to run so you'll need to learn which lower tier tanks you can make money with. Also the premium-only tanks are, IMO, overpriced.

The only F2P MMORPG I can think of that worked for me was STO, although it lockboxes and starbases fucked that up a bit and were what drove me away in the end.

I've seen no evidence, ever, that Mark Jacobs is sufficiently analytical enough, nor aware enough of anything outside his own world, to get these kind of sums right. Therefore I have to say that going sub-based is the only option that makes sense at all for CU.

BTW they need to call the first expansion Nova Tepok.  :grin:

I believe DDO and LOTRO did a great job with F2P. GW2 is great.

Have to admit I've not played any of those, but I do intend to check out GW2 sometime, I've heard so many people say good things about it.

GW2 is well worth the box cost, especially if you enjoy adventuring.  Playing with a friend makes the game 10x better. 

I still don't like free-2-play in any shape or form.  I'd rather show my support with a subscription or lack of support by leaving.  The ticky-tack nickel and dime shit in today's games makes me crabby. 

I know, I'm old.   :geezer:

STO's model seems perfectly fine. DDO got it incredibly EQ2 levels of wrong at the start but they have fixed it. Tera went f2p and seems to have done so in a good place for them to make money and for it not to piss all over customers.

I've heard nothing but bad things about WoT being P2W but a game like that is going to have a lot harder time being f2p than a MMO where pvp isn't much of a focus.

I also prefer simply paying a sub to microtransactions.

The trouble with free to play is that it's so often a misnomer. It can't really be free because servers cost money, but if you say it's free then people tend to believe you, only to get upset once they discover there are restrictions designed to make them pay.

In a perfect world though (from the player's point of view) I guess every game would be like GW2. Does anyone know how their business model works, ie why they can offer genuine f2p when firms like SOE can't or won't? Do they just make do with lower profit margins or rely on massive box sales?

An exceptionally well balanced triple economy (real money is traded for gems, gems can be traded for gold and gold can be traded for gems at a real-time exchange rate) and a RMT/gem shop full of useful but not game breaking items and bonuses and costume/weapon skin/pet fluff. I'm personally surprised how much free expansion has gone into GW2 so far, but you can bet there's going to be a boxed expansion within the year. GW had 4 boxes in the end, I wouldn't be surprised if GW2 follows the same pattern. It's entirely possible Arenanet has a less aggressive stance on fleecing customers than say, EA, but they're definitely staying afloat.

Jacobs is wrong.

Not because being f2p versus sub makes a game automagically great, but because people have learned you can have a good game without a sub.  Tacking a sub on to a game does not make it quality.  It doesn't suddenly improve the service.  The pay system in a f2p game still needs to be designed well.  The game still needs to not be shit.

For a well-designed and implemented f2p game what you get is something that is fun for everyone.  You allow those willing to spend a little money, for whatever reason, to get insignificant perks that make them happy.  You have those willing to wet themselves tossing money at the devs keep the lights on.  And everyone gets to do it at the price-point they are happy with.  With a sub, it's take it or leave it.

Management of resources is still an issue.  Making not-stupid business decisions remains important.  Gameplay still matters.  What f2p allows is for a wider player base.  All a sub guarantees is a limited market.

I still like puzzle pirates and LOTRO as F2P examples done right.

I feel like LOTRO would be nigh-unplayable if I didn't have the lifetime sub (or a regular sub). The amount of deed grind to get points to unlock quest/zone packs to progress is just utterly insane - you get people creating a character on every server to grind the same deed repeatedly to get the 5 Turbine points for it etc. Trying to play that one totally for free makes SWTOR look really generous.

Puzzle Pirates on the other hand is a great model, yes.

It's silly, but they have the option at least.  With a sub LoTR and TOR would both be shuttered right now.

Not needing to do such things is part of designing it well.  (And to be fair to both studios, they opened as sub-based games, so they had to hack in f2p systems.)

Yep, I agree that LOTRO is pretty bad. Deed grinding is terrible, and forcing players to re-buy questing zones ranks pretty high on my list of F2P Transition Dick Moves. SWTOR... eh. I tried it, but all the flashing SUBSCRIBE NOW text was pretty egregious, so I ended up resubbing for a month anyway.

I was sort of ok with COH, but that's because I had enough vet rewards to perma-unlock the invention system and the MA for free. :grin: GW2 is great... I like the B2P approach in general.

I meant that for LOTRO is was doable if you were poor/masochistic. But it's there.

Puzzles Pirates just makes me smile because it's silly, and I like to sail.

STO has a great model, but PWE has begun really putting the screws to people on pricing.  The lockboxes are the first problem in that gambling for items gets fucking expensive.

Now, with Neverwinter, they're also charging $30-$40 for mounts and companions in addition to $5 for 8 bank spaces (expandable 5 times) and that's just over the line.

My issue with STO's model is that the actual stuff you can buy is crazy goddamned expensive. It's a pretty playable game without spending a dime, but if you do actually want to spend something, it's about $1 per key for their stupid lockbox stuff, or ~$25 for a ship.

IMO, WoT has the same issue with their premium tanks being entirely too expensive. I get that I'm essentially buying a tiny DLC, but the price of a full retail game for a single item?

NEVER!




Jacobs is a crazy person, there's not much else to discuss.

That's a photoshop imo.

What happens next: Nevermore and I plus 62 more ravening Baby Eaters crest the hill behind...

...and probably decide there's too many Mids looking at the dead Hibby to risk it.

I always get chained to carpentry!


Alternately, you trickle up to us three at a time. It was very sporting of you guys.

Alb Trickle, Best Trickle.  :why_so_serious:


That was one of my favorite things about Albs, it was either 3, or 300. Never anything in between.

TERA is doing F2P very right.

No, being a Minstrel if I was in a group it was always part of a zerg.  Maybe in a single group of 8 but that was rare.  Usually I was out solo tracking enemy movement or looking to pick off stranglers.

Don't knock the trickle. We had to implement a BUDDY SYSTEM because people would wander off one at a time and die horribly to stealthers.

I think you misunderstood my point. We'd have 90+ Albs outside a keep (pretty sure that's a zerg, even for Albs, unlike the Mid version of a "zerg," which was nine people.), but they'd trickle in, three at a time, so we could merrily kill them. Apparently Albs don't know what "charge" means.

So two of you died instead?  :why_so_serious:

Hey, I was just the taxi.  What they did once we got to the keep was out of my hands!

Hopefully three!

.. Maybe we used them as positional data.

F2P can be done right. But can it be done right on huge AAA titles? Or will us here need to leave this kind of game to make room for the younger players who show up expecting much less than even Rift levels of investments in their MMOs?

Not saying it's a bad thing, just wondering about change in general. Nobody expects players to hang out for longer than six months, and few want them to, because they become the most entitled most expensive players to continue supporting. So F2P works for companies large enough to rotate through games bi-annually.

That's not bi-annual launches of $60mm games though, nor is it sustainable by a one-company/one-game pattern. And I don't use the last few years of games developed on for-subs budgets hail mary'ing into any-income-is-better-than-none land as a baseline either.

I guess this is kinda what SOE was trying to do, except their curation process got in the way.

There's three major game revenue models:

 - Buy to Play: you have to buy the box to play.
 - Subscription: you have to pay a monthly fee to play.
 - Microtrans: you can buy items / equipment / bonuses / cosmetics with real money.

Yes, F2P MMOs are going to shake up, just like sub-based titles went through because there are too many MMOs for the number of players out there. But I think Jacobs believes - before his game has even been developed - that CU will be so sticky as to keep the 50k - 60k players he expects. I think he's going to get a nasty surprise in an era of MOBAs and other free PVP options.

If they can create a good game and have enough persistence (like EVE) I can see them succeeding with a sub model (if the goal is 50k subs) for an extensive period of time. Since it's Jacobs I'm afraid it will fail on atleast one of those.

I think they'll have trouble with their model if they expect to sell a box and require a sub.  I don't see the sub model dieing off completely but I think the days of expecting players to pay $60+ for a game and then paying a fee to play it are pretty much past.  

Not the right question considering you can ask if AAA titles can be done right at all.  The revenue model is just one factor in the overall design.

I've played DDO, path of exile, age of wushu and GW2 and haven't had any problems with any of their F2P models.

New KS post: I am Mark Jacobs, and my KS is only 55% funded, and I am desperate for your money. (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13861848/camelot-unchained/posts/455338)

I was going to accuse this wily, seasoned industry veteran of somehow making one of the oldest rookie dev mistakes in the book, i.e Making Promises.

But then I looked over the post, and what he's really done is just crank out some feel-good crap so that he can say he updated the KS this week.

Complete with weasel wording.

So maybe he's more wily than I thought. Hmm.

That's just how he writes/talks. He's been doing that since DaoC. He's a pro at using 5000 words to say NOTHING.

He will not lie to us. He'll provide zero fucking documentation and never explain shit, but that's not lying damnit.

That snippy bit aside, I actually liked the Herald's weekly Q&A, even if the answers were shockingly wrong some times. But nowhere near as wrong as the Paladin TL, so that's something. <3

The Herald being wrong was still way worse then the crazy paladin TL. The TeamLeads just had their own logs and reverse engineering to work it.


The people who made the fucking game couldn't get their own numbers right. The ones they merely had to like, look up, since they had access to all those things, since they made the game.


it must've been hard coded again though.  :why_so_serious:

Oh god, the private Mythic TL/beta boards  :awesome_for_real:

They were almost as bad as the VNBoards, except you at least had 5% higher chance of a dev responding to tell you to "STFU, we know what we're doing"   :why_so_serious: :uhrr:

Who were you there?

For me the most egregious thing was not the wrong Q&A answers or anything with the TL program but just the actual numbers up on the Herald being lies/wrong/misleading. I unfortunately can't remember details of the myriad problems we found with it.

Basically he needs $50,000 a day from RIGHT NOW to just make it. I have a feeling this is not happening without some magical angel investors.

Edit: Well, given that there's this period in most kickstarters when when you get within like 10-15% of the goal you get a massive uptick in backers I guess he could do it if he makes it to ~1.8 mill or so in the next 10-12 days.

http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/13861848/camelot-unchained/#chart-daily

*sad slide whistle sound*

Also:

- Ads

No game can live on that alone. But then, no sufficiently funded game can live on any single revenue stream alone anymore either. Because there's too many ways to collect money, investors will strongly ask why you're not chasing them all. So they'll ask why you can't sell the box you'll monetize through MTX and hey why not throw some sponsorships in there.

Except for SimCity being, like, broken and stuff, they probably coulda done pretty well with the ads they added in.

Unfortunately, ads requires many more eyeballs even than MTX to effectively monetize, like many multiples of eyeballs. And it's all very risky at a time with digital ads are tanking anyway.


Which has been my point about the "success" many of the turned-to-F2P games have enjoyed. The revenue model provides ways to project dollars based on precedent. All the post-WoW subs-based MMOs probably targeted some % of WoW's dollars by analyzing what they didn't have (smaller team, smaller IP, less distribution, shorter time horizon to ROI, whatever). But they were all based on sell through to X number of players with Y% at least paying one month worth of a fee and Z% hanging out for the then-standard of 4-6 months.

They turned to F2P and have mostly announced "more success than ever!11/", but that was compared to where the game was when they made the switch, not where the game was when they decided on the business model.

Compare games designed as pure F2P-only experiences given away for free. They don't get anywhere near the same investment. We in our core-gamer age bracket expect at least WoW quality breadth and depth, and that costs a lot. Younger mobile-focused gamers may eventually get there, but possibly not. The mass market has become gamers, but they have not inherited our desire to spend 40 hours a week in one exclusive title for months on end.

This is why I question whether we'll see a AAA-quality F2P-only title. Between the user habits and the need to minimize risk, there might not be a big enough market for it.

... or some mysterious benefactor (i.e. Jacobs)  puts in the required money with 5 days to go, which then opens the floodgates for all those people who jump on large profile funded Kickstarter video games once they are funded.

Also, that's not a Gamers' Bill of Rights, that's a CSE Code of Conduct statement.

The possibility is there.  It's just a matter of whether someone tries it and makes it work.

A triple-A game doesn't really need to go the f2p route though.  People are more than willing to buy the box then play for free if they think they're getting a good game.  All going from buy2play to free2play gets a title is more initial views.

The real question is whether the project chose the correct monetization model based upon what they have produced, and I imagine it is very easy to misjudge that no matter how many MBAs you throw at the problem.

Looking at recent games:

GW2 - b2p
Defiance - b2p

Team Fortress - b2p -> f2p

'MechWarrior - f2p
Marvel Heroes - f2p
Free Realms - f2p

EQ2 - sub -> f2p
CoH - sub -> f2p
DDO - sub -> f2p
STO - sub -> f2p
LotR - sub -> f2p
Terra - sub -> f2p

WoW - sub
Rift - sub
FFXIV - sub

Wildstar - ?

Most of the f2p games have a subscription option, so really it's about barrier to entry and whether the quality of the game makes people want to spend money.  More pricing options just increase the chances someone feels comfortable throwing money at you.  Is there any f2p title that has failed because it was free rather than it had systemic problems?  (CoH is the only close one, and NCSoft just up and killed it;  We don't know it was unprofitable.)

Where AAA titles fall into a trap is that they want to guarantee everyone playing is paying.  They completely ignore the social aspects and that maybe a one-size-fits-all payment model isn't the most profitable one.  I suppose projections are a lot easier when you can say every player is worth $x amount, but it's also horribly short-sighted.  Perfect for a monolithic company with a conservative attitude.

It was still making money; at least enough to tide it over indefinitely. NCSoft shit-canned it because there was zero interest in the game in the home territories is about the closest to the truth I can gather. I could be entirely wrong and/or bitter on that matter though.

Also you missed The Secret World on your list as it occupies a fairly unique position:

TSW: sub > b2p

Those are my feelings on CoH, too, but I'm trying to avoid too much speculation so I gave it the caveat.

TSW is a good point.  Another move away from a sub that helped a game immensely.  Conan, too.

Other than the original GW, we didn't have a lot of datapoints (queue people saying it wasn't a real MMO) for non-shooters.  I think we can agree it's at least viable though.

Planetside 2 is FTP. (and I've spent > $200 on it since launch in 11/2012)

Yes, except they went f2p after they were b2p. If a game starts on paper as f2p (hoping to monetize a percent of everyone who shows up), my contention is it won't get AAA budgets. Because there's no precedent. And because (so far, though dwindling) enough f2p games have made enough money for well under $10mm in dev vs $75mm+.

Good list you provided. Forgot about MechWarrior. Most were "save me!" switches, but I don't know about MechWarrior, am surprised FFX IV is still live, and will be shocked if Wildstar launches with subs :-)

I'm personally not sure that's the question. When f2p is the "save me" option, I usually wonder if it's just to limp along until the capital investment has finished depreciating.

But I also should be clear: I'm not decrying this shift. Good on these companies for being able to make the shift and, heck, for even wanting to. It's just that I don't think the current perception of "hey let's make a f2p title" equates to "hey let's make one for core gamers who like really expensive shit".

CoH/V was killed because (roughly) every quarter's revenue was worse than the one before it since about 2007. It was making about US$10m a year at the end and was the sole source of revenue at a Mountain View-located studio of 80 people. So while CoH/V was profitable with its team of 40, it's extremely likely that all of Paragon Studios wasn't. NCsoft needed to cut costs and PS was underperforming.

What's interesting is that Positron recently revealed that Paragon Studios knew ahead of time that NCsoft wasn't happy with their performance (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/189896/behind_the_scenes_of_the_paragon_.php) and PS was looking to fund a buyout, but PS and NCsoft couldn't reach an agreement. The surprise for the studio was the sudden nature of the shut down announcement.

Plus there were talks with another publisher that didn't work out.

So although NCsoft has been painted as the bad guy in CoH/V's shut down, it seems they did more than just shut the game down on a whim.

---

Slightly more on topic - Cryptic's Neverwinter is entirely F2P. No sub option at all.

I'm not sure 'MechWarrior qualifies as AAA.  Maybe AA, if we push it.  It gets enough traction around here that it's a good example of what the f2p model can produce.

FF XIV did shut down a few months ago.  They're in the closed beta of a Realm Reborn.  While I'm sure it'll be a better game than its predecessor, I have my doubts it'll get the returns a AAA expects.

This I would agree with.  Until b2p games start losing significant market share to f2p games, it is unlikely we will see this.  SoE had the best shot at changing this, but I'm confident the GW2 model will inspire more future businessmen than Planetside 2.

Maybe when today's teens run things it'll change, but we have plenty of time for the market to shift in a dozen directions before they wield influence.

'Mechwarrior is more like a single 'A' in my opinion. Seriously, they basically exist thanks to an internal kickstarter which netted them 4M before they had anything to show, but they started with close to nothing. Sure, maybe I don't know where the lines between the As are, but looks to me that it started like a very small project and grew quickly due to amazing community feedback and an unexpected amount of "shut up and take my money".

Yea I dunno. It's kinda fuzzy in my mind. I can't easily find a solid definition. I'm sure it's some combination of budget, team size and retail price point. Easy to tell AAA from indie, but it's kind of a gray area all on in between.


Totally agree. GW2 is a good example of an attempted blend. Doesn't seem like they've been able to monetize enough to keep the new content (zones, levels, abilities, classes) coming. But I'm hoping they announce an expansion pack or something. They did such a good job on that game, it'd be a shame if it wasn't the foundation for future iteration ala EQ1 was.

I just realized that Final Fantasy XI is 11 years old and it is still sub-only. And so is Dark Age of Camelot, which is 12 years old. And Ultima Online which is 16 years old. What the hell?!

I did the DAoC trial a year or two ago (never having gotten into the game when it was fresh) and the interface and systems were so archaic it was basically unplayable. Nothing will entice new players into the old, old guard at this point. If the 12 people still subscribing are enough to keep the lights on, there's no reason to disturb the order of things now.

But I mean, just check out the awesome videos Mythic uses to promote DAOC (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=QM5dVXFPHnc).  How could you not want to play that in 2013  :why_so_serious:

My god that game had some massive desync. Hard to believe I used to play that looking back on it.

So many disappearing ice skaters in that video.

Also, the fact that Bioware has to put their name on that shows how much of a deal with the devil they made when they sold to EA.

That video reminded me of all the ways that ToA fucked up the game. 

Did they really think adding generic rabble rabble mob sound would help?

Wasn't there another thread where people were claiming graphics didnt matter?

1) I really appreciated the captions to the video, because I had no idea what was going on at any point during that.

2) The Featured Video associated with this promo was "I Lost $250,000 In One Day!" which seemed fitting.

3) Someone should have really cut that video to show an individual story rather than a lot of very similar looking ants running around.

Sadly for me, I still pretty much do know what is going on when I see footage like that.  :why_so_serious:

They should follow CCP's example and have actors doing the voices of players, in scary Russian accents http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDVEHE10nHc

Same.  You never ever totally forget your first love (of MMOs).
 
If it's all one big corporation at this point, I fail to see why charging $15 at the door is justified, esp. at the population numbers they're at.  Even if they didn't add a cash shop, the value of the game for those that still play would increase exponentially by having some new/fresh blood added to the mix of a PvP game. 

Eve trailers always look great.  The game seems so dramatic and exciting in those, then you log in and it's more like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMSjd6HNQdY

The answer is simple. Move the trailer designers to game designer positions.

Upgrade the sad slide whistle to sad trombone. Donations have pretty much completely dried up.

Last week it would've taken $50,000 a day to make it over 2mil, now it'll take $70,000.

It's justified because the people who pay it really, really want the game to stay alive. Cutting the price will not get them any new blood - the game is just too old and creaky. And the people who are paying it are happy to keep paying it, because it keeps their baby alive.

(http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/13861848/camelot-unchained/minichart.png) (http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/13861848/camelot-unchained/)

:yahoo:

Time for MJ to knock the dust off of his wallet if he wants this turd to float.

There's no point in risking his own money on something that has garnered very little interest.

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/82533/rakedance.gif)

Even that's more exciting than it truly is.  I always counted myself lucky to get blown up. 

I don't know but I think most people would spend 700,000 to get 1.3 mill.

so 12k people are interested in this sort of game.About what I expected

More people than that are interested in this sort of game. The only thing you learned here is that only 12k people trust MJ and/or are dumb enough to think that you can kickstart an MMO on 2 million.

There's some hope among current backers that a big dollar backer pops out of the woodwork soon which suddenly makes everyone interested again.

If it fails, the post-mortem will say that $2m was too much - if he'd gone for $1m or $1.5m, Jacobs would have got it.

There are many who would be extremely interested in a DAOC revamp, but we know better than to trust Mark Jacobs to actually be capable of good planning and actual follow-through.  Not to mention the fact that most (if not all) of the Mythic employees who were actually the driving force behind the RvR model are gone.  Mark tended to make a lot of comments indicating that PvP implementation and gameplay were not high on his personal priority list.  In fact, he often came across as less than comfortable with PvP.  So it's interesting/amusing to see him portray himself as the great savior of RvR now.

Anyway, as much as I miss DAOC in its heyday -- and I miss it a lot -- I won't involve myself in this Kickstarter thing.  I'm honestly a little shocked that anyone has at all, even though 12Kish is hardly an impressive head count.

If people had doubts about Jacobs, Warhammer completely solidified those as facts. One of the reasons I ditched so quickly was I could see the same attitude coming from the company about issues and I'd already danced that dance. Waiting on metrics. FIFO fixes. etc.

I'm watching the videos and info they're pumping out trying to raise interest and funds.  It's like they're pretending that the problems of DAoC and WAR never flipping happened.  So surreal  :uhrr:

MJ is the kinda guy who fires his company's talent because they won't tow his line.

Looks like he should have named it Camelot Unfunded. 

I think his kickstarter is waiting for mez to wear off. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=2tWbPZSm2Jk#t=92s

Someone let this guy know the game isn't going to happen.

 :drill:

Not sure where the 12k number is coming from.  Looks like it still has less than nine thousand backers.  The average amount donated is insane though.

Yay, they have EQ1 running on an emulation server.  :why_so_serious:

5-star drive, 3-star talent.

Love that phrase. :heart:

Don't forget complaining suchandsuch a thing that needed to be changed was "hardcoded" and thus impossible.

Zack Braff put up a kickstarter for a self-made sequel to Garden State the other day.

It has made more than $1.5 mill.

(http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/1869987317/wish-i-was-here-1/minichart.png) (http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/1869987317/wish-i-was-here-1/)

How is there demand for this?

Why would there even need to be a sequel made narratively speaking?

I don't know but it's about 10 times more popular than seeing Mark Jacobs make another square wheel.

MJ really working the PR mill atm. Very breathless interview (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-04-23-can-camelot-unchained-kickstart-mmos) on Eurogamer where the interviewer has his tongue so far up Jacob's arse he's possibly become an intestinal parasite.

This quote made me roll my eyes:


I.e. even if the KS fails he'll be back!.  :oh_i_see:

Of course he will.

If he drops the amount to US$1.5m, he'd make it next time easy.

But is this KS about funding game development? Or is it about attracting more traditional investors?

In the latter case, $2 million looks a lot better than $1 or $1.5 million. Getting a lesser amount is going to be even less impressive, after failing to hit the original target.

Same thing as RG's Avatar KS: it's just to have a datapoint to show to real investers? "Look, we got X people to show faith in the form of Y dollars, that's alot right??"

Unfortunately, it's not. No real publisher is going to put $30-50mm behind a $2mm KS on the strength of someone who hasn't made a game in a decade nor someone who parlayed a minor success into a high profile failure. The market is too flooded, all of the publisher's backers are sending in the latest press releases about the much cheaper and far less risky mobile app space, the next generation of consoles are going to suck up most of the attention for a year or two*, and the demographic for the kind of games these old school MMO developers want to make is aging out of being a real market force.

tl;dr: there's a reason they need to go on KS first.

He'll need to rebrand it or wait 5 years so people forget. Otherwise it's actually disintentifying to back it a second time for the people interested in the dream the first time.

* Maybe.

It's a touch embarrassing for CU not to be fully funded (and I won't be surprised if a 'mystery donor' shows up at the last minute) but the aim of the Kickstarter was to raise funds for investors. Jacobs can some humility, perhaps rename the project from its working title of CU and say he's learned a lot from the experience. Then relist at a US$1.5m target and have some stretch goal at US$2m that makes it very attractive to get there.

AFAIK, he's looking for investors to kick in US$5m+ into the project for a total budget of US$10m.

So then he's just looking for a Unity FB game?

Less than 48 hours to go:
http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/13861848/camelot-unchained/

Damn thing is starting to pick up speed  :ye_gods:

Yeah, it'll surely make it at this point.  As an ex-DAOC'er I will have to keep an eye on it, but my expectations are incredibly low.  If it turns out not to suck it will be a pleasant surprise.  As others have said, I would be more interested in it if Jacobs wasn't involved.  He was in charge while DAOC was run into the ground with idiotic PvE expansions, and then he was in charge while WAR utterly squandered its potential, so the same sort of thing will probably happen again.

Third time's a charm?  :grin:

This was being trumpeted about in Neverwinter general last night.  People's response to "No MMO has ever had complex gameplay." was "Camelot was and Camelot Unchained will, too!"

There are zealots for every awful thing.

You didn't like DAoC.  We get it.

I read an article on PA about how there was apparently a spam-campaign done on the media to help reach the goal.  Might explain the last minute rises.

24 Hours to do $250,000? Either a angel investor or some sort of ridiculous spam campaign is required and the latter I doubt will work.

There's something incredibly fishy about their tiers. Five people gave $10,000 to an unmade game? 25 gave $5k. Almost 40 gave $1250. 100 gave $1000. 170 gave $500.

The most ridiculous is that over 1200 people gave $250. Are we living in a universe where that makes sense? Over 10% of your backers are willing to part with $250 for promises? FFS that's the boxes plus 3 years solid of a WoW subscription.

I think you've uncovered the scam here. They're all ringers to sucker people into donating money. Good detective work.
The ce kickstart in reality made $53.45.

It's gone from 1.45 to 1.7 mil in the last 3 days. Another 250k in the next 44 hours is pretty much guaranteed, especially considering it's usual to see a big jump in funding occur on the last day.

I hope it does reach its funding goal. The train wreck will be tons of fun to watch.

:popcorn:

I meant CU. No, I didn't like Camelot but for entirely different reasons than it being awful.  You're just too used to being dogpiled on this one. Thicken that skin, son!

I liked DAOC. This is trash.

What is trash?  THERE IS NO GAME.

Exactly.

But the game in his head is trash. It's sort of like a reverse fanbois thing.

When you have a track record of failure you can't use your one success (that you later trashed, pushing it towards the 'failure' pile) as 'proof' your next project will be awesome.  The default assumption should be "Crap until proven otherwise."  

When you have that record AND you pull a bullshit kickstarter stunt to get other suckers to fund your attempt? Yeah, calling it Trash is a pretty good call.

Let's be objective here.  The guy developed a game in 2001 that is still up and running.  He developed a second game with a HUGE budget entrusted to him and later merged his company with BioWare (earning a pretty penny along the way, I'd assume). 

You don't like the guy's design choices.  I get it.  While the guy has made some questionable design decisions, I'd hardly call his career a track record of failure. 

While a personal success story, I wouldn't call it a design success.  The game is played by a small number of die-hards.

I bet Algernon still has people playing it... does that make it successful?

Saying someone is 'not a failure' means simply that. 

If all you said was true, he wouldn't need Kickstarter to pimp this idea.

It's trash, junk, vapor, whatever you prefer to call it. This won't get made. He's not even using the actual funds to make the game. He's using to to pimp the freaking idea to other people so he can make the game. If you look at it objectively, the guy was in charge of one of the biggest bleedouts of the MMO landscape until SWTOR hit the scene.

In this economy, I doubt anyone is willing to invest much in a game that has, at best, the potential of filling a niche.  I also don't know how much of the failure of WAR is directly attributable to MJ as I've never worked for the guy.  I will admit that WAR was a huge bag of lost potential.  I knew that the moment I saw all the emphasis on PvE.  MJ and PvE just don't belong together... ever.

But MJ designed the WAR crafting system himself!

Were you not involved in the Warhammer beta forum we had going here, Nebu?  To hear Mark talk at that time he was pretty directly involved in most of it.

Sometimes bands make crappy songs. That still a far cry from someone who has never made a song, but talks about how crappy others songs are.

I was.  I also remember how much we all enjoyed the game in beta.  

Yeah, WAR was generally considered a good game by almost all of us until T3.  Even though RvR was pretty much non existent, and the game was basically public quests + battlegrounds.  After T3 the game devolved into a ghost town of public quests and terrible grind and utterly failed.

I'm willing to bet the game gets made if they get funding.  I'm also willing to bet that almost all of the crap Mark Jacobs is talking about in his videos doesn't make it in the game.

It will get funded. They are too close, and one of the things was about Mark kicking in $2M of his own money if they matched it or some bullshit. He's not going to let it sit over $100k. Mystery funding will happen.

In other news - apparently some of the supporters decided it was a good idea to mailbomb the game press to try and get them to cover and drum up interest in the Camelot kickstarter

http://penny-arcade.com/report/article/spam-and-kickstarter-how-fans-of-camelot-unchained-made-sure-the-press-woul

Which then led to this apology/update by Jacobs

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13861848/camelot-unchained/posts

Horny teens have more sense than some of these backers.

Right, let's close down the site then. All a bunch of IT admins and other assorted professionals here.  It can be an engaging discussion between Stormwaltz, yourself, Schild and Margalis on all games, ever.   :oh_i_see:


We also pointed out the problems with public quests being ghost towns once the rush moved on, too-focused testing and not getting to see the upper end.  Each of which were pretty well handwaved away.

Average Pledge Per Backer: $158: I think that just about tells everything (since it's a computer game)

To be fair Ben Kuchera sucks.

This is also true.

73% of the backers are under that average. It's the backing of about a quarter of the participants and the high dollar values. In fact, 65 pledges make up over 15% of their total funding.

To be fair, if CU was going to be anything other than a hustle cash grab warmed over attempt at recapturing past glories, the $2 million mark would have been hit late on day 1, and no one would have to know what Ben Kuchera thinks about spam.

All I mean to say here, is the definition of "failure" used around here is off the mark by miles. Its as if "failure" means "not wow numbers" as a baseline.

Mark Jacobs destroyed DAoC with 1 expansion and got fired from the Warhammer team after it bled a record amount of subscribers.

He may not be a failure in terms of raw profit, but he's a failure in terms of keeping a good thing going (DAoC) and creating a game with even a little bit of lasting content (Warhammer) after being fronted a $100 million dollar budget.

Bands make bad songs from time to time.

And people make poor analogies from time to time.

So Jacobs has a success with DAOC. He then messed it up and got taken over by EA.

He was going to do Imperator Online, and that never happened. He did WAR and that was a flop. Besides a success over a decade ago, he's had more failures of late. This is a what have you done for me lately business.

And some people use a reality that only exists in the reality of form discussions. I also have like, zero interest in this title. I just find it odd, that a title no one in the thread seems to care about, is so cared about.

People care about abuse of Kickstarter. Guess what this is?

Right, save that Internets.

It's more than that. When people ask for funding, they open the door early to detractors of the project. Now it's not just a choice of whether you play it and buy it, it becomes a gunpoint issue of pay up or it's never going to happen fanbois.

Some bands are one-hit-wonders.

That happened with Age of Conan too. There was a honeymoon phase mostly due to Tortage and the first 20 levels being awesome. It took for the game to show the worst itemization ever dipped in terrible performance unless you had a rig from the future for people to start looking for the pitchfork. Still, some (me) will still tell you that was an absolutely great game, but that wouldn't help their design team to succesfully land any Kickstarter campaign I am afraid.

I'm dubious of your cynicism about our cynicism.  We need to go deeper.

Indeed. Magestorm was awesome.

What I mean is compared to other games like Torment: Tides of Numenera (Average Pledge Per Backer: $56) and Wasteland 2 (Average Pledge Per Backer: $48)

Wait, are you talking about Richard Garriott now?  :why_so_serious:

 :rimshot:

Bad songs don't cost companies MILLIONS 99% of the time either.

You might just be wrong about that.

$1,943,728 pledged of $2,000,000 goal with 20 hours to go!

I reckon they're going to make it past the finishing post just in time for the deadline, which is damned convenient!

I still can't believe people are backing this. Take my money, so you have the chance to ask other people for money and then MAYBE there might be a project. Insane.

I hate to sound like a "conspirationist", but I really don't think real people are, all of a sudden, backing this up big time.

It's a pretty standard last-few-days jump for any kickstarter.  I'd guess that many people that are on the fence wait until the last second to decide.  I know a few of my hardcore DAOC playing friends have more or less done this, deciding to throw in $25 at the last moment.

Same jump can be seen in even very successful kickstarters.  Some examples.  

Double Fine:  http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure/#chart-daily
Torment: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/inxile/torment-tides-of-numenera/#chart-daily
Eternity: http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/#chart-daily  (really dramatic jump here)

Obviously much of this is stretch goal related, but regardless I'm not surprised at CU's trajectory.  Exactly what I expected a few days ago.

Watch the celebration!  (well eventually)  http://www.twitch.tv/citystategames (http://www.twitch.tv/citystategames)
 :awesome_for_real:

To be clear, Imperator was languishing until they secured the Warhammer Fantasy IP. What funding they had then became big once they were bought on the promise of future success. That development was complemented with insane amounts of Marketing and PR happening roughly at the same time the early beta reports were leaking. The company name was being applied to other projects on the strength of the investment they made to buy the MMO which was made on the strength of DAoC.*

Does that make him personally a failure? No. Games are a trillion decisions made by hundreds of people over many years.

But, as the face of the game, he's associated with how DAoC and WAR did. He's trying to bank on that, and we're seeing that can only go so far (like RG, and his first MMO has been going on for more years than that).

When people bank on their personal name recognition, they need to accept their skeletons will be scrutinized along with their successes, and that the sequence of those is often more important than the total picture.

* Incidentally, shifting the clock forward a few years and the only thing you need to do is replace the company and game names. Heck, replacing MJ with RG gets you there too.

Aaaaaand...they're funded.  With 19 hours to go even.

Faith in humanity shattered.  I'll go weep in a corner now.

I still have my doubts this ever sees the light of day.

It won't in any workable form. They'll probably get a beta or something going until they can get people to pay for access to that.

 :psyduck:

I broke Ingmar!

(http://25.media.tumblr.com/a60f89732fd6e683df5b54a657042362/tumblr_mju4fmnJgJ1qafzi2o1_400.jpg)

In case anyone was wondering, I didn't give this a cent.  I will play it if it ever gets that far.  If...

Meanwhile, my faith in humanity is maintained.

And now we've got years worth of material to look forward to. YEARS.


FIFY

I didn't give money either.  To any kickstarter.  I keep forgetting they exist and I'm mostly skint.  I don't know if this game will make it or not, but I still think Marc is a sweetheart and I hope he makes a living and doesn't have to become something else.  I spell his name "Marc" because he's a game DESIGNER. 

I chose not to back it either as it was just funding to use for seeking out other VC funding. I'm sure Mark Jacobs can secure enough funding to get the game developed, but I would rather just buy it when it releases. Gone are the days where I hope for a beta spot. Now? I just hope my strawberries grow this year.

Yeah, it was never in doubt (http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/05/02/camelot-unchained-secures-an-additional-3-million-in-funding/)

Once the KS was funded, Jacobs went ahead and put in $2 million of his own, and they've pulled together another million from non-KS sources.

Now, can you develop a three-realm RvR MMO, with all of the features that Jacobs has been crowing about, for $5 million? I guess we'll find out.  :awesome_for_real:

I had missed this for some reason, but they're planning on this being a paid subscription based game.  Because obviously, this time will be different - never mind the trail of tears that is every fucking game that is not WoW or EVE at this point.

They have about 5 weeks of operating expenses now, according to Curt Schilling. No problem.

If CSE has 400 employees, sure.

If it gets above 20, they will have problems.

I've backed two kickstarters. One was a pure charity, which was funding a friend's giant fire art installation. The other was effectively a pre-purchase to the Guide to Glorantha, which came from Moon Design who had an established track record and because I'm a lunatic for Glorantha the way these backers are for Camelot.

I'm skeptical because I don't think, based on his past behavior particularly here, that Jacobs can keep his ego in check. If he goes humble and downplays it as a small indie niche game, he could probably get 50-100k subs and declare it a success on that level. Sort of like POE. Sort of like DAOC actually. I think he'll go big with grandiose claims and end up being seen as a failure even if it makes a profit though.

I think that even a marginal game could garner 10k subscribers for a year or so.  If he plans for this scale, he'll be fine.  If he gets grand plans, then he's going to circle the drain as the majority of you expect. 

CU has a team of 10 devs + whatever support people they have on staff.

That amount of revenue can support a staff of about 10-15 people, and no more. If that's the case, you're right.

"If it has less than a million subs, it's a failure."

If it cost $100M and has less than a million subs, it's a failure.  :grin:

Mark said he would be happy with 20-50k. He also said that the subscription could possible, and should be less than $15 a month.

Now all we need is Paul Barnett to make a video taking about the nascent and probably untenable ideas that they kicked around an office brainstorming session, and turn them into solid promises about how the game will cure cancer, solve world peace, and come to your house to clean up your garage for you. I don't see why he shouldn't be wearing sun glasses in it either.

He's probably still happily employed at EA though. Probably a perfect fit for him.

OMG. A quick google turned up this gem. 

Fuck me, General Manager? Failed upwards quite spectacularly didn't he?

Yeah, but he's the GM of Mythic.  That's like what, 10 people?  Pretty much on par with being the GM of a Taco Bell at this point.

Taco Bell produces less shit.

I LOLed.  :oh_i_see:

Barnett better not have anything to do with Camelot Unchained.  It would kill the small glimmer of something_hopelike. l

There is no hope. Death is certain.

I suspect that Mark Jacobs has about as much interest in having any association with Paul Barnett as he does in contracting a case of hemorrhagic smallpox.

I could be wrong, though.

PB as a GM is fucking extraordinary.

He will be able to live off that forever.

Games industry is  :roflcopter:

I just realized that we need an emoticon for 'clownshoes'.

Wow. How did that happen?

DAOC nostalgists, and friends/family of employees.

Is this the part where Jacobs comes into the thread and says "HA HA, BITCHES!  GOT MY MONEY!"?   :why_so_serious:

If he put out a full game with the feel and gameplay of Tier I WAR I'd buy that for a dollar.  But...yeah.

Wasn't that the idea behind that canceled arena game?

Maybe I should've played that then. I'm not a PVP guy, but Tier I was some of the best PVP I've experienced. 

One possible response:
Money is not a game. Come back when you have a finished game.

I think the implication is that he's just taking the money and running.  No game intended.

It was the idea. The idea just turned out to be complete shit when made by 3-star talent.

Nah, they just tried really hard to make it more than the lobby game it wanted to be, as Kall has pointed out for us. Recall he worked on that one.

Nope I worked on Fury.

But by that notion if they are accepting a subscription then they'd have to make Camelot Unchained into something more than a lobby game. 

I missed that at some point someone was trying an Arena PVP game based on WAR.  I hear "arena PVP" and still thing of Fury. My mistake.

No worries.  Camelot Unchained will fail for the same reason Fury failed, why EA ultimately canned the WAR arena game (hell they had the ability for a lot of code and asset re-use too to make it cheaper), why exteel is no longer around, and why that one arena game released recently on steam (Forge I think) is flailing around with complaints of lack of players. 

A centrally hosted MMO arena game is doomed to failure, and it's clear to everyone except idiot investors and the idiot DAOC fanatics that threw money at the kickstarter.

Well to be fair, Forge was a pretty shitty game. Fury was actually kind of fun but poorly designed from what I remember. I just don't think the MMO Arena game has been made properly yet. Don't ask me how though. You have to someone take MOBAs and MMORPGs and combine them and convince people that they should just go play the game they came from because it's ultimately better.

MMORPG Arena games need stickiness, so just a map/battleground type of system will probably fail. This might mean that instead of a map that lasts 5-10 minutes, you need one that lasts 1-7 days.

You need a progression system, levels and gear, but something that you can easily jump in and out of.

Classes have to be simple with a limited action bar. I think Neverwinter's setup is perfect, including the combat mechanics/style. This ties into the MOBA style of things. With limited class layouts, and shallow class development, you can keep adding in new "heroes" as the game ages".

Armchair dev time because I'm bored.  Here's my game:

Picture Alterac Valley from WOW 1.0. The map will be designed to last 1-7 days (however you do that). You get your stickiness here. This includes PVE objectives to gain gear, unlock buffs, your side boss, your side's upgrades etc. Everything from the original AV.

Inside that week of gameplay you can level your character and collect gear. Gear is a limited resource in this game. The more rare items are unique to the map so only. The less rare they item is the more of them that are available. You now have a progression system with builds. Leveling is pretty easy and fast and what you're really doing is hunting gear to fight better with. The game is also full loot, but loot is readily available.

Now since the game is designed to last 1-7 days, and leveling is fast and gear is plentiful, you have a short progression system, you have an arms race and you have PVP tossed in. However since games do not last that long, you can jump in and out of them and gear/levels is transient and their loss is not very harsh.

The things you can play around with are things like once you join a map can you quit and find another one mid-fight or are you locked in?

Anyway, I think that game would be successful if it's either buy to play, or you pay something like a $5 subscription. I can't think of cash-shop items unless you want to make classes a paid for thing.

If we decide not to count MOBAs, the closest thing to centrally hosted arena MMOs, and most succesful, are probaby World of Tanks and Mechwarrior. In a way, they prove that there's definitely a market out there. Somehow, it's just not really working with fireballs, swords, elves and a third person view yet.

EDIT to add: I think GW1 got really close to nail down the concept, which could have easily made into a standalone. It's astonishing that they failed so bad with the sequel.

Uh, Bloodline Champions.

There are too many unknowns to say that GW1 nailed down the concept in such a way that would have worked stand-alone.  I played in the high up GW1 pvp scene back in the hey days, and as much as many of them bitched about it they still participated in a lot of PvE stuff every once and a while.  The PVE was pivotal for the stickyness that the PVP side required because it meant that if you were feeling meh about actually doing the PVP that day you still had something in the game to do, which then lent towards "hey we are doing XYZ come join us" and convinced to do PVP.  That whole dynamic wouldn't exist if it was PVP only, and based on other games that have tried I do believe it would have failed pretty hard if it didn't have this stickyness.


Fury had a lot of very poor design decisions, and anyone that remembers me back in the day will know I will criticize the game as much as any regular player (probably more because I know the behind the scenes crap and know how that the leads were douchebags who suck at making games or knowing what makes a game fun).    However, the "well games X, Y, and Z all had major design flaws, but I am awesome enough that I can do better" is a good way to head straight for failure (and I think is what Marc Jacobs truly believes).

Persistence is a good way to help the stickyness issue, but that persistence has to make sense.  Your ideas for a 1-7 day map only works for games like Planetside, where everyone is able to fight anyone and there is no concept of servers (that counts out Fury, World of Tanks, MOBAs, Exteel, etc....).  GW2 WvW also disagrees that a limited time persistence (1-7 days) has it's drawbacks with motivation when you know the server will just reset all of your progress.  It also affects your morale when you are getting stomped and just decide to wait for the server reset to hope things will be more even (instead of wasting time trying to make things even yourself).

Pretty sure Exsteel failed because it was unplayable due to lag which was the problem with so many of these types of games in 2000-2010. They are picked up by such bottom feeding companies who just can't afford or don't bother to pay for decent bandwidth. I'd imagine the cost of bandwidth is going down though so hopefully as we slowly all get google fiber or its existence forces comcast and others to stop being giant fuckers the environment for arena games will improve.

Rumble Fighter is still kicking though its smaller now for sure, pretty sure Gunbound is still around too. World of Tanks is obviously quite successful. There have been lots of them that without lag and with better translations/localization would probably have done fine. Infinity Online was great but got fucked up by splitting the EU/NA community, lag and there have been many others like that where the company running the NA/EU release couldn't get out of their own way enough for the game to have a chance.

As I said in the PoE thread, other devs need to take note of the race idea from PoE the concept can be applied to other types of game as well. Arena games would benefit greatly from a mixture of community warfare/galaxy map/storyline combat, in-game handled tournaments and novelty races.

For arena games and stickiness you should also consult your history books and find people who worked on TA's galactic war, MPBT3025, StarFleet Command's community warfare thing the name of which escapes me etc. Because way too many of these games fuck up the same stuff that most everyone else fucked up.

I pledged $5 so I could bear witness to the chaos and fury of the private backer forums in a year ^^

 :oh_i_see:

Honestly, I was quite down on Smite at the beginning of its existence, but the Arena mode and their recent overhauls of the game have made it sort of like a mix of slower-paced arena-style combat and the whole MOBA thing. I wasn't expecting on coming back to Smite after it's weird early beta with the tradtional DotA map that I'd like it as much as I do.

I think it's really only a matter of time with so much money floating around action RTS games that someone is going to try to crack that nut and succeed.

Also, none of the successful MOBA games, nor WoT have a subscription fee.

While we're talking great failed PvP MMOs, let's not forget APB.

A huge problem with these games is baby eating - newer players get kerbstomped by more experienced players and don't come back. MOBAs and similar tend to limit the kerbstomping to one game, following which the victim can go off and find somewhere less brutal to develop their skills, get help, etc.

One world PvP games don't have this and / or rely on terrible matchmaking set-ups. This mattered less when there weren't 50 different titles you could be playing if you didn't like the one you were in.

However, there's a large group of players out there in love with the idea of world PvP and that's the story of how CU got its Kickstarter money.

I said the whole time with APB if it was free to play it would be huge. I still think that was true. They completely fucked up by reducing the playerbase. The smaller the playerbase the worse babyeating gets and feels if its large enough then the baddies have enough baddies to play with that everything is fine.

APB is free to play now (http://store.steampowered.com/video/113400/), and on Steam. Redownloading it myself to see how it plays 3 years later.

Well yeah, in the 1-7 day map thing, the game is wide open without servers. The persistence is on the web or in the UI with leaderboards, ladders and other epeen stroking stuff. You can create leagues and teams and all sorts of stupid shit that keep people happy. But you need leaderboards.

This is where GW2 failed. They just made a map where people played in. Points of interest were easily flipped and you just ran around getting point ticks. You did this for the whole week and whoever had the most points, won. It's stupid. Not only that, they didn't have leaderboards. No one gave a shit about anything. The gameplay was horrible after time. And boring.

I would like to see a short-term persistent game. A game that persists for a few days. It could last weeks or hours. But there is a definitive end that is objective based. GW2 was just "whoever scores as many points in a week wins". There was no ultimate goal.

I'm terrible at MOBAs and never really got into them, but there is that "early game" I believe where players farm creeps or whatever for experience so they can buy powers/items to put them into the mid-game. I would like to expand that process so it takes place throughout the game. But since I love theorycrafting/dev armchairing for no reason at all, tell me this wouldn't be fun.

Large map, maybe 5-10 the size of AV. No instances obviously, same objectives. 200-300 per side at any given time.
Start off with shit gear, early game is doing quick and easy PVE content for gear. Think EQ-level spawn check/killing for gear. This takes place in the first hours or so.
Once your early power is established, you move out further into the map.
Option 1: Kill other players for gear/experience.
Option 2: Attempt more difficult NPCs for gear or ambush players going for that gear.
Option 3: Begin farming for defensive/offensive bonuses. (Remember those raid bosses from AV that fought for you? That sort of shit.) Your team needs to kill players to fuel these bonuses.

This continues on until one team kills the other's commander. You have a leveling process (takes a few hours), you have gear, you have PVE and PVP targets. More powerful gear in unique. Best weapons in the map are unique so only one person can have them.

Not only that but you fuel the uber gamer that loves that Opening Weekend of an MMORPG rush every single time.

Outside the enjoyment of playing that type of game, you can fuck with class balance, gear balance. Create new maps, allow for 2, 3 or 4 teams. Create special competitions. Offer prizes and other shit outside the game that offers stickiness.

Essentially, it's a MOBA on a super large scale that includes more PVE shit.

Shit it's been three years already? Fuck me.

It might have been if the controls, balance and general mechanics didn't suck monkey ass.

Well if anything MOBA are biggest "baby eaters". I mean if you never played MOBA before not only you gonna get curb stomped game after game after game, you gonna be trashtalked  while at it as well. And of course every other game will have afk/intentional feeder.  The worst community I ever played with bar none.  Add to it an insane learning curve which makes eve look icasual  and its a mystery to me how LoL is most popular game  out there

Because they reduced the learning curve and they have a baby queue

Also, because when LOL works right, it's REALLY FUN. And let's not forget that out of the "box" it gives you the ability to play a shitload of champs for cheap or free and has real incentives for spending real money without pressuring you to spend money.

Plus, it's low level community isn't bad - it's only when you've been in it about a month or two that the shitweasels start coming out of the wood work. The difference in low level community I saw between LOL and HON was night and day. HON was just full of trashtalking shitcocks from day one. It took me weeks to get a game with a dicknozzle in LOL. Of course, now that I'm level 30 and playing ranked, it usually takes me weeks to find a game WITHOUT a dicknozzle.

Makes sense; HoN games are ranked from day one.

Arise!

This is supposed to be hitting alpha this month; anyone have access to their forums to see if thst's still going to be a thing?

I have a friend that sends me updates.  I'll do my best to pass them along.

Cool, thanks.

This has all the info on the alpha.

http://camelotunchained.com/en/evening-update-wednesday-august-27th-2014/

Sarcasm or just a dead link?

Dead link. They're doing it wrong.
http://camelotunchained.com/v2/afternoon-update-friday-august-29th-2014-repost-from-weds/ (http://camelotunchained.com/v2/afternoon-update-friday-august-29th-2014-repost-from-weds/)

edit: I mean the link. They're blogging wrong. Whether they're doing RvR/MMO wrong is, of course, subjective.

Thanks.

Hmm, sorry about the bad link.  Not sure if they changed the date on the blog or what.  That was the same post I was trying to link though.

They changed the date of their announcement, so they wrote a new post.
And, rather than link/redirect from the old post to the new post, they just erased the old post.
So anyone (like you) who tried to link to the old post ended up in 404 land.

Even though there's a heavy NDA, they have shared the first footage of DAOC 2 Camelot Unchained, which is now in closed Alpha with only the 250$ backers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdLRYy3o-Qw

Not sure why they'd release that footage.  Nothing good will come from it.

My guess it desperation or another plea for funds coming?

Well, it does look a lot like Dark Age of Camelot, I'll give them that.

Vikings, Arthurians and Tuatha Dé Danann.  Subtle.

Look at the arc of those spells.  I wanna cast siege fireballs like that.

The backers are SUPER happy with those videos. I saw it because a friend of mine who's been raving about DAOC (and now DAOC 2) since day one thought of killing my pessimism with that footage. He was like: "so this was going to be shit, huh?! TAKE A LOOK AT THIS NOW!"

 :oh_i_see:

It looked okay for a so-called pre-alpha.

They've got plenty of time to really fuck up.  It's in stick figure mode, the fact that it's not already the Mona Lisa is not really a negative.

Note: I have no pony in this race, I just like seeing different shit than what we've gotten the last decade or two.

Every time this game comes up I get frustrated that it is going to have a subscription. PvP oriented games benefit the most from free or buy to play, due to the increased population. I don't understand why they don't go the RIFT route, which has the best implementation of free to play imo. On the other hand, a sub based model will likely save me a lot of money in the long term.

I was super happy with the video for two reasons:

1. The mention of physics/combat being resolved server side (no easy hacks or user-induced latency)

2. The cost-benefit of skill/ability builds looked intriguing.

I have a friend that is in the pre-alpha and he is VERY excited about progress so far.  Then again, I played DAoC with him for 6 years, so my glasses are rose tinted. 

Also the people who payed enough to be in the pre-alpha are all insane, so there is a high chance they will like it.

Well, not doing it this way would be pants-on-the head retarded for a PVP game, so I don't think that point can be really counted as a achievement.

That being said, I hope the game turns out well.

Dat video... it's 2001 all over again.  :oh_i_see:

Can you name a pvp mmo where the mechanics are kept server side other than WoT?  I'm not sure that there is one.

Hmmm...Are we talking about the same thing? I might be revealing a lack of understanding here, but I thought that basically every MMO nowadays has the combat completely server side, only movement being client based but limited by regular sanity checks by the server.

You may be correct, but this was always a particularly big issue in the past.  Being able to exploit both location and movement speed are annoyances in MMO pvp.

I'm okay with the footage, but I would have liked to have seen some siege weaponry in use (though it may not have been implemented just yet).

I did like the duck and the line of "For Howard the Duck!" as a battle cry :grin:

The guy from the video acts like 15 months is an eternity.

Yeah, I was thinking - gee, pre-alpha to launch ready by next fall?  Good luck.

I'm pretty excited for a non quest-based theme park MMO to launch. This game isn't really for me though, I don't think I can really do another hotbar/tab target based PVP game. I hitched my hopium fueled dreams to Crowfall who are developing an action based combat system. That's all I'm basing my excitement on.

I still can't remember when the old "it's alpha" or "it's beta" thing was used as something other than an excuse. This is supposed to be done in a little over a year? I mean I've seen their concept art and it looks terrible just like this alpha footage. This is honestly what I imagined the game looking like. It's funny looking at how things have developed over the last few years.

Asia/korea is making polished MMOs with stunning graphics that usually turn out to be piles of p2w shit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5zHKxq1DXQ

Meanwhile the west has returned to making MMOs with the graphics and polish of the early 2000s which also turn out to be piles of p2w shit. A lot of western mmos aren't even mmos anymore, but I guess you could call them pseudo mmos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbxMi74MNJI

The funny thing is that some of the Koreans games would be really really cool if it weren't for the p2w aspect. But would they have those budgets at this point if they didn't build with p2w in mind?

Probably not. If you look at Archeage as an example, it seems like the biggest part of their profits come from getting players addicted to virtual gambling.

Archeage and tera started out as P2P.

ArcheAge has never had a box cost in the US, just a cash shop and optional sub fee.

New Official Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXCAQ9HSne8).

Didn't we have that above?

I also love how the opening is inspired by the Game of Thrones opening in both style and sound.

Yes, but Falc's link cuts out the shitty podcaster.

Massive improvement.

Agreed, much better this way. It's further along than I expected; this might actually be a thing one day.

Graphics remind me of EQ2.

How did they manage to make so many terrible looking races.

Did you never played Dark Age of Camelot?  :why_so_serious:

I thought it was just the graphics of that period. I do remember them looking bad. The race I picked looked like a cross of Homer Simpson and Cletus the slack jawed yokel.