f13.net

Never, ever again.

The problem isnt the people as a whole, its that you played on War and Vengeance. Vengeance is made up of all the asshats from servers where things have gone to shit.

The players in Shadowbane seem to stick in their own little circles and move servers in groups. So all you did was move where all the morons from War went.

Now if you tried an entire new circle of gamers like those on Corruption or, perish forbid maybe Mourning you would have found a better class of player.

Im not saying Shadowbane is awesome and worth everyone subscribing to, but you have to admit that it has come a long way from the time it was released, especially in the last few months. The new ideas are intriguing even if they may upset the balance somewhat ingame for awhile.

Im personally looking forward to my schooling wrapping up so I can spend some more time ingame. But to each his own.

~ Seabiscuitt the Shipwrecked Pirate

I had this problem with this game too.  The grouping problem anyway.  This is not the only time I had this problem though.  I played EQ when it first came out and then I quit.  I never bought the expansions.... That was the end for me.  If you don't keep up with expansions, grouping is impossible.  I tried going back to SB, EQ, and AC....  all with the same ending.  I was a loner in a team game.  It was like throwing the baseball in the air, hitting it, and then chasing it myself.  Never quit a MMOG.  Once you quit, you are pretty much never allowed back these days.

Interesting observation, and thinking about it I'd mostly agree.

SB is a game where you will enjoy yourself 5x more if you are in a sold guild compared to playing alone or with a couple of friends.  Every character I made in the last 6 months or so I played SB i got to lvl 59 in 4 days of mostly afk lvling or macro lvling.  I played the game for over a year without ever really having to look for a group except in irc or guild chat.

Not with UO... it only took me 2 weeks to get to a stage where I was useful enough to be taken to spawns and suchlike. Even got myself an 18x18 (THE house to get, castles are pretty much impossible) in that time. Quit again because I burned out from going at it too hard, but I'll be resubbing (and taking it easy) as soon as the bank processes the transfer of funds from one account to the other (would have resubbed yesterday but the damn bank is slow... shoulda got off my ass and just threw a 50 in there myself).

I swear everytime a mmog looks good but I can't play it (SWG US only... fuck that, not in WoW beta and again... US only) I turn back to UO for my fix.

What does this have to do with Shadowbane? Well, their free trial is North America only (why I have no idea)... so EA gets my money.

Nor with SWG. It's easy to get up and running again even if you re-roll. Of course, it is better to return, if you do, to an existing character and the bajillions of credits mudflation granted you.


So true. Even more so than every other MMOG I've played, SB is about the group you fall in with early in your career. If not for my guild on Vengeance (House of Sagacious), I'd have likely quit within days again ("again" because that's how long I lasted in beta).

I'm wondering if the same is true about Lineage 2. I hated that game with a passion I long thought beaten outta me by this genre. L2 sucks in ways I thought were designed outta even the crap titles years ago. But it could be that I decided not to hook up with folks right away.

Wow, that's riveting gameplay right there.  How many characters would that be?  5? 10?  So 20-40 days of afk levelling?

Progressquest is free you know. (More variety (http://www.burnproject.com/usr/Azhrarn-LOD/screenies/pq.jpg) as well)

SB is beyond hope.

heh SB is actually one of those games where making your character does not = gameplay.  Making your character is just the boring part which you go through before the actual gameplay, ie pvp/gvg

I'd usually make a new character only if I thought up some uber template which I wanted to try out etc, most of the time I would play finished characters and pvp

You probably would've had a different experience with a larger/more established guild (or nation even).. as you point out in the writeup, your guild can pretty much make or break shadowbane.  It's too bad though; there was lots of PvP and GvG (or ZvZ, really) fun to be had during the winback weeks and the week or two after.

My period back went a little differently; I transferred over my 59 Mage Channeler from Scorn, and was more than a little annoyed that 59 didn't mean much any more.  I then proceeded to bitch about RoC not being available (see old wt.o boards) anywhere locally, and I was too cheap to order it online.  My character wasn't gimped by any means, but he had no survivability -- even less than he had before, with his lack of resists and with R7 prelates pwnzoring the crap out of me.

Luckily, I was talked into creating a spec character to join one of my guild's spec groups, and ended up making a template-of-the-month defensive channeler.  Got him to 50-ish in a few days, and then to 61 about a week later; xp'ing on RoC was fun (as long as I didn't look too closely at the ground textures or the great quad in the sky), because every half hour or hour or so there was some PvP to be had.  I was skeptical about the character at first as I already had a channeler, but I probably had more fun playing this character in the group than I ever had before in SB.

I was impressed with Shadowbane's improvement in stability; I think I had only two or three client crashes during the time, and all at non-critical times.  (For one of these I even managed to capture a recording of the client crashing, which was reproducible with the playback -- sent in the bug email to Ubi/WP about 3-4 weeks ago; as of last week, noone's downloaded the files.  Ah well, I tried.)  Bugs were still present, though; I didn't hit the server crash that you saw, but the ever-present vendor lag was out in full force.  There's nothing quite like the feeling you get when you just got your ass kicked, and it takes you 10 minutes to open your bank to get cash to repair.  I hope no game ever recreates that feeling. Ever.  The stability in large sieges impressed me the most, as I not only didn't crash once, but I was actually able to play -- i.e., powers I used actually worked (albeit with a seemingly random delay), and with the message filters, I could actually follow what was going on and which bastard prelate was nuking the crap out of me.

Even though I reactivated my account, I cancelled again last week.  Though many of the bugs were fixed, there were still enough to annoy me over time, usually lag related.  It was fun for the little bit I was back, but with certain problems within the guild, along with everyone getting generally tired of Shadowbane and thinking about moving to Lineage 2, there wasn't much reason to keep it active.  Too little, too late, unfortunately.

Both styles are still around, often employed by the same people. The guild I played with on Mourning folded because of it. Nobody wanted to fight, because they were afraid to lose. If they were forced, they'd call in half the damn server to help them. There just wasn't enough middle ground between total ownage and total isolation to keep people interested.

I jumped on Vengeance recently and had no problems getting groups for my newb Scout.  I also found a good deal of action for my transplanted R3 Druid.  This without RoC.

Of course, It didn't last long, I quit after repeatedly getting stuck with no way out (no, /stuck did not work).  Apparently my 2.8 GHz with 512 Megs of RAM and a 64 meg Radeon wasn't rendering the shitty terrain fast enough, and it rendered on top of me, giving me all the mobility you would expect from a person stuck up to his crotch in a tree, Manhattan Project-style.

Best part is the people who choose to exploit by getting stuck in walls, trees, under buildings, etc. so no one can hit them but they can hit you.  Good old shadowbane and the terrain bugs.  Will they ever be fixed?

Philadelphia Experiment.

*GASP* I still enjoy playing ShadowBane *HORROR*. All problems Joe mentioned are still there but other than occasional lag spike during prime time are not common. During the last month of playing 2-3 hours a day and participating in 1-2 large sieges a week, I got 2 Sb.exe and maybe some lag and server was down once for 3 hours after large patch. Again technical issues are there but by no means game stopping – no longer outcome of sieges determined by low percentage of people survived Sb.exe and no longer it is siege-by-mail. Servers hold well with battles of 30-40 players on the each side, and its get unplayable only if you get to 250+ people on each side all stacked.

I dunno- an atomic bomb might be able to blow someone into a tree as well =)

I tried the holiday winback program.

Within 15 minutes of transferring my character to Vengenence, I had 1 Sb.exe error, 1 server crash, and was ganked from stealth by a level 70 barbarian at an open tree who hit me for 3 times as much damage per hit as I did on my best hit.

They didn't win me back.

I think thats what you ment right?

Why would anyone either want or expect  player interaction in a massively multi player game? With that kind of attitude it won't be long before you start asking for massively multi player games to be more like a game, too. Why can't you just be happy with the ample opportunity to role-play an antisocial recluse in a somewhat realistic online despite-having-no-need-to-be-online massively multi player despite-having-no-need-to-interact-with-other-players game despite-being-more-like-an-activity-than-a-game if-you-can-call-pictures-on-a-slot-machine-a-world world?

People like you are impossible to please.

Doh.  Is it too late to act like I'm just making an obscure reference to some other movie you never saw?