AoC vs WAR vs ? - Biggest Launch Disappointment 2008

[cevik]

Also, they shouldnt be working on balance issues until the broken Feats are fixed. I know as a HoX we have many many feats that outright dont work. I guess you would call that a balance issue, I would call it broken mechanics.

But that's been a huge part of the feat redesign on the Necromancer side of things, they fixed most (all of the reanimation tree works, I'm not nightfall so I'm not sure about that side) of the feats as they moved them around.  I figure that's part of the balancing pass.

The same thing happened in WoW, half my talents didn't work or only marginally worked until they went through and did the Warlock balancing pass.  It was all part of the same process.  Go through the classes, fix the broken things, fix the things that the "community" calls "broken" because it doesn't do the exact thing they want it to do, and balance the class around the new fixes because if you don't people will freak that it's ZOMG OP because you changed things to make them more useful.

I can't imagine going through the HoX tree and fixing the things that are "broken" because they don't work well enough that the community considers them useful without moving a few things around because you just made feats more powerful.

And to be honest, a lot of the "ZOMG THIS R BROKENZ FUNCOM SUX" things in the Necromancer trees worked, they just didn't have enough impact for people to think they were worth taking vs other things that were more useful.  The exact same thing that happened with talents in WoW, where you had certain builds that were "right" and others that were "zomg broken" or "u took that skillz u noob?!", not because they didn't work, but because their usefulness was outclassed by other things.

All said and done, I hardly see where it's a big deal that they are moving things around in some feat trees as things progress.  I personally think you are probably repeating silly trolls from the forums verbatim because you want to bitch about the game.  :)

[Morfiend]

All said and done, I hardly see where it's a big deal that they are moving things around in some feat trees as things progress.  I personally think you are probably repeating silly trolls from the forums verbatim because you want to bitch about the game.  :)

Nope. I have felt this way since the second patch or so. I think WoW did it much better. They first went through and fixed a ton of stuff that was just blatantly broken, THEN they started in on the balance tweaking.

I guess you playing as a necro and me and a HoX color our experiences differently. I personally think they shouldn't put the "Feat People" on reworking classes a few weeks in to the game, when they could instead have them going through the feats going "OK, test this one, OK, it does nothing, lets fix it. Next." Once they have done that to all the classes then they can start with "OK this tree isn't performing as we would like, lets start moving stuff around".

[cevik]

Nope. I have felt this way since the second patch or so. I think WoW did it much better. They first went through and fixed a ton of stuff that was just blatantly broken, THEN they started in on the balance tweaking.

No, they REALLY didn't.  For instance, Improved Drain Soul was broken until they did the balance tweak.  Improved Curse of Agony was so usless as to be considered broken and character gimping until that point too.  In fact, none of the broken talents in the entire Warlock talent tree were fixed until the balance pass, and there was a large list of broken or useless talents.

I guess you playing as a necro and me and a HoX color our experiences differently. I personally think they shouldn't put the "Feat People" on reworking classes a few weeks in to the game, when they could instead have them going through the feats going "OK, test this one, OK, it does nothing, lets fix it. Next." Once they have done that to all the classes then they can start with "OK this tree isn't performing as we would like, lets start moving stuff around".

Perhaps it does color our experiences differently, but surely you're smarter than the average AoC forum dweller.  And surely you are smart enough to see the difference between a designer and a coder.  And I bet, if you really got around to thinking about it, you'd probably see that it's two totally different people that perform that task.  The designer is going to be looking at the feat tree and moving stuff around, probably using some internal toolset and that guy probably either doesn't know HOW to code or was a coder years ago and is now a full time game designer.  A coder is going to be going through all the broken feats and fixing them.

I'm sure there is a lot of overlap, but I suspect they are two different people, probably two different groups of people.  Thus any real mental exercise will tell you that those two tasks will probably not interfere with each other.

Will there be another balancing pass in the future, after everything works?  I bet there will be.  So far in every mmog we've ever seen it's been an ongoing and constant process that is done time and time again.  But I fail to see why it's a huge "ZOMG I CAN'T BELIEVE THEY FIXED THAT AND NOT THIS" issue, other than to idiots that dwell on official message boards.

[Slayerik]

Temporarily shutting down your main forums because you don't know when your servers are going to be back up and you don't want to listen to your customers is one way to handle customer server, I suppose. 

Hey Simond, I respect ya cause you play Eve...and Eve owns..... but seriously all you do is flat out rag on Funcom/AO and kinda obsess about the shit. So you are either :

A. Playing the fuck out of it

B. Not playing it at all


Either way, you suck :)

[Mrbloodworth]

Oh, i am mainly talking about the Official forums. Everything on there is exaggerated by 100X. Everyone i meet in game is having a blast.

Thats probably because they people who dont like it have already quit? Now, I am not saying the game is OMG!!1! Brokenz!@!, but they are having a LOT of issues, and there is a huge amount of core gameplay that is broken, yet they are working on class balance rather than fixing most of the broken shit. They are doing things like changing animations and fixing typos and reworking complete Feat trees, when most classes have core mechanics broken or downright not working.

Yes, but they seem to be doing what every other MMO has done before, making a list from most broken to least, and then working them 1 or two at a time. The rest of that stuff, like animations and GUI are diffrent departments.

Recall, teams for thies things tend to number in the hundreds, and they all have areas they are responsible for, and development or changes in one do not always affect anything else.

That, and everyone always thinks there class is the most broken, and how dare the developers not fix their list of things first... even IF they are perceived broken, when they are not, they just play diffrent than game XYZ (The point of my previous post)

[UnSub]

Heh - stumbled across this necro by accident.

So, with the hindsight of history, what was the answer and why?

[Malakili]

Heh - stumbled across this necro by accident.

So, with the hindsight of history, what was the answer and why?

For me personally, it has to be WAR, if for no other reason that I never thought AoC was going to do much in the first place, so I wasn't very disappointed by it.  I had very high hopes for WAR though.  To me, their downfall was that they tried to do too much, and the game was well...too much a game.  By this i mean, I never really felt like I was actually in a WORLD,  everything I did felt more like a series of mini games than it did a real presistant world (aka Theme Park Syndrome).   I did enjoy the game a lot wen it was first released, but it QUICKLY wore on me.  What I wanted was a persistent war that really felt like it meant something...instead we got just another thinly veiled loot grind.

[Samprimary]

So, with the hindsight of history, what was the answer and why?

they both win horray

[Hawkbit]

Both released unfinished.  You just have to pick between the liar and the one that won't listen to reason.  Pick your poison... or don't. 

[Numtini]

Looking at our reactions and the continued traffic on either game, I think War had to be the bigger disappointment.

I look at War and I think of what could have been a really good game. I look at Conan and I think funcom's a joke.

[Fargull]

Both, though I feel that War takes the cake, though that is probably more because the bar was higher from my playing DAOC and not having touched anything Funcom had released.

AOC had a lot of innovation in the combat corner, but it was obvious that the later part of the game was horribly broken out of the gate.

WAR just felt bad, I wanted to like it, but everything seemed to be out of sync.  The biggest disappointment was the fact that after pushing the PvP and seemingly learning from the mistakes of DAOC, they decided to say screw the new approach and re-ramp the PvE portion... Mythic is horrible at PvE....

[UnSub]

Having skimmed this thread:

1) I didn't say anything that turned out wrong, but I accept my desire to see The Secret World is my own problem.

2) Wow, this had both HRose and grunk in it.

[Venkman]

Both released unfinished.  You just have to pick between the liar and the one that won't listen to reason.  Pick your poison... or don't. 

This.

It did help both that they didn't release right on top of each other. And they both more than showed that there's at least interest in a game that isn't WoW. But they also both showed old school thinking and prioritizing rather than fresh thinking and truly grokking of what WoW did right. Basically, neither was so cast in stone in early 2004 that they couldn't course correct, if they had read the WoW tea leaves right.

[Threash]

I thought AoC was a much better game and could be fixable with enough work,  WAR is broken at its most basic level and should have been scrapped and restarted from scratch years ago.  WAR seems to be winning the subs race though, although both are pathetically low.

[ghost]

I would say WAR is the biggest disappointment.  If you take out the PVP from both games AOC is still kindof reasonable.  WAR without the PVP is simply putrid. 

I tend to like running around in AOC every now and again and checking things out.  Too bad it isn't more expansive like LOTRO.

[Lantyssa]

WAR.

AoC had an awesome start, some of the best combat, and held my interest until my roomie decided they didn't want to play anymore.  It had room to improve, but nothing in it made me rage.  (Customer service on the other hand, especially their pre-order fiasco, was clownshoes.)  I left satisfied and feeling I got my money's worth.  It's one I'll consider re-upping eventually.

WAR had tons of good concepts.  Loved the Chaos races.  It made me a blood-thirsty PvPer.  Only it was all in scanarios.  Then the Tier 3 wall smacked me upside the head.  We see tons of possible improvements to make this game awesome and watch as Mythic makes the wrong choice Every. Single. Time.  I have no interest in returning.

WAR is the champion.

[Nebu]

I agree with Lantyssa completely, though I've always been a bloodthirsty pvp'er.  Ok... not so bloodthirsty.

AoC is the better core game.  WAR had the most potential.  WAR sqandered a wonderful opportunity and continues to drive in reverse.

[shiznitz]

I agree with Lantyssa completely, though I've always been a bloodthirsty pvp'er.  Ok... not so bloodthirsty.

AoC is the better core game.  WAR had the most potential.  WAR sqandered a wonderful opportunity and continues to drive in reverse.

Having played AoC and not WAR, I think AoC had more potential but they really messed up the small stuff.  Reading the AoC threads in the Graveyard, it sounds like that game has very good, fun and optional PVP. The PvE is also MUCH better that WAR (which isn't saying much) but the loot is horrific and that keeps the PVE people away.  WAR looks like ass. AoC has decent character variety.  I am still baffled by the way WAR cross-linked PvE and PvP wioth that gear grind.

[Tarami]

WAR.

Conan would have been a fun, solid game if they would have had time to actually add the game instead of just a tutorial. WAR was on the other hand a fully realized, deliberate mistake.

[March]

WAR

From the folks who brought us RvR in DAoc we got Guild Wars III with a PvE Grind and crappy Titan Quest character Advancement mechanism.

Why they built someone else's sequel I'll never know.

Not only did they not learn from their own mistakes in DAoC, they had the good idea to rehash all the mistakes of two or three other games they emulated.

AoC struck me as the best that funcom could do; it doesn't strike me as odd that their best is not that titillating.

[schild]

AoC struck me as the best that funcom could do

Their single player games are pretty much the best in their class (adventure titles). As such, I'm not quite sure what you're talking about.

Edit: War was the bigger disappointment.

Why?

The changes were simple and Mark just decided to be totally bullheaded about it. "We can't just flip a switch and halve the EXP." SHOULDA FOUND A WAY MARK, SHOULDA FOUND A WAY.

[Trippy]

Halving the Exp at that point would've just meant people getting to the broken End Game content quicker.

[Threash]

The changes were simple and Mark just decided to be totally bullheaded about it. "We can't just flip a switch and halve the EXP." SHOULDA FOUND A WAY MARK, SHOULDA FOUND A WAY.

Funny thing was they basically did flip a switch to increase the exp after beta.

[Nebu]

Halving the Exp at that point would've just meant people getting to the broken End Game content quicker.

There's a lot of truth to this.  At least people would have stayed a little longer since playing alts wouldn't have felt like punishment. 

[schild]

Halving the Exp at that point would've just meant people getting to the broken End Game content quicker.

As Nebu said, alts.

But at the same time, people quit because of the grind, not because of broken content. And most of the people in Bat Country had already been in more than one encounter and it did not - NOT EVEN A LITTLE - contribute to them leaving. Well, maybe a few people, but I know for the people I bopped around with that the gamestopping grind was what did them in. Fixing content is something I can wait for. Hell, nearly 2 years in SWG should show that. But leveling curves are simply something I have NO patience for. No one likes spending a shitload of time doing anything and not being rewarded.

[Venkman]

Alts work better though when there's a reason to level one up. So I think you're both right in a way. Smoothing (not simply halving) the XP would have helped more people want to have different ways to play the game different ways. I think though that even that would have worked best if they had deactivated 2/3 of the PQs and half the lakes. PvP only works when there's people around, and for awhile the only way to ensure that was by joining Scenarios. Which most people did because they could do it from anywhere.

Oh, which is coming in WoW in 3.1 

[UnSub]

On this topic I have to say that WAR was a bigger disappointment because I expect so very little from Funcom. Except for The Secret World. Which may never come, given how much money Funcom have been losing.

I quit WAR on arriving into a new chapter, looking around and seeing yet another PvE "kill these guys here, now go up here, now collect these flowers" grind in front of me. The number of anti-kiting mechanisms in the PvE were also insane (I was a SW, so using terrain and range should have been helpful to me, instead of watching mobs run up steep slopes / across water at the same speed they'd travel over flat ground; also the bugs that would see mobs HP returned instantly if they 'dropped' out of combat). I'd done my dash on scenarios as well. Mythic's inability to recognise their own flaws / understand player behaviour was another big factor in deciding to quit.

WAR did respark my interest in PvP, but that's about it.

EDIT: Slopes, not slows.

[Zzulo]

AoC actually. I thought it was going to be a fun game with some fun PvP

What I got was a completely unfinished game with no PvP system at all. It's a shame too, because I really enjoyed the game for the first 30 or so levels. It just fell so hard and deep after that though. One wonders how after 5 years of development, they could launch the game with so many promised aspects  completely missing, with the rest of the game in an early beta state.

I mean, even to this day, they have failed completely to implement DX10, something that was written right on the box and said to be available from launch. I don't even want to go into all the actual missing game content, because it was just so terrible.

[schild]

On this topic I have to say that WAR was a bigger disappointment because I expect so very little from Funcom.

I like that reason! I want to switch to that!

No one expects a game let alone fun from Funcom!

[Lantyssa]

Alts work better though when there's a reason to level one up. So I think you're both right in a way. Smoothing (not simply halving) the XP would have helped more people want to have different ways to play the game different ways.

The rate needed to be set such that I went through one racial pairing and when I got done with it I was a mulitple of ten of the tier.  That would have actually required more than doubling the rate of xp, but it's what was needed.  That also means up to six alts worth of content.

[Fordel]

I would have to say WAR. I also never expected anything from AoC/FunCom. I DID expect WAR to *not* make the exact same mistakes they made in DaoC... 

[Count Nerfedalot]

I'd have to say AoC myself.  WAR you could see was stuck in a ditch design-wise and getting deeper every day, plus I'm not personally interested in anything Mythic has done or claimed they wanted to do anyway.  But Conan! Dark lore, nice graphics, beheadings, barroom brawls, mysterious magic, exotic locales, etc, etc.  And Funcom actually does content well, when it bothers to do it at all.  I had hopes in spite of the PvP focus, and beta reports of the combat sounded really really cool.  But then they went and yanked the rug out from under it when it was only 1/4 finished.  WTF???  And they have just announced that even after taking a 36 Million dollar loss/writeoff on AoC that they are still well capitalized with another 30-something Mil in the bank (hope it's a Norwegian and not Icelandic bank!).  So why the hell did they not finish the rest of the game instead of rushing it out the door when they did?

[Lakov_Sanite]

I was promised bountiful tits but all I got was implants.

[squirrel]

On this topic I have to say that WAR was a bigger disappointment because I expect so very little from Funcom.

I like that reason! I want to switch to that!

No one expects a game let alone fun from Funcom!

What's the term? Winner winner chicken dinner!

EDIT: WAR was disappointing. AoC was just Funcom.

[AcidCat]

I found WAR more disappointing because it didn't engage my interest on the most basic levels - combat and exploring the world. AoC at least had somewhat different combat that kept my interest for a while, and although the world wasn't put together like I would prefer, the zones were interesting and visually pleasing.