Arche Age

[LC]

The nose would need to be much bigger.

[Signe]

I'm playing this for one month.  I had to take a break from DA3.  I start missing MMORPGs after a bit.  I don't know why since I'm always solo.  Anyway, I was in the beta but didn't get very far and I wanted something new tp me and this is all I found.  I didn't get very far in TESO beta either but it looks harder to solo than Archeage.  I could be wrong.  It has happened.  Lots. 

[Draegan]

Not sure if this is the game to jump in to real quick unless you just want a boring quest grind to level cap. It's not particularly interesting unless you want to get into all the pvp stuff or trading/farming stuff (which really requires a sub bc of labor).

[Signe]

Yeah, you're probably right.  I just started and I already see what a crazy time sink crafting will be.  Bleh.  Maybe I'll go back and play EQ2 and collect things.   

[Draegan]

This game is a classic super Korean craft grind.

[palmer_eldritch]

I got lots of enjoyment out of this game and now I'm done with it.

Pro-tip: for a super fun time, go to enemy regions when they are in war and patrol the housing zones looking for farmers to kill. If you have AOE abilities you can even kill people in thier homes! (just press tab repeatedly as you ride around the housing areas to select enemies you can't see).

[Draegan]

That sounds boring.

[Falconeer]

No that wasn't boring at all. It just wasn't fun for long. But what is?

[WayAbvPar]

There was some very cool stuff, but it was WAY too grindy to keep up. Not just taking forever to get anything done, but having to log in CONSTANTLY to play Farmville. I would have stayed around if I could have done the grind at my own pace and not had to worry about losing my land holdings to overdue taxes and shit.

[Signe]

There was some very cool stuff, but it was WAY too grindy to keep up. Not just taking forever to get anything done, but having to log in CONSTANTLY to play Farmville. I would have stayed around if I could have done the grind at my own pace and not had to worry about losing my land holdings to overdue taxes and shit.

This is exactly how I feel about the game.  I don't look forward to the farming grind that will lead me to the crafting grind which is why I'm only playing one month.  If I make it.  As for the rest of the game, it's not awful but it's certainly not great.  I level at a decent speed but that's because most of the quests aren't very creative.  Much of it is mostly the same stuff we've seen over the last decade or so (barring a few special MMORPG's such as TSW which has some really unusual quests where you might need an actual brain - unless you're a Google addict - to find the solutions).  Kill some of these, find some of those... everything has a glowy so you don't have to look very hard, either.  Anyway, I don't know what I'll be playing or what I'll be on about next.

[rk47]

Missing MMO after DAI?
I know the feelz.
I felt like I was playing a shitty MMO too, and wanted to reinstall TOR to have dat story-driven MMO feel back.
But steam sale changed my mind.
Now i'm just looking for a bargain.

[Signe]

I give up.  Everything I plant, even geese, is diseased.  I went nuts trying to find out where to get "livestock supplement" and finally had to cheat and Google it.  Sheesh!  Farming and crafting are going nowhere for me.  Annoyedquit.

[rk47]

I give up.  Everything I plant, even geese, is diseased.  I went nuts trying to find out where to get "livestock supplement" and finally had to cheat and Google it.  Sheesh!  Farming and crafting are going nowhere for me.  Annoyedquit.

I recommend playing this game

[Teleku]

Is....is that a slave/plantation sim game?

[tmp]

It's just the Sims. There's probably a sex dungeon under that mansion, too.

[LC]

[luckton]

It's just the Sims. There's probably a sex dungeon under that mansion, too.

FTFY.

[HaemishM]

Please tell me that's completely real and not a Photoshop. Because that is fucking awesome and makes me glad I never paid them a cent.

[Count Nerfedalot]

^ this. 

Scott Hartsman joins Sid Meier and dozens of other game designers/developers who have become textbook examples of both the Peter Principle and the inbred dysfunctionality of the computer gaming industry.  The same issues are probably present in most if not all industries in our greed-is-good culture, it's just a lot easier to put individual faces on it in those with rockstar mentalities than in others.

[Draegan]

Scott Hartsman has never designed a game from start, I wouldn't put him in line with guys like Side Meyer.

[Lantyssa]

RIFT?

[rattran]

Side Meyer?

[Count Nerfedalot]

Actually, I think it should be the other way around.    Sid Meier started out pretty much at the top of his profession, sold out, and became just another mediocre-at-best faceless corporate bureaucrat.  As far as I can tell from game credits and interviews and postmortems and such he hasn't done jack shit this century beyond allow his name to be used on other people's work.

Scott, on the other hand, was in the trenches up to his eyeballs at least as recently as 7 years ago when he was given pretty much free reign to do as he wished with the sterile, half-finished, and waaaay out-of-date crap that Sony rushed out the door as EQ2 and which WoW stomped into the ground through the power of *polish*. And he took that freedom and burned some sacred cows and made some gutsy decisions and put some effort into polishing the user experience in several less obvious but significant ways (crafting, auction house, working quests, etc) and somehow ended up with something remarkably broad and deep and interesting out of it.  He succeeded so well at this that Sony corporate decided to bring it back into the corporate mainstream. Scott didn't seem to like being leashed again so he left and EQ2 sputtered and slowly died under the resulting ever-growing pile of mistimed and mismanaged marketing boondoggles, corporate meddling, inept management and round after round of new dev teams making newbie mistakes over and over again. 

Meanwhile, Scott achieved a Peter Principal singularity, having done so well at bucking The Man, he was promoted to the point where he became The Man, and ever since he has gone deeper and deeper into the soul-sucking morass of being driven always and exclusively by the upcoming quarterly financial report.  Rift was the best soulless dry unsticky AAA MMORPG ever at release and up until he left it to the B-team (who, ironically, made it a good deal less soulless) while he moved on to wheeling and dealing with the big boys.  Arche Age is just the latest datapoint well on the downward side of his parabolic trajectory.  It took a lot of people making a lot of blatantly bad decisions on both sides of the Pacific to screw up AA in the US so badly. But as top dog, buck-stops-here hands-in-the-pie chief apologist, cheerleader AND decision maker, he deserves the lion's share of the blame, scorn and contempt for every single bit of corporate bullshit that has driven AA into the ground.

Sid Meier was one of last century's shooting stars, Scott Hartsman is one of the first in this century.  Both did fantastic stuff with limited resources and under strict constraints, and have been pretty much worthless when given relatively vast resources and total freedom.  Sid had some great game ideas he was able to turn into great games, back in the day.  But once promoted to studio head over many games at once, he faltered.   Scott did an amazing job of straightening out the hot mess a bunch of corporate yes-men had made of EQ2, but faltered and fumbled as his responsibilities increased to designing a game from scratch then doing mega corporate deals and managing from waaaay on high the adaptation of a Korean grind fest for the American market.

[LC]

Please tell me that's completely real and not a Photoshop. Because that is fucking awesome and makes me glad I never paid them a cent.

100% real.

Also here's some drama/entertainment from the TS of one of our allies on Tahyang. I was one of the the lucky few to hear it live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67EpUD5fp7Y

[HaemishM]

At some point that video just turned into the beeps and clicks of dolphins.

[Draegan]

RIFT?

He actually came in about 1-2 years prior to release to rescue the game. He was not part of the original development team. He came in when the game was still called Planes of Telara. I visited the studios around release time and talked to a lot of devs. Would you be terribly surprised that a lot of them were EQ1 grognards? Rift was the last MMO I catassed with any enthusiasm. It was a well made product but some big decisions made the game go from could be very good DIKU flavor, to shitty game over the space of a year after release.

I could go on and on about the game, but it's already 5 years old or something like that.

[Fabricated]

Please tell me that's completely real and not a Photoshop. Because that is fucking awesome and makes me glad I never paid them a cent.

100% real.

Also here's some drama/entertainment from the TS of one of our allies on Tahyang. I was one of the the lucky few to hear it live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67EpUD5fp7Y

what in the holy fuck is this it all kinda blends together into noise for me after like 20 seconds. My brain literally refuses to understand it.

[LC]

One of our allied guilds booted some chick and then she came into their TS and started yelling at another chick in the guild. Not all of it was recorded. It was actually about 5 minutes of her yelling without taking a breath.

[LC]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTBFeYC9B8M

[tmp]

They've gone full Second Life. I actually had to squint hard to check that wasn't Second Life.

[Rendakor]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTBFeYC9B8M

Wtf? That's bizarre, particularly the girl's square head.

[palmer_eldritch]

From what I remember, you can buy a white paper bag to put over your character's head and then add textures to the bag so I guess that's what's happened here.

[Rendakor]

Ahh; not sure that was a thing when I played (if it was I didn't know about it).

[Falconeer]

Yes, it was, but really no one was doing it because it was already ugly as hell.