Prime Battle for Dominus from PitchBlack games

[UnSub]

True, but that isn't what the rules say. Only that you have to state intent to leave the game for a forum ban.

[sinij]

If you think that clear-cut rules will prevent drama, you are sadly mistaken.

I intend to stop playing my character. (ban/no ban?)
I am taking a break from the game but letting my subscription stay current. (ban/no ban?)
I am not having as much fun as of late as I used to, should I cancel? (ban/no ban?)
My friend is canceling the game. (ban/no ban?)
My friend is canceling the game because he/she got cancer and want to spend time with family. (ban/no ban?)
Such-n-such canceled the game, ban them from forums too! (ban/no ban? if so who?)
Here is chat log of such-n-such talking in general chat about quitting. (ban/no ban? if so who?)

This took whole 2 minutes to come up with, dedicated community will be a lot more devious.

[Xanthippe]

Not to mention how it is entirely possible to craft a forum post that doesn't break any of those rules, yet is still a nasty post that goes against the spirit of the forum rules.

I think Sanya is generally smart, but I don't think that this will work the way she envisions.

[Stabs]

An interview with Sanya has just been published by blogger Scarybooster here:
http://www.scarybooster.com/?p=1063

On Diku Archetypes:

Sort of? We do have the archetypes. But the lines are a lot blurrier. Everyone has a heal that is powered by your personal energy, and you can spec in that heal to make it use less energy and eventually heal your groupmates. (More on that in a second.) Everyone has a melee and a ranged attack.

Each of our classes (there are six per faction) can be specced to cover a pretty wide range of style. The classes per faction don’t exactly match, either. Each class has fifteen abilities, and each ability has ten levels. At the highest level the abilities affect the player’s group. But there are only enough skill points in the game for you to max out six abilities, so you have to choose.

With 6 maxxed out abilities I wouldn't be surprised to see maxxed out healing being very common. Especially if healing the group with Heal 10 costs the same energy as healing oneself with Heal 9.

This kinda happened in Rift in the Expert dungeons early on (pre-nerf). They were fairly difficult but the difficulty was mainly a matter of incoming damage. People evolved a playstyle of taking 2 or 3 healers in a 5 man group. It was very normal in the early days to have tank, one dps, 3 healers.

In Prime I can see groups of six being 6 group healers (who can all do something else) one of which perhaps is a specialised healer.

I'm guardedly in favour of this as a mechanic. Waiting for healers sucks. Being a healer in a diku generally sucks too.





On The Experience System

There aren’t levels, exactly. You earn a skill point whenever you fill an experience bar, and there are a thousand skill points possible. But some encounters will reward you with multiple skill points if you do them when you are below a particular skill point threshold. And of course, you get experience from doing everything in our game.

I hope they sort out the botting that plagued games like UO, SWG and Darkfall. If healing gives you exp you end up with afk healers bot healing their afk friend who is standing in a fire. I still remember with some bitterness going into the med centre in Coruscant in SWG and being unable to get healed because all the player medics were busy healing bots running action bar burn macros.

I'm also unclear about whether any exp can be spent anywhere. So can someone spam heal a guy who's afk in a fire for a week to become a master marksman or the server's first maxxed out weaponsmith? Or do you need specific crafting exp to level crafting etc.

[Azazel]

.

[Azazel]

Can we talk about this elsewhere? It's more interesting than Yet Another Shitty MMO. Politics?

[Azazel]

The discussion not related to this game will stop now.

Bah. Late to the party. OK.

[WindupAtheist]

This has the same (single short word) (colon) (nerdy phrase using name of gameworld) naming convention as Rift: Planes of Telara and frankly it sounds pretty silly in both cases. I mean I know the whole (Something) Online thing is pretty dated at this point, but at least I could say the full titles with a straight face. I wonder what other games would have been called under this format...

Ganks: Pillaging of Sosaria
Poop: Weighty Socks of Norrath
Queue: Flaming Servers of Azeroth
Snore: Crafters of Tatooine
Fucked: They Made Us Use Eberron

[Modern Angel]

Blame White Wolf.

[Ashamanchill]

Broken: The Incomplete Quest for Hyboria.

[Merusk]

Spreadsheet: The Accountants of New Eden

[Paelos]

Taxi: To Victory and Beyond

[Azazel]

Doesn't that baseball players generic fantasy game also use the same naming convention?

[Threash]

Why does this need pve or crafting? ugh.

[UnSub]

Why does this need pve or crafting? ugh.

Because it's a title made from a MMO wishlist.

[Malakili]

This has the same (single short word) (colon) (nerdy phrase using name of gameworld) naming convention as Rift: Planes of Telara and frankly it sounds pretty silly in both cases.

Remember when Rift was just called "Heroes of Telera" and then they changed it to "Planes of Telara" and then they changed it to "Rift: Planes of Telara"  and then the Planes of Telara part started disappearing from their logo and now I think its just "Rift" (if you look at the website this is even more obvious).

[Amaron]

I hate the bastard who owns Rifts but I'm still kind of disturbed Trion got away with outright stealing the name like that.

[Threash]

This has the same (single short word) (colon) (nerdy phrase using name of gameworld) naming convention as Rift: Planes of Telara and frankly it sounds pretty silly in both cases.

Remember when Rift was just called "Heroes of Telera" and then they changed it to "Planes of Telara" and then they changed it to "Rift: Planes of Telara"  and then the Planes of Telara part started disappearing from their logo and now I think its just "Rift" (if you look at the website this is even more obvious).

It started of as just Rift, but it got confused with some other Rift franchise so they changed it.

[palmer_eldritch]

If the game doesn't launch with the ability to place orders for gear my interest level just went in the crapper.  I'd rather not have to interract with crafters - not that I dislike them, I'd just rather be playing the game then begging folks to make me gear.

I think that's a key issue. What some people dislike, as far as I can tell, is having to find a friendly crafter to buy the stuff they need. If it's easily available then I don't think people care whether it was made by a PC or spawned by the server.

If you want non-crafters to accept a player-driven economy then it actually helps to make the process of buying stuff as impersonal as possible.

For example, in SWG people complained about having to find a decent crafter and go to their shop and give them money. In Eve, generally speaking (I mean buying non-cap ships in Empire) you can buy spaceships and other stuff without any contact at all with the producer. For people who choose not to take an interest in the economy, those items may as well have been produced by NPCs. Whatever complaints people have about Eve, it doesn't have the combat-players vs crafters vibe that SWG sometimes had.

[Stabs]

Galaxies had relatively few top level crafters. Eve has a ton of crafters. In Galaxies a gun made by the top guy was significantly better than a gun made by the 10th best. In Eve a Rifter is a Rifter is a Rifter.

It's supply and demand. Short supply allows people to be dicks. This happens in Eve with Technetium and supercaps.

[palmer_eldritch]

Maybe the key to making a crafting-heavy game playable for non crafters is to make sure it's a buyers market.

[Stabs]

Two things that really help Eve are the single server economy and the generous auctionhouse functionality.

If you had to find a player to make you a Rifter every time you needed a new one it would be a horrible game. Even horrible for Rifter-builders.

There really is no reason not to allow people to sell and buy on long duration orders. In Eve it's 3 months. One of the reasons I got bored of Rift: Planes of Telara was that I kept spending some time putting up order after order on a tedious Auction house UI then come back a couple of days later and find 5 orders had sold and 45 orders had been sent back unsold to my mailbox. I had other options of course but I didn't like any of them. I could just let stuff build up infinitely in my huge bank (which is what I mainly did). I could start walking past orichalchum mines without mining them but I'm too much the pack rat to do that comfortably. I could vendor it but that's annoying, you're vendoring the top resources in the game on a server where tons of people really need it.

In Eve I could put up the same orders for 3 months and go do something more fun.

I'm a little pessimistic about Prime's economy. People will be split by server (at least 3 at launch, they've said). Servers will be split by faction. So at best you're reaching 1/9th of the customer base.

A fun option is that it looks like they may feature resource smuggling and a black market. This is the equivalent to Eve players selling supercarriers to the people who are invading them. It's appealing strongly to my evil inner capitalist. "We suddenly lost after the other guys got a load of Prime from somewhere and out-teched us!" Walks away whistling.

[WindupAtheist]

Maybe the key to making a crafting-heavy game playable for non crafters is to make sure it's a buyers market.

This is what I meant in another thread when I said meaningful crafting was fine but not TOO meaningful. I think it was the SWG death thread.

[Stabs]

Maybe the key to making a crafting-heavy game playable for non crafters is to make sure it's a buyers market.

This is what I meant in another thread when I said meaningful crafting was fine but not TOO meaningful. I think it was the SWG death thread.

Well the other end of the scale is buy 5000 gold of mats, click Start Craft while reading a book a couple of hundred times, make your thing that gives you +40 Stamina, never craft again until the next Expansion.

It's just horrid to us crafting fanatics that our beloved playstyle got replaced with THAT.

[Count Nerfedalot]

It would be interesting to see a God's view Venn diagram of the following mmo player characteristics:

Hate pvp
Love pvp
Hate crafting
Love crafting
Hate participating in player economy
Love participating in player economy

Of course that would only be meaningful in the context of a single game (or version of the game in the case of SWG  ) since implementation details are probably more determining than initial player inclination.

It just seems like many of the folks who most loudly despise player economies are those most enamored of pvp, and vice-versa, yet the player economy is just another form of pvp. 

[Merusk]

Hate           ----------- Love
PVP            ------X----
Crafting       ----X-----
Player Economy --X-------
PvE            ---------X


 

[Lantyssa]

My bars would all be pretty high.

I actually get into PvP when it's not ass.  Just no one besides WAR managed to make PvP fun for me.  And that had plenty of issues with the game and mechanics until it was too dead to devote resources to fixing its problems.  I expect this will be more of the Gear >>>> Everything Else paradigm.

[Segoris]

Stealth interview at Game Riot

There is a question answered about how everyone has healing skills as more of a downtime dampener and how that works, as well as stating healers are still the ones to be relied on. The rest of the interview focuses more on how stealth works - and I personally like it. The main portion of how stealth works is in the spoiler below. The rest of the interview is about what PB envisions for their stealthingcloaking classes

[Kail]

That was kind of evasive.  Can he not re-stealth because the ability is on cooldown, or does the cooldown not tick while he's in combat?  Because they also say the cooldown will be just a few seconds at max level.  Sounds depressingly similar to Warcraft.  "Stealth" = invisibility hotkey with a long cooldown.  Support classes get an ability that "helps" detect stealth.

Some of it sounds weird, though. "With Disguise, the intent is that you do assume the identity/appearance of the target class, and you appear that way to everyone including your own faction."  THAT'S going to ruffle some feathers, depending on if the game allows you to damage allies or not.

[Segoris]

The only part that wasn't clear about stealth is if the cooldown timer counts down while in combat or if the second you're out of combat you can stealth. The rest I didn't find unclear. Basically they're saying if you initiate combat from stealth, you cannot re-stealth until out of combat (no vanish type abilities). If you start combat while un-stealthed (meaning you were completely out of combat and then start attacking someone) then you can stealth. It is MUCH weaker than WoW/Rift and is closer to WAR's than anything

The disguise bit is odd, but I'm guessing the lack of friendly fire will also include no damaging of allies who are disguised either. I don't know but I kind of figure that is how it will be. Good if it does ruffle feathers, fuck feathers that haven't been ruffled in a while by games playing it safe.

Edit: From Sanya regarding disguising and friendly fire -

No friendly fire, so you can't be ganked by your own... but you might really piss your own faction off as they go racing after you, thinking you were a bad guy.

[Kail]

Re: stealth, you're right, I was misreading (read "Even when the timer finishes, he still can’t cloak" as "Even when combat finishes, he still can’t cloak")

The friendly fire thing I still think will be a problem.  Friendlies not being able to skrag you makes me wonder what the point is of making you look like an enemy to your allies.  It sounds like a mechanic that's going to cause more frustration and newbie grief than it will add new and interesting possibilities or tactics.  The major scenario I'm worried about, though, is if enemies can damage you when you're disguised as one of them.  If not, it seems like a fairly useless ability (just tab over the targets and see who you can attack).  If they can't, it seems stupidly powerful.

It just seems weird to me, but it's hard to describe why.  It's like the game is trying to be an FPS, but then backing away at the last minute and bending things around to hold on to this tab targetting hotkey gameplay.  But it's just one skill for one class, so I'm not too worried, it's just kinda weird.

[Segoris]

I agree it's weird, and along with espionage I can't see it being good for much more than just the first few weeks of gameplay (for different reasons, but similar shelf lives). The thing I like is that, afaik, they are actually trying something new and not just renaming it. Of course there could be another MMO that has tried a similar system to their disguise and espionage, but I can't think of it (and I'm not counting tf2 as it is a completely different genre)

[Segoris]

Crafting page is up on the main site, and I imagine this should be a pleasantry to some around here as it's not exactly the same 'ole collect then hit craft all type crafting (though I don't know if mass production is available). I'd say it's worth reading for anyone interested


Basic run down of the system:

A few mentionables from their page:

[palmer_eldritch]

Saw a bit of their character creation video. I think they're in for some really unbalanced sides. The two aliens races are ugly with a capitol U.  You have a choice between ugly beastmen things and the other is a kind of skinless, skeletal race. The beast people lack even any furry appeal. I know in EQ ogre and troll were among the least played, Wow had lower population for Horde pre-Blood Elf iirc.

Yeah, I can't imagine playing anything except a human. Invented races work when they have a strong and simple identity. For example, the Kerra in EQ and EQ2 are cat people. You don't need to know anything about the lore to appreciate them. I have no idea what a Rodon or Salent is meant to be in this game.

They should have just made all the races human and put in a ton of customisation options. Given the setting, you could always allow for some far out stuff like glowing eyes or robotic limbs for players who wanted to go down a more alien route.

[Lantyssa]

I like the bug-reptilian species.

Crafting looks wonderful.  I'll have to try it out just for that system.