All Posts by Raltar

Originally posted by _Pix_

The final speeches took place last Thursday, October 2nd, as planned. The Judge announced the verdict was to be reached on October 31, i.e. in less than 4 weeks.

On Halloween? Creepy. Yet somehow poetic.

I didn't know the trial was so limited. I remember when I played (which was quite some time ago) I invited many of my guild members to play the game with me. I sent them buddy keys to try the game before they bought it, and they didn't seem to be limited in any way. I guess that has changed since then and it doesn't sound like a very good change.

There were "health potions" of a sort back when I played. Vendors at the hospitals where you respawn sold various types of med kits and other items that would reduce death penalty or have other helpful effects. However the function of items was one of many small details that the developers seemed to enjoy making bizzare changes to on a regular basis, so I suppose its possible that they no longer function the way they did when I played or that they may be gone altogeather.

Crafting was always a major problem with the game. In perticular, the fact that it was more costly to craft a useful item than it was to simply buy one, thus making crafting pretty pointless. I know crafting has been changed somewhat since my day, but from your description it sounds like it is still more trouble than it is worth.

As for the difficulty issues... Maybe something has changed since my day and grouping has become more important. But back when myself and the other members of my guild decided to quit this game, it was largely because much of the content in the game was far too easy to solo and grouping wasn't really nessary. some of the missions were easier if you had 2 or 3 players on your team but almost none of the missions in the game required more than that... which leaves even a small guild with very little to do in the game.

You didn't mention PvP in your review but for the record, its pretty much a joke too.

Originally posted by Autodidact82

And RG is laughing at all the suckers that bought his game. While he sleeps with all his money, in his space suit.

The fact that his customers can actually picture him doing this is a big part of the problem with this game.

Lack of content was the main problem. The early levels of the game were done well. The atmosphere was good, the action was fast-paced and there were lots of quests to do to gain experience so "grind" time was minimal. However, the higher in level you got, the faster the game started to go downhill. Around level 25 quests started to become fewer and further between, which meant more time spent grinding. Everything after level 30 was an exteremely painful grind. When you finally hit the maximum level of 50, the game was just over. There was no end-game at all. The game was designed in a very linear story-like progression, almost as if they meant for it to be a single player game rather than an MMO. Once you reach the end of the story they wrote for the game, you run out of things to do. No real reason to stay subscribed at that point.

Originally posted by buckstar0814

I found one good thing about this game.

I complained to the BBB about the game not living up to standards on box. Not much came out of it for a while. Then 5 days ago I was contacted by Funcom and they refunded my purchase price and even a little xtra to cover the cost of paypal transfer!!!

At least one person  at Funcom has there shit together, there may be help after all.

I will rant no more about this game.

Buckstar, would you mind posting a link to the BBB website along with a brief description of how to file a complaint about the game? I'm sure this would benefit many people who also deserve a refund but have not been lucky enough to receive one yet. It can be your good deed for the day (and probably for many more days in the future, as it could help a LOT of people for some time to come).

Originally posted by Scared

Originally posted by Malickie

Lastly if it bothers you so much that AOC is designed a certain way, why would you even bother checking this forum out? I'm not trying to dictate what you do in anyway, Its a sincere question. You have said, you have no desire to ever play again.  The overall game design is a very easy chain of information to aquire. Therefor you're not really helping anyone, you're merely baiting as I see it right now.

 It's basic psychology. FC has treated its customers like crap and now it's payback time. We get pleasure from seeing AoC stock go down.

Sacred has the right idea in anwser to this question. I think he took it in the wrong direction by talking about "payback" and "stock" however.

The issue here is that Funcom released AoC in an unfinished, buggy and uninteresting condition. They lied to their customers and mistreated them. Nothing they do now or change about the game will erase the mistakes they have already made.

The reason I post here is because I want to see Funcom be held accountable for their mistakes. MMO developers (and in fact the entire gaming industry these days) pull these kinds of stunts way too often. customers get screwed over way too frequently. And it happens because people like you let it happen!  When consumers take the attitude of "aw yeah, the game was bad awhile ago but thats the way it works, you should re-subscribe now that its better" you send the wrong message to game developers! You are telling them that if they screw you over, steal your money and lie to you, all they need to do is slightly improve their product and wait six months, then all will be forgiven. Do you think that message is going to keep them from screwing you over and lieing to you in the future? NO!

Don't let Funcom get away with what they have done here. They lied to you, mistreated you and sold you a product they knew wasn't what you wanted. They think its okay to do that. Are you going to let them continue to think that?

Originally posted by AmazingAvery

The third difference is I am a current concurrent subscriber, I am not someone who played the game for the first week or month who is still posting here telling you what they think the game is like based on outdated information.

Why do all you fanboys keep throwing that excuse around? I said it once before and I'll say it again:

It does not make sense for me to remain subscribed to a game I did not like just so I can stay updated on what is happening with it.

It would be like if you bought a used car from a used car dealership, got it home and found out that it had no engine, no brakes and the radio only plays the oldies station. Would you keep the car? Of course not! You would take it back to the dealership and demand a refund! But after you returned the defective car, would you go back to that same dealership every week and ask to buy the car again so you could try it out one more time to see if they fixed it up any? Duh, of course you wouldn't! That would be stupid. Instead you would warn all your friends to stay away from that car dealership and you would go to a different dealership to buy a better car.

AoC is the exact same way. Those of us who played the game and didn't like it have no reason to go back! And we aren't going to keep paying for the game to confirm its bad, because that would be stupid. And if we did keep paying for the game just so we could complain about how bad it is, you know what you would say then? "Oh if you don't like the game then just quit!" This is just your classic fanboy defense. Instead of actually talking about the game, you beat around the bush and try to run off anyone with a differing opinion by coming up with various flawed excuses for why you don't think they have a right to give their opinion.

Well I hate to tell you but this is a public forum. If we don't like the game and we want to tell people that we don't like the game, we have every right to do so.

Besides, another thing I've said many times before, I quit the game because the basic premise is falwed! The combat system is not as great as they hyped it up to be and the game itself is just not appealing to me because it offers very little character development or freedom. These factors have NOT changed in the last few months. Funcom can fix bugs and add more content, but it won't alter the reasons why I originally quit the game. So my information is still completely accurate and not outdated at all.

So your arguement fails on every possible level.

Originally posted by PezzBomb

Originally posted by Raltar

For me, AoC never had a chance and will never come back. I played in beta and saw then that the gameplay was terrible. Leveling is a grind fest, the combat system is button mashing fever and the small instanced zones leave little room for exploration or any form of open ended gameplay. Unless AoC does something drastic that totally alters the entire basis of the game such as the way SWG had the "NGE" then it will never be the kind of game I would be willing to play. And since the NGE was probably one of the worst ideas in gaming history I'm not going to recommend that to the AoC devs. So they may as well admit they made a boring game which many people with high standards will not play and move on.

 

But can AoC itself recover, fix some of its problems and maybe regain a few of the fans it lost? Sure. Its possible. Anarchy Online was a terrible game when it was released. And although Funcom never made it into the kind of game that I would play myself, they fixed it up reasonably well and got a lot of people back. They could turn AoC around as well. It will never be a very big game and nobody will ever forget the way that Funcom treated the game and their customers over these last six months. But it may get a few people to return. And of course there will allways be the small crowd of blind fanboys who will fight to the death for the game like our buddy Cobra here.

I saw one of you post in one of the other AoC threads and I just want to let you know that I do not belive you. It is just odd to straight out hate a gamedeveloper to the degree you hate FC. It makes me think that you youself have some personal agenda. No hard feelings, but it looks kind of strange.

It looks strange to me that a guy who signed up for this forum yesterday already has eight posts, all of which defend a game he hasn't even played yet. Then he states that he doesn't believe the statements of someone who has played the game.

People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

Originally posted by CobraSolidus

Stop being such a hypocrite and move on. For christ sake you post more on the AoC forums than the most hardcore AoC fans.

I could say the same thing to you Cobra. You have been here just over a week and have nearly 100 posts, all of which discuss the fact that you quit WAR to come play AoC. It seems to me that you have a very specific agenda here. Atleast I come here to discuss games other than AoC.

Originally posted by pittbull1

wooot, finally a game that might actually get me away from eve, though it seems a bit to good to be true

If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. This game is just like Shadowbane on paper. And Shadowbane was a great game on paper. It just sucked in reality. Lets hope that Darkfall manages to be as little like Shadowbane in reality. I have my doubts though.

Originally posted by Rokurgepta

TR has a story line and a pretty good one really. It is a fun game until you hit level 30 and then there is little new to do. The quests are a lot of Fed Ex type and the game lacks epic battles. CPs are a lot of fun, but after a while they become tiring.

End game is as close to nothing as is possible with a few hours worth of instances and CP fights if you want. There is nothing that makes you feel like you really are fighting for humankinds survival against some huge enemy force.

The game is very solo friendly and to me that is one of its drawbacks. No group content means no epic battles, you never really feel like there is an overwhelming force, instead I always felt like Rambo, no odds against me were ever enough that you could not win against things your level.

If you like PVP I do not feel TR is great for that. I would take Planetside for PVP fights anyday over what TR has. They have done a lot of work balancing classes and fixing skills, but to me that was beta stuff to do and instead they spent 8 months of peoples money fixing their mistakes instead of adding content to a smallish game world.

Agreed, to all of it.

I played Tabula Rasa and even made the mistake of dragging my guild into the game with me (well actually it was Bthorne's idea, but I'll have a talk with him later about that) and even with my other guild members in the game we couldn't find any group content worth mentioning.

I actually remember there was this one really awesome instanced mission that was very hard. You had to pass a "test" that the aliens (whoever they were, I can't remember now) had left behind on the planet. You had to go through these three chambers fighting huge waves of enemies while completing various objectives like guarding a specific point or killing off all the enemies in a specific amount of time. When I went through this mission the first time I was higher in level than the rest of my guild, so I joined a random pick-up group for it. It was a wild battle and a lot of fun. So I was looking foreward to doing it with my guild.

So a little while later when some of the members of my guild were ready to do the mission I insisted on going along with them to help out even though I was higher in level. Knowing how hard it was I figured they could use all the help they could get.

So we get into the first room and I'm telling everyone to get ready because I think we are about to get our asses kicked. Five guys come wandering out and we mow them down. I'm like "okay guys, that was just the first wave, get ready for the real thing!" and we end up waiting awhile and another group of five guys wanders out. We kill them and then wait awhile, five more show up. This goes on for a few minutes and its boring the crap out of us. I'm wondering what the hell is going on. Even room 3 which involved one of those huge stalkers was a joke.

After the mission was over I went to read the recent patch notes and I discovered that the developers were getting complaints that the mission was too hard to solo so they dumbed it down so that it could be beaten by a solo player. Which of course made it way to easy for the size of group that was previously needed.

Thanks TR devs. You obviously know how much we all hate group content... *sigh*

PvP was a joke too. You could challenge other players to duels and from what I saw that mostly consisted of people bunny hopping and blasting away with shotguns. There was GvG where clans could declare war on each other, but that seemed to consist mostly of people wandering around trying to figure out where the players in the other guild were. I heard a lot of reports of guilds kicking out all their members except for one alt character after they had gotten enough kills to win so that the other team couldn't catch up.

There was just no reason at all for a guild to play this game after a few months so we got the hell out of there.

Its true that there are a lot of hardcore Darkfall fanboys who only like the game because in their opinion "full loot = instant win" and those people would probably jump on any game which had full loot.

However as several other people have pointed out, the game has a lot of other intersting features besides full looting. If all the full looting fanboys leave it would only be to the benefit of the community as a whole if you ask me.

Of course, Darkfall needs to quit being vaoprware before we start to discuss whatever future it may have.

Originally posted by AlexanderTD

WHAT THE HELL are you all doing here spaming your critique every day that doesn't have any reasonable arguments except " it's bad, everyone knows it is!"

The reason it seems that people are saying "its bad, everyone knows it is" rather than posting long detailed rants explaining why its bad is because we all posted those rants MONTHS ago before you showed up. Most of us don't feel like retyping ten pages of complaints about a game we don't even play and its not worth the effort when the majority of people here have already read everything we have posted before.

Originally posted by Mrbloodworth

You did not just seriously compare AOC to dark and light did you?

Yes, I did.

Believe me, I know ALL about DnL. You can see for yourself what I had to say about the game. I think I can safely promise you that its far worse than anything you have ever said about the game.

I'm not saying that AoC was anywhere as near as bad as DnL. What I'm saying is that if there were more severe consequences for developers who release poor quality games (such as the consequences DnL had to endure) then fewer developers would be willing to risk making poor quality games in the first place. And since the goverment isn't likely to open a department of "beating the crap out of half-assed MMO developers" any time in the near future, its up to us as the consumers of these products to make them feel the consequences with the only weapon at our disposal: Not spending money on them.

Funny, when I was in beta I downloaded the client and I didn't have to pay $2. I wonder what changed between then and now?

Oh yeah...

Last I checked, FunCom charges you money to download the client. Its like $2 or something but it kinda defeats to purpose of a free trial.

Originally posted by Scared

Originally posted by Mrbloodworth

Other than that, seems you take to many things personally about the launch of the game, if 50$ was too much of a gamble for you to take, i suggest you wait 6 months before buying any MMO.

50$ is chump change. This is a question of principle. I have no problems with the game being a failure. I have a problem with FC repeatedly LYING to their customers and I find it very strange that some people don't have a problem with that. It seems like many MMO players just bend over and take anything the developers give them.

We as customers are giving the wrong message if we keep tolarating lying and bad products.

The OP is correct. This game is not going to turn itself around in a few weeks just because a new guy got put in charge and announced a patch that has a few fixes. It will take atleast six-months to a year before this game will really have had a chance to fix enough bugs and add enough content for it to be considered to be truly reformed. And I wouldn't resubscribe until I saw for sure if this 3.0 patch is going to deliver as much as they claim it will. If it actually makes a few promising changes and improves the gameplay then that might be a good sign for the future, but just because Funcom claims its going to rock your world and put it on the test server tells you nothing. Wait until its live in the game and then see if its any good or not.

I also agree that its not an issue of one person losing $50. Its an issue of Funcom stealing $50 from thousands of people and not delivering the product promised to any of them. Gamers need to send a clear message to game developers that this kind of tactic will not be tolerated and that they can make more money in the long run by giving us the game we wanted then by giving us crap and running away with our money.

Take a look at what happened to Dark and Light. That game was awful on every possible level. People demanded refunds, left the game in droves and finally the developer got his pants sued off. Currently the servers are offline and the last few people still employed by the developer are hiding out in China to avoid the consequences of their actions. If what happened to Dark and Light happened to everyone who made a bad game then the quality of MMOs upon release would skyrocket because developers would finally be AFRAID of letting their fans down, which is the way it should be. This attitude of "aw, it just released, you can't expect it to be good yet" is the wrong attitude to have. When a business sells a product, they should be expected to deliver quality, reguardless of if the customer pays $1 or $1,000,000.

As for Cobra. Yeah, I imagine its possible hes being paid off by funcom to pretend to be a fanboy. But I think the first mystery we need to solve is if he is trying to make some kind of political statement by having a picture of McCain in his avatar while he trolls these forums to death over and over.

For me, AoC never had a chance and will never come back. I played in beta and saw then that the gameplay was terrible. Leveling is a grind fest, the combat system is button mashing fever and the small instanced zones leave little room for exploration or any form of open ended gameplay. Unless AoC does something drastic that totally alters the entire basis of the game such as the way SWG had the "NGE" then it will never be the kind of game I would be willing to play. And since the NGE was probably one of the worst ideas in gaming history I'm not going to recommend that to the AoC devs. So they may as well admit they made a boring game which many people with high standards will not play and move on.

But can AoC itself recover, fix some of its problems and maybe regain a few of the fans it lost? Sure. Its possible. Anarchy Online was a terrible game when it was released. And although Funcom never made it into the kind of game that I would play myself, they fixed it up reasonably well and got a lot of people back. They could turn AoC around as well. It will never be a very big game and nobody will ever forget the way that Funcom treated the game and their customers over these last six months. But it may get a few people to return. And of course there will allways be the small crowd of blind fanboys who will fight to the death for the game like our buddy Cobra here.

Originally posted by 3on1

its not really aoc, more the ao system. in aoc everything is instanced, even the cities. in tcos (and ao) only some dungeons will make a copy of themselves when they get too crowded, so u dont have to camp a boss with 50 other ppl at the same time :D (not entirely sure if its only dungeons tho)

Ah, so its not like AoC then. That other guy made it sound like it was when he said "zones" instead of dungeons.

If its only the dungeons, then I'm okay with it.

Originally posted by L0k1-

You'll have several instanced dungeons like you have in almost every current MMORPG, and the normal zones won't be instanced UNTIL it becomes too crowded. Then the game will make a copy of the zone too balance the load, but from what i've heard. The load balancing has been quite positive and the chance that a zone will get a duplicate because of too many players is almost zero to none.

ARG! That sounds like AoC style. And thats never a good sign.

You may not know this, since such features probably weren't in the game a year and half ago, but is it possible for players to build in these zones? As I understtod the system in AoC, players could build player cities but they would be located in certain numbered instances of a given zone. So there might be a lot of player cities all located in the same spot in the same zone, but each one would be in a different numbered instance of that zone. You know what I mean? Do you think TCoS would do something similar, to a point where a guild might own a city but that city would be located in instance #43 of whatever zone it is located in?

Actually that would make sense. Somebody at this new Acclaim probably did that translation.