All Posts by gestalt11

A low margin of error and complexity are not the same thing.  In fact sometimes they are at odds.

As someone who hates most death penalties I have to say as far the respawn timer is concerned:

Don't die.

There you go not a flaw.  Besides its not new, WoW had this in its BGs.  IF it was 5 minutes OK but 30s to 1 minute is perfectly fine and serves a useful anti-graveyard zerg purpose.

Didn't those those guys say they did a complete reorganization after all those problems?

Originally posted by dethgar

The horrible animations people have mentioned occur dynamically to reduce frame rate lag when others are around.

 

My only gripe so far is making gold, I don't really want to do pve but I have to in order to buy my new abilities.

That must be why I am seeing wildly different posts on them

You are allowed to say whatever you like as long as they follow the social guidelines.

Th NDA is lifted.  I believe Mythic has a separate test server for an advanced version of the Beta but only special testers are on that.  Probably mostly pros and people they trust a lot.  So you can say anything about what is on the normal current normal servers or anything from the past.

Originally posted by sabutai22

Originally posted by Bruticus_XI

Please explain to me how this will work when you need to have PRIOR CONTROL of Tiers 1-3 before you can even start to control Tier 4.

 

If you have played DaoC or WoW battlegrounds, hell even shadowbane back in the days against an all GUILD VoIP enabled opponent and all close to max level then you will understand what im talking about.

 

We know what you are talking about.  We also know how the actual campaign is structured.  Do the math.  You have a serious problem in your estimations.

Your point makes no sense unless the guild are not only literally huge but also CONTINOUSLY span all levels and also do not have substantial opposition on the other side.

You think you know what you are talking about, but there are glaring.  Just plain huge problems with your analysis.

You are not going from one individual fight to the battle field to the campaign.  At best you can claim that maybe a serious guild could monoplize one tier.  To seriously believe they monopolize all the teirs they would need is beyond the realm of resonability.

So prove it.  Prove they can actually go through the ENTIRE process they would need.  Because I bet you cannot show how even an excellent guild can do that without having about 500 people.

Originally posted by Consensus

Originally posted by Alundre

Originally posted by Consensus

exciting stuff. what is the instancing like? big zones?

is combat basically just like WoW?

 

The zones are pretty large but I would say they are fairly equal to or slightly smaller than WoW zones.

Combat is just like wow except 10 times slower. While that will probably be nice for RvR (people won't be getting 2 shotted like in wow), it also seems to make the experience feel very slow and gets downright boring in PVE.

 

cool, yeah the combat pace is the worst feature for me right now (only watched videos)

from what your saying feels like thee glass cannon mele dps I usualy role might not be as good (killing people before they can retaliate is thier only defence)

There are multiple kinds of instancing.  I would goto warhammerwiki for a full explanation.

But basically the world zones are large and mostly "seamless", probably comparable to WoW.  Then there are instanced things such as dungeons,lairs and scenarios (scenario are just better made WoW battlegrounds).

The dungeons specifically have multiple kinds of instances and one dungeon may have portion with a more narrow instance.

By this I mean that when you enter a dungeon you are always separated by faction but you may have multiple groups in the same dungeon.  When you get near a boss you may go to a new instance where only your group may exist.  There is also an in between type of instance for about 2-4 groups.

So basically they are trying to keep some of the feel of the communal dungeons of EQ1 or EQ2 but not have camping or other population problems.

I have not participated in the beta for this< i just took this from the wiki so a Beta player will need to confirm if this made it into the game as its described.

I am not sure if you are missing something about the chicken rule.

You only turn into a chicken in RvR areas unless you to go to a non-Core server in which case you always turn into a chicken.

Were you on a non-Core server?  If so that is the price you pay for tryign to circumvent true RvR rules.  Otherwise you can go back to PvE areas just fine on a Core server.

Originally posted by IcoGames

AoC's release was borderline unethical.  Tortage was 'ok', but I can't understand how Funcom thought they'd get away with literally half a game.

I've always argued that today's mmos need to be feature rich and stable at release.  Imo, SWG was the last MMO where players bought into a partnership with development.  Now we expect a working game, and rightfully so.

You aren't gonna get an argument from that about AoC in that regard.

But you have to admit whether you liked Tortage or not a large number of reviewers:

a) gushed over it

b) never went past it

In addition if you go to the AoC forums and necro thread from the first week of release like someone did, you can even see players who later became critics gushing over AoC just like the reviewers because they were still in Tortage.

The first few weeks of reviews were like an average of 8.9 and mostly because of tortage.

Good or bad you gotta admit the initial power of it.

Originally posted by Kurush

Originally posted by gestalt11

And that is that the intitial "new player" experience is incredibly important.  700k sold and far better reviews than the game deserves (in many people's opinions) all because Tortage was done very well.

 

It also proved that it isn't enough even if it can have large effect on things.  Retention is necessary and the various other aspects of AoC are what determine that not the starting area.

 

And perhaps even shows you can be victim of your own success if half the game does not measure up to the other half.   A similar thing seem to happen with Tabula Rasa when the content went very thin at lvl 30 (out of 50 levels) and they had no where near the community prolems of AoC by this I am referring to accusations of dishonesty, the patches actually improved TR(except for one of the them), AoC moderator problems etc.  But there was a similar amount and character to the negative posts once the fun iniital game hit the lack luster mid and later game.  It was not as severe as AoC as there were no obvious non-deliverables on the features.  Only people who though Garriot = UO2 were super pissed it seemed.

 

Now DDO and Vanguard are both revamping their "new player experience".  Of course both of these are games with disappoiting launches but well desirieable enough features that they seem to be growing at least slightly.  The features are on complete opposite sides of the spectrum for the two games but that is beside the point.

 

I wonder, even if DDO or Vanguard had something as impessive to reviewers as Tortage was (getting 8.5 to even 10) would it help the way such a thing obviously did on release?  Is it too late for those games.  Many old players on their boards say that and demand more content, but of course they are obviously biased.

 

My intuition says this won't help much.   Mostly because reviewers have moved on.  It might increase recruitment, but I think anyone inclined to check it out is more inclined to give it a deeper look than at release anyway.  Certainly DDO initial dungeons were nothing amazing but they were perfectly adequate for me since the system is different enough that the fairly boring tutorial was still quite useful. 

 

 

Well, I don't think any developer is hoping for a sudden resurrection by revamping the starting area.

You need to realize, though, that many developers have a lot of players try the trial but not convert to a subscription.  Their goal with these changes is to slightly increase growth by converting more of those players.  I think they can succeed in doing that, even if it doesn't cause a sudden uptick in sub numbers.

Do you have a ballpark estimate for how many people try a trial and do not sign up?

Originally posted by Vindicoth

Originally posted by jaycee2006

Ok, a question to get the thread going. In PQ's,are there always players doing each and every one? I find it hard to think they do, and I would hate to be in a PQ area alone, spamming chat to try and find someone.

 

 Obviously not, but its very easy to get one going. Advertise, get 2 or 3 people started doing it, open your party up and convert to a Warband. People in the area will be notified that you are nearby and may want to do that PQ and will be able to instantly join your group without any input from you. Before you know it you'll have 10-15 people all doing a PQ and all you had to do was start a small group.

If you have ever done the rikti invasions in City of heroes I think you can probably get a pretty good feel of how quick a group can form.

As soon as the broadcast goes out people head over to the zone.  Over local chat, not even bothering with the very good CoH LFG tool (I mean it set the standard a long time ago) people start saying "need invasion group" or "LF bomb group".  Complete strangers get into 8 an groups within a minute or two in almost any invasion.  Even 6 or more months after the initial originally meant to be temporary even became a regular, but limited thing.

I would guess the PQ's will work similarly they just won't have the world broadcast and may not have the auot-examplar things (so that all levels play together) that ht Rikit invasion does.

One of the things to remember is its an event.  People want to get going as soon as possible.  So they get to business pretty quick and with less drama.

Originally posted by 1234aaa

 You're not feeding a troll.

 

You just sound INCREDIBLY biased. And yes, i read everything you wrote. I just, personally, cannot see how you can begin to compare WAR to WoW.

 

WAR= RvR heavy pvp... a seamless world where PvE and PvP intertwine VERY nicely (revolutionary in itself)

WoW= Boring PvE, worthless PvP (epics are a dime a dozen and you aren't worth 2 cents if you don't arena! And arena is VERY limited!)

 

 

Just because he is not super objective and taking multiple viewpoints and possibilities does not mean he has a bone to pick.  Many people simply don't operate that way.

Take it for what its worth.  The OP never claimed he was revealing some kind of truth from heaven.  And besides claiming he is a WoW fanboy is silly he specifically said certain aspects of WAR are the best he has ever seen in an MMOs.  Fanboys don't talk that way.

And that is that the intitial "new player" experience is incredibly important.  700k sold and far better reviews than the game deserves (in many people's opinions) all because Tortage was done very well.

It also proved that it isn't enough even if it can have large effect on things.  Retention is necessary and the various other aspects of AoC are what determine that not the starting area.

And perhaps even shows you can be victim of your own success if half the game does not measure up to the other half.   A similar thing seem to happen with Tabula Rasa when the content went very thin at lvl 30 (out of 50 levels) and they had no where near the community prolems of AoC by this I am referring to accusations of dishonesty, the patches actually improved TR(except for one of the them), AoC moderator problems etc.  But there was a similar amount and character to the negative posts once the fun iniital game hit the lack luster mid and later game.  It was not as severe as AoC as there were no obvious non-deliverables on the features.  Only people who though Garriot = UO2 were super pissed it seemed.

Now DDO and Vanguard are both revamping their "new player experience".  Of course both of these are games with disappoiting launches but well desirieable enough features that they seem to be growing at least slightly.  The features are on complete opposite sides of the spectrum for the two games but that is beside the point.

I wonder, even if DDO or Vanguard had something as impessive to reviewers as Tortage was (getting 8.5 to even 10) would it help the way such a thing obviously did on release?  Is it too late for those games.  Many old players on their boards say that and demand more content, but of course they are obviously biased.

My intuition says this won't help much.   Mostly because reviewers have moved on.  It might increase recruitment, but I think anyone inclined to check it out is more inclined to give it a deeper look than at release anyway.  Certainly DDO initial dungeons were nothing amazing but they were perfectly adequate for me since the system is different enough that the fairly boring tutorial was still quite useful. 

Originally posted by Honeymoon69

compare classes at low level is waste of time.

I kind of agree and I would go so far as to say comparing at release is a waste of time too.  Some classes take a while for everyone to figure out to use well since they take a combination of things done right.

Except of course for obvious overpowered stuff and glitches. 

Interesting take on things.

I don't think I agree with you about the way open field RvR will turn out but it is certainly possible.

I am ready.  And I have my agenda all set.

Although my agenda mostly involves eating as many donuts as possible in one sitting.  But I am sure I can make that relate to WAR somehow.

Originally posted by metalhead980

Originally posted by gestalt11

Originally posted by metalhead980

Henchmen need to be balanced so they don't overpower everything.

In GW they are far from balanced.

With my heroes and henchmen I get maybe two or three attacks off before they kill the whole damn pack.

It makes me feel like I'm not needed and totally kills the game for me.

It's like watching someone else play an MMO.

 

 

 

 

The higher level content in GW such as higher stuff in Realm of Torment or Eye of the north do not work this way.  Ever.

 

Stuff in realm of torment will rip you apart if you just let the NPCs attack willy nilly.

 

 

while I'm aware that 5-10% of the game is hard and requires actual strategy the leveling and questing leading up to that point is actually easy as hell and those damn henchies/heroes are OP. Even setting targets, pullling mobs back to my hencies they rip all the mobs apart before my Dervish could cleave them all down.

In the later content I would normally use my guild to run stuff, its a lot cooler to run a mostly real player team into those areas.

 

Other than unbalanced hencies and heroes I actually find GW one of the better games i've played in the last few years. GW is unrivaled in solo pve content and pvp balance.

Yes the Heroes specifically can really cahnge the playstyle of the game since you can call targets and move them to places.  Having three Heroes was much more like a Real Time Tactical game.

I personally liked the Heroes in GW however I am not sure its a great idea to change the gameplay that much.

It seems to me you should either do what Gods and Heroes was doing and make it all that way or keep the gameplay single character based.

I do not think DDO will allow enough hirelings to have this same thing happen.  Since it only one thing and you may have less control.  I would have to play it to really say though.  

Originally posted by Raithe-Nor

Originally posted by vesavius

I have stated in othe threads why I think solo orientated play systems destroy community, and the value, of these games by reducing the player pool to the pont where even social players can not play the way they wish to, so I will not bang that drum here.

All I will say is that I personally feel NPC hirelings are not good for a MMORPG if they are designed to replace, and not supplement, a group of living players. It would be great in a single player game, but it is just yet another community destroyer and way for the solo lite anti-social brigade to actually avoid people in a muli-player game.

 

Agreed.

In the case of DDO, this is what happened:  the developers at DDO noticed that the remnants of their playerbase consisted of mostly-antisocial metagamers that were helping destroy any chances of new players latching onto the game.  So, instead of adding social mechanics to the game (the lack of which was what caused the previously described playerbase state) that would attract a different style of player, they simply removed the social mechanic of needing to group with other players.

As if the social aspect of grouping to complete quests wasn't the thread the game was hanging by...

...it really does seem like a self-destruct mechanism.

Actually  I would characterize DDO as split into two relatively equal sized camps, the meta-gamers you mention and the more immersion dungeon crawl based people.

And they do not mix well.  The immersion people hate the zergers.

Originally posted by vesavius

Originally posted by gestalt11

Originally posted by altairzq

Yes they are absolutely needed to destroy the MMOs once and for all.

 

....

 

Given all this, and all you say, I will ask you this...

Why are the most popular games so fundamentally solo if we are all so social by nature?

I am not sure whether you mean non-MMO games or are talking about WoW and a few other MMOs.   Also i do not consider a game like WoW fundamentally solo.  But this is my opinion on the matter and it involves several factors:

1) creating computer game that have social components is a computational arduous task.   Therefore it is a much less settled due to technological and investment issues.  There are far more single player games made simply because of invesetment stuff

2) People are both social and individual.  I don't invite 4 people over to do the dishes yet people spend ass tons of money paying triple the price of a bear to watch a ball game at a bar just to be around other people.  Clearly people do not want to be saddled with others at all times, yet also it is clear that people will expend serious resources and place a very high importance on gathering with others.

3) Given #2 above it really does not make sense to try to make everything a group or solo endeavor.  When you make doing the dishes a group endeavor people will get pissed.  When you have a house party and its "solo" people will get pissed.  People want both because they are inclined towards both.  In fact some people do solo activites to prepare for social activies.  If someone was trying to comb my hair for me I'd get pissed since its annoying.  Yet the only reason I comb my hair is to look good for other people.  I do not think the solo versus group dichotomy even exists.

4) social things tend to last long and take a while.  Yet generally are highly valued AS LONG AS THEY DO NOT INTERFERE with everyday activities.  Most everyday activities are individual, private things.   House parties, team sports, clubs, etc etc.  People put in serious time and effort to participate, create and find these things.  But at the same time as soon as they interfere with private things they will get dropped.

 

5) Privacy.  It may seem counter-inutive, but it is a cornerstone of human socializing.  It is a faux pas to dig too deep into private things.  Humans go nuts when they don't have privacy.  Everyone has different ideas about what should be private.   I believe that this is something that is vatly overlooked in what is considered a social atmosphere because these a virutal worlds and subtle issues that seem counter-inutive like have not really been tackled.  It seems strange to say it maybe, but without solo stuff, private stuff your social fabric will dissolve if it is composed of humans.  We may be social but we aren't ants.  We aren't even dogs.  Humans are funny they are both highly individual and highly herd oriented.  When dealing with each we have subtle unsaid boundaries that we do not really fully consciously understand but we bow to out of practicality.

 

6) The get a bigger hammer solution.  I think the social aspects of MMOs have been taken in a very simplistic and hamfisted way.  And so the supposedly more social games of the past are in fact just putting square pegs into round holes.  They assume that shoving people together is the same thing as social.  I do not think this is true at all and thus they wind up with strange problems where nothing ever quite fits right.  

 

 

Why has game design gone against the flow of human nature, as you paint it, and become so much more popular then the old social models?

I don't think current game design is against social models.  I consider Guild Wars for example to be very much akin to a pick up game of basketball.  I consider EQ1 style forced grouping to be very similar to a Union in a non-right to work state.  There is a reason people call EQ1 a job.

I would actually say the games are becoming more social not less.  I ansered some of this above.  But basically I do not accept your premise that they are less social.  I think they are more social because I do not see quantity as superior to quality.  As many people together as often as possible is not the same thing as social.  I think this is definitely born out by people who have only Played City of Heroes truying other games out.  They often get a culture shock and feel the games are very inferior in the social aspects.

 

I would also ask, honestly for an honest answer, do you usually solo or group?

I do both.  I often quit games in frsutration that do not let me solo.  I often get bored of games where the grouping is not good.

Not interested in arguing here, just would like to hear your view.

I have stated in othe threads why I think solo orientated play systems destroy community, and the value, of these games by reducing the player pool to the pont where even social players can not play the way they wish to, so I will not bang that drum here.

All I will say is that I personally feel NPC hirelings are not good for a MMORPG if they are designed to replace, and not supplement, a group of living players. It would be great in a single player game, but it is just yet another community destroyer and way for the solo lite anti-social brigade to actually avoid people in a muli-player game.

I think here is perhaps where we differ the most.  I do not believe there is truly such a thing as what you describe.    Why do I say this?  My reason is very simply EVERY SINGLE person in this entire world eventually falls into the category you just mention.  There is not a single person in this world that eventually does not want some alone time.  There is almost no person playing an MMO at one point in time that still wanted to play and INTERACT WITH THE WORLD but not talk to or deal with people.  For whatever reason, a fight with a girlfriend a long night raiding, whatever. 

 

There are people who's preferred method of play is to mostly solo and they play MMO's to interact with the a "living" world.  But frankly they are fairly rare.  Most people are a pretty equal mix of the two.  And the most social thing is the ENGAGE with them.

You can say well then don't play a community based game.  I say to you that dealing with this IS part of the community.  You do not build a community by excluding people when they don't suit your needs.  The people who are the best at running social enterprises are often extremely graceful and rarely lay down the hammer of social obligation.

Its not really practical to have a static content game and still have meaningful travel.

That is why Eve is strucutred the way it is.  You simply cannot expect people to travel 2 hours to get so some particular thing.

The knee-jerk response is, make it extremely rewarding.   But that really won't work. 

The other response is make it not take 2 hours.  Well then you have completely altered what