Profile: Sovren1
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• • Everyone is leaving for Age of Conan

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    Originally posted by kitsunegirl
    I bought a preorder for AoC, but got turned off by various stuff, funcoms handling, the aggressive and abusive community, the bad reviews, the fanboi reviews, the crappy open beta client - tied in to the first item listed. If I do buy the game, I doubt Ill play it til a month or two after the game is launched. Perfect launches are rare, and the way Funcom has been running their ship, Im not expecting one.
    Currently, Im considering playing EQ2 again... I hate SOE alot, but the game is relatively fun, it has a lot more content than Warcrack, graphics are less pretty, but more realistic. And I did love playing my fae, as much as I like my Draenei... Its just SOE... and Smedley. >.> Ive cancelled Warcrack and Lotro waiting for both expansions.
    Oh, and honestly, AoC is meh to me, the game Im dying to play is Aion. I know its an NCSoft game, styled like Lineage II, but Ive had my eye on it since around 06...

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    I'm actually in the same boat. The only game holding majority of my desire to play is Aion. In the meantime I will probably give AoC and War a shot. Currently playing EQ2 and WoW off and on with a dab of Guildwars for my pvp fix. Everything I've seen from Aion is A+ and have been watching it for about a year and a half. Great concept imo.

  • Posted: 5/19/08 6:01 AM
    Everquest II
• • Aion the game for me?

  • No, look for something else...lol. You my friend are an unadaptable sludge.
    OmG, why does my mage keep changing how I play him? Grow up. You aren't making the games. The way games are progressing or leveling out obviously says that the things you want in a game just aren't going to be done.

    By the way, In WoW there really hasn't been many changes in play style. A mage is still just a mage.

    I'm responding to this because I am so sick of folks like you who think more time in a game grants you the high rise penthouse over the peons on the street. We all pay the same price to play these games. We should all have access to the lore for one, which the culmination usually happens in endgame content. But because I like being solo I should never know the story? Dude fuck off!!!!

    Troll over and out.

  • Posted: 2/27/08 10:19 AM
    Aion
• • Guild Wars: 5 Million Units Sold

  • Grats, LF to GW2 also. Keep up the good work. Nice game.

  • Posted: 2/27/08 9:58 AM
    General Discussion
• • What game to play while waiting?

  • You want something that hints at being an MMO till War comes out? I second the motion on Guild Wars. It's a free sub. Can't go wrong there. Pvp ain't bad either the way it's done. Team based pvp in the form of gvg or Guild vs Guild. It's an easy pickup. You go through the pve and you'll be rdy to start the pvp or do them both at the same time.

    Sure, to start off you'll be behind the power curve in the amount of skills you will own, but you unlock them for your account so any pvp character you create will have them. It's an easy game to finish (by finish I mean every chapter has the storyline that resembles being played like it were a single player game which is why many consider not a real MMO)and get caught up with a lot of choice on how your character is built skill wise. But being able to be good at those choices is where the hard part comes in. Some have it, some don't.

    I personally am a fan of this game because of the way classes don't counter each other, particular skills do. Ie; A monk places an enchantment on an assasin to give hit points back to the assasin eveytime it's hit. A necro, or mesmer could have brought a hex that shatters enchantments. Cool downs are basically nil which makes for a strategic fast paced fight. No cool down is really more than 60sec.

    Interupts, enchantments, hexes, conditions, rituals are all very clear cut. By that I mean find your target and be able to see exactly what that person uses when they use it. Makes for finding out how to break an opposing character down or opposing team for that matter.

    A monk may be the greatest at healing, but with the hybrid play...an elementalist or ritualist may be some hidden healers on an opposing squad.

    I don't really play anymore though as I am now back to WoW getting geared up. I can forewarn you though, if your a fan of movements such as swimming and jumping, and hell...flying, you won't be able to do that stuff in Guild wars. After awhile tho, you'll get past that playing with what they give you.

  • Posted: 2/27/08 9:51 AM
    WAR (Warhammer Online)
• • Why oh why can't we have a stat based char creation MMO again.

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    Originally posted by gestalt11
    If you do this everyone complains about balance.
    
    The two major names coming out are PvP titles so its not that surprising they went for classes.
    
    However I will say I think they are kind of copping out. Although Guild Wars probably is a game that you do not believe fits your archetype. It actually does do so even though there are classes. GW has over 1000 abilites each with their own stats and you can cusomize your abilites with each one via your attributes, which are essentially analogous to skill points. Each class has on average over 100 abilities and everyone can have 2 classes so you can have somewhere between 200-300 abilities to choose from. There are no restrictions in class combinations.
    GW lets you build a character in a very similar way to the systems you describe. Whether people like the progression model is irrelevant for this disucssion. The point is that you do not need a UO skill style game to accomplish roughly the same thing. Afterall putting points into skill just gives you abilities anyway.
    
    The reason i mention this is because of the balance thing. GW is a very well balanced PvP game. This is because they came up with a meta-system then created all their abilities to make the real system. They have interrupts and enchantments and enchantment removal and hexes and each type is designed to perform a certain way.
    When GW creates a class the only balance concern they need to worry about is whether the abilities do what is intended for that class and that certain undesirable phenomenon like tank-mages are either not possible or have a weakness (like relying on enchantments).
    
    
    So in other words you won't see this type of system start to pop up again until games start balancing the way Guild Wars, via a comprehensive ability design using a meta system, does instead of the way WoW does, via class and role.
    This won't happen anytime soon. Most designers do not have the ability for elegance that Anet or CCP do. Its much easier for them to cobble things together into classes and call it done.
    
    Its the same reason many programmers use iterative Loops instead of recursion even though sometimes the recursion is a far more elegant solution. Its just easier to think about and grab a hold of with your mind. The funny thing is they convince themselves this makes class based balanced easier to do, because its a simple model. But actually its a model with many unseen holes and is thus much harder to balance than Guild War's style balancing.
    The class balance model requires a complete reanalysis of everything everytime any change is made. The Guild Wars system does not. That is one of the reasons it is superior for an MMORPG. However this fact is not generally fully understood or taken into consideration and usually the apparent simplness of of the class based model wins people over. Its a sort of misidentification of the KISS principle. They are keeping the wrong part simple.
    
    They think by keeping the classes simple balance will be simple, but then they just keeping running into the problems of cascading changes and strange interactions because they did not actually design systematically.
    
    So you are screwed until this becomes obvious to the slacker monkey part of their brains. I don't say that pejoratively, laziness is important for designers. It is your motivation for doing things right. But at the same time it can be very simplistic and its not until you get hit of the head enough with the problems of the two approaches that you sort of begrudingly say "OK lets try it this way, because that other way was too much of a night mare."
    
    Right now the skilled based people are the victim of completely awful balance, well really complete lack of balance, that existed in games like UO. The designers saw this knew it was bad, heard the complaints and knew it hurt their bottom line. They then looked at how to control those system better and just saw a complete mess and ran as fast as they could to what appears to be the easy solution: classes.
    
    They are now in the process of realizing class balance, while offering some improvments over no balance at all, is in fact a big hairball of wires that you have to untangle every frigging time. So while you can set up decent balance maintaining it is a gigantic pain. And you will need to do some maintainence because there is no way you do it perfect the first time and things change anyway.
    
    The next step will be getting past the idea that class are a necessary evil and there is no other solution. Over the next few you will see that mantra repeated over and over. It already is. Then a few attentive designers will realize the whole thing is already solved in GW and that emulating them will actually give them and the players more freedom and make balance easier to maintain.
    
    So you are screwed for I dunno like 5 years or until Guild Wars 2 comes out. Or you can play Eve. Or maybe that World of Darkness MMO CCP is supposedly making. Otherwise you are screwed for a while because it will take them a while to move to a more comprehensive and elegant balance system and that is what drives all this. Well also the robot like reliance on class roles messes with their thinking too. But in the end they actually need to do the original design with no classes and put classes on top if they want roles, other wise they go back to their hairball.
    
    

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    oh ok, I missed this post...yeah, i agree

  • Posted: 2/24/08 11:33 AM
    General Discussion