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GW2 is not pay-to-win. The pay-for items are all vanity items. You can buy experience boosters but they don't do you much good in PvP since your PvP build is max level the moment you roll up your character.

You're quite sure about that?

jump over to http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/206045 Basically UO was one of the first sandbox style persistent worlds. When we say UO like we generally mean the entire world is PVP and is full loot. Full loot meaning, when I kill Abe, and abe is wearing a sword and armor, I get EVERYTHING he had on him. It makes death a serious thing and not to be taken lightly. Also sandbox in that you are not forced intoa role, such as "tank" or "Mage". Actually it is basically about breaking down barriers of all sorts and giving the player freedom to choose as much as possible, their style, their skills, their adventures.

Alot of these MMO's have painted themselves into a corner with regard to creating a level playing field between established players and new players. You could have two players of equal skill squaring off but because one has been feeding his habit for a few months or even years longer they win in the random number generator fight that occurs.

Sounds like you want to play Darkfall Online

I've been reading this blog and it seems that the game isn't like any other one I have seen so far.

They say its based on player skill and there are no levels much like Ultima Online and you can build cities like Shadowbane.

That said... I haven't played it so you'll have to take the blogs word for it.

That's a laugh. I don't know anyone of the 20 or 30 people that play or have played WoW for thousands of hours that haven't tried out other MMORPGs - Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, EVE, a slew of free or freemium ones, etc.

Maybe because that is because you play WoW and don't encounter anyone who didn't come back.

I'm on a very large guild on Warhammer Online (1000+ members) and the concensus is that we don't like WoW. I mean it was good, but it had flaws for what most of us wanted in an MMO and that is why we are sticking with War.

There are many debates on vent about why say Conan failed or what Mythic could do better with Warhammer online, but not everyone wants to play that game for lots of different reasons. I think at least the WAR followers like the PvP and RvR which WoW has but pulls off rather poorly in some aspects in getting more than several hundred people onto the open battle field at the time.

Anyways, its really from your personal perspective of who says what. If you play WoW, you probaly didn't like WAR and if you are currently playing WAR there are reasons you aren't playing WoW.

On a side note... I've been reading some very interesting blogs about Darkfall Online about the game politics and game mechanics. Perhaps when they release an North America server and iron out the bugs I'll take it for a spin.

There is a few games that was released before 2000.
Meridian 59 - Released in 1996
Everquest - Released in 1999
Asheron's Call - Released in 1999

This is according to:
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/show/all/sCol/estimatedRelease/sOrder/asc

if you do a google search for "sci-fi mmo" you'll see that nearly every title you come across is for PC:

• Earth & Beyond
• EVE Online
• Jumpgate
• Anarchy Online
• Age of Armor
• ACE Online
• Atriarch
• DarkSpace
• Darkwind: War on Wheels
• Divergence
• Tabula Rasa
• Earthrise
• Endless Ages
• etc., etc...

i don't play PC games so i can't tell you which ones are any good, but the point is, there are a ton of sci-fi MMOs to choose from on the PC (Windows at least).

is posted in this thread. Warning: Contains images of two pixelated male characters in cloth diapers.

Someone should have told this guy about the internet's porn.

Not quite, it's like if she threw off her clothes behind the filing cabinet and they overheard the noise.

The point is was it done on company time or not?

That was a bad link anyways the correct one is: http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm?THREAD=192300&BHCP=1%2C1%2C1&PAGE=1&bhjs=-1

Based on the link I posted I wonder if it was a setup on the part of a player with an axe to grind?

"This has nothing to do with EA," he said, pointing out that this was entirely a Mythic decision, and it isn't a directive from the company which many MMO players feel has a dubious history in our genre. "they had zero input in this. This is not something we went to them with and said 'hey guys, we need an extra few months...' and they said 'no, you must ship on this day'. They don't even know about it. It's not a discussion we would have with them."

---Article By: Jon Wood
Created On: July 11, 2008
http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/239/feature/2041/page/3

Yep sounds like crap to me.
~B

To be honset i can live with big memory consumtion, but i cannot agree on cpu usage. Quick test - go to [mmorpg.com] site (widely known website), then check cpu usage (im sitting on win xp). I get almost constantly 50% usage by firefox.exe process

WoW would be something you put one your resume, but I don't think it would be seen in the same light as Bioshock or Half-life2. World of Warcraft isn't even in the top 10 of MMORPG.com's game rating list: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/sort/rating/gam e. It's a bit odd, that it is played by the masses but the masses except there are many better games.

As far as I know, every game you mention or refer to is Windows-only. Which is, I suspect, a big part of why they're all less successful than WoW.

There are somewhere around 20-30 million mac users with machines recent enough to run WoW well, and no good access to all of the games that you tout as being superior. It seems very likely that the semi-gamer subset of those 20-30 million people makes up a big part of WoW's 8 million subscribers.

This is the big thing that all of the Blizzard émigrés failed to take with them, and an important part of why none of their more recent ventures have been a real challenge to Blizzard's offerings.

I dont know. WoW is dispised in my games industry circle, it has had a very detrimental effect on the industry. This one game has significantly dropped the sales of the games industry as a whole. The fact that it isn't really that good of a game, it was made of the masses to be sold to the masses. Soap opera's are aweful shows, but it doesnt stop something like East Enders being watched by 13million people each night.

Just because a game has sold lots of copies doesn't mean it is a great game. The other question has always arised, this applys to many MMO's. How many people have just forgot about their subscriptions, and just browsing down their statement don't really notice that $15, and do something about it.

WoW would be something you put one your resume, but I don't think it would be seen in the same light as Bioshock or Half-life2. World of Warcraft isn't even in the top 10 of MMORPG.com's game rating list: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/sort/rating/gam eID/0. It's a bit odd, that it is played by the masses but the masses except there are many better games. Although it does make me laugh that Planetside is rated above it.

Ryzom was the first "mmorpg" to do this.

http://mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/gameId/36

Sounds like Anarchy Online is what you are looking for. Free client download and free to play. If you want to explore/play their expansion areas, then you'll need to pay. But the original area is large enough to keep one's interest for 30 or 40 levels. Even after that there is still enough content to keep one interested but the expansion areas offer better equipment&xp. The game is well established and well populated. Cedega does support playing AO in Linux.

Another free to play game is Last Chaos. The only time you have to pony up some cash is if you want to buy something from their item mall like an xp potion(+30% xp). The game is fantasy based, so it might not be your cup of tea. It is an interesting game, the devs have done some unique things. Example would be skill points, these are earned along with xp but at an inverse... high xp, low sp/low xp, high sp. They also have events every weekends; friday happy hour(random bonus stuff like double xp during happy hour) and sunday tea time(again random bonus stuff). Last Chaos is playable in Wine.

For a purely cooperative game, you might check out A Tale in the Desert. There is no combat in the game. It does offer a a native linux client. It has been a while since I played this one.

There are a wide variety of mmorpg out there, some just take a bit of effort to find. Maybe start your search at mmorpg.com.

First of all, why is there no Mac OS X or Linux client? I despise having to use Windows for any reason at all. The only reason it's even installed on my Macs is because I'm a technology consultant and I have to deal with Windows professionally, but I'd really rather not have to.

Fannar also revealed that the company is actively developing Linux support for EVE Online. He also strongly hinted - to the point where he basically confirmed - that an Apple client was also in the works.

Just from observing the trend of MMO's, we can see that everyone is constantly trying to re-invent the wheel when it comes to the enjoyable traits of gameplay. Despite Planetside's dismal failure, other company's are infact trying to re-invent the MMOFPS.

http://www.webzengames.com/Game/Huxley/default.asp
http://mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/overview/ga meID/197
http://www.gametrailers.com/gamepage.php?id=1774

I've been following the details of this game since it was first announced at E3 two years ago. I'm an avid raider in WoW and this is the ONLY mmo that has caught my attention. I'm also a fan of paper based RPG games and for reasons I can not explain this MMO has a Rifts (Palladium) feel to it. If any of you are still on the search for a good MMOFPS, i'd recommend checking this out. It should be out sometime this year and will be running on the Unreal Engine 3.

As one of the guys who translates some of the stuff there to languages other than french: At the time of writing the game was #3 in the rankings, that was on thursday evening i think. There also was a time when the game was #2, the rankings shift very fast. One thing has remained true though: Despite having a tiny userbase compared to other games, it has remained in or near the top 7 for over a year.
And even if it's true that it's only a popularity contest, think about what it means for a game with barely 5000 paying accounts and a userbase that is mainly mature and laid-back players, to manage this on a site with 500k+ accounts: To stay ahead or at least head-to-head with games that have 5 million subscribers globally or that can sport an almost rabid fanbase to the point of securing them several awards in the last year's reader's choice votes. http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/ 388/page/1/from/

Here, I made a copy of the summary in case the slashdot gets servered :)

This year's AGC is now at an end, and several sites have coverage of the last day's events. The hit event for the day seemed to be Damion Schubert's Moving Beyond Men in Tights talk. MMORPG.com has a slew of interesting articles, covering Emerging PR Strategies for MMOGs, Running Your Own MMOG, and Rich Vogel on MMOG Betas. Raph has a liveblog on a session about Virtual Economies, and finally the 3pointD site has a look at a panel on Virtual Worlds. Interesting stuff. From the 'Men in Tights' writeup:
"The queston to answer, why do we keep making grindtastic classbased combat oriented men in tights gamey games? I'm not going to answer 'because it sells' because it's a circular argument and a copout. We won't get anywhere if we only do what was done before. Instead, I'll ask why do we need a grind, why do games appear to be winning, why are classes good, and so on. The reason to tackle this is because whenever people decide to make a new game, these are often the first five things people choose to innovate on. But there's a lot of bad innovation from people trying to solve these five problems."

Here, I made a copy of the summary in case the slashdot gets servered :)

This year's AGC is now at an end, and several sites have coverage of the last day's events. The hit event for the day seemed to be Damion Schubert's Moving Beyond Men in Tights talk. MMORPG.com has a slew of interesting articles, covering Emerging PR Strategies for MMOGs, Running Your Own MMOG, and Rich Vogel on MMOG Betas. Raph has a liveblog on a session about Virtual Economies, and finally the 3pointD site has a look at a panel on Virtual Worlds. Interesting stuff. From the 'Men in Tights' writeup:
"The queston to answer, why do we keep making grindtastic classbased combat oriented men in tights gamey games? I'm not going to answer 'because it sells' because it's a circular argument and a copout. We won't get anywhere if we only do what was done before. Instead, I'll ask why do we need a grind, why do games appear to be winning, why are classes good, and so on. The reason to tackle this is because whenever people decide to make a new game, these are often the first five things people choose to innovate on. But there's a lot of bad innovation from people trying to solve these five problems."

Here, I made a copy of the summary in case the slashdot gets servered :)

This year's AGC is now at an end, and several sites have coverage of the last day's events. The hit event for the day seemed to be Damion Schubert's Moving Beyond Men in Tights talk. MMORPG.com has a slew of interesting articles, covering Emerging PR Strategies for MMOGs, Running Your Own MMOG, and Rich Vogel on MMOG Betas. Raph has a liveblog on a session about Virtual Economies, and finally the 3pointD site has a look at a panel on Virtual Worlds. Interesting stuff. From the 'Men in Tights' writeup:
"The queston to answer, why do we keep making grindtastic classbased combat oriented men in tights gamey games? I'm not going to answer 'because it sells' because it's a circular argument and a copout. We won't get anywhere if we only do what was done before. Instead, I'll ask why do we need a grind, why do games appear to be winning, why are classes good, and so on. The reason to tackle this is because whenever people decide to make a new game, these are often the first five things people choose to innovate on. But there's a lot of bad innovation from people trying to solve these five problems."

Oddly enough, if you go to MMORPG.COM's game list and sort it by ranking in descending order, you will find that World of Warcraft is ranked 13th! (The real kick in the face though is that Space Cowboy Online, which is a completely free MMO and has been out of beta for about 3 months, is ranked 11th.)

Of course, there is always the argument of the number of subscribers. But I'll use a quote from a movie to refute that: "People don't drink the sand because they're thirsty. They drink the sand because they don't know the difference."

There are better MMOs out there. The quality is not rated by the number of lemmings they have. (Sidenote: MMO Lemmings!)

MMORPG.com: The usual debate over skill vs. class system rages here. Why did you go for skill-based?

Tasos Flambouras: Why allow players to take the skills they want and need as their character develops and the game evolves?

In a skill-based system, such as Darkfall's, players can create exactly the character they want to play, without limitations dictated by design choices or by the need to balance a class-based system. It's more challenging for us as developers, but we feel it's better for the players and for the game.

In a class based system you get a pretty much already developed character with little room to grow, whereas the skill based system allows you the freedom and the pleasure of developing your character yourself. With the number of skills in Darkfall, each character will be unique.

In Darkfall, you pick and choose exactly the skills you fancy, and if you tire of the combination, you just switch your focus to some new ones - any new ones. In a class-based system the only time you have complete freedom is right before you create your character and then you're boxed in by your initial, often uninformed, choices.

The skill based system allows the player to adapt, as he learns more about what he needs in the game, to best fit his playing style. New players may not know which class to pick since they don't have experience of the game, essentially forcing them to be stuck with a gimped character, or having to re-roll and forcibly retire a character that was a part of the community and had its own history. The same applies as the game evolves and new skills become important.

Allowing characters the freedom to grow and adapt allows us to add new content and new challenges without worrying about being unfair to certain groups of player characters. In Darkfall all players will be able to take advantage of the new opportunities that come along with the evolution of the game.

for reference, the entire interview can be found here: http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setview/feature s/gameID/4/loadFeature/408/page/2/from/

Here's my suggestion if WoW is sucking: vote with your damn dollars. City of Heroes never has these problems. If you haven't tried the game, give it a shot, 14 days no strings attached no cc needed:

http://www.mmorpg.com/cov_trial.cfm?fp=1920,1200,1 145983133843,20060425123853

I tried WoW, but I'd rather fly (or leap, or superspeed) than walk or take a slow horse. And I'd rather fight and run missions than spend endless hours craftgrinding. And I like playing with my friends and being able to even when we're different levels - "sidekicking" is the best mmo feature EVAR.

But CoX has basically never had these issues. One or two minor hiccups in 2 years.

I've played the beta for 2 weeks @ 4 hours/day (IAABT). DDO looks great and is well made but I can't recommend it because of an utter lack of content. After the beta I had a level 7 and level 6 toon, having played every dungeon to boredom. Hard core players maxed out their first character in less than 2 weeks.

During the last week of the beta the hardest part in starting a party was deciding what to do: noone cared anymore which dungeon to go to.

You may want to read the beta reviews at http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/hype/ga meID/163 before spending time and money on this dud.

I'm very disappointed.

I think this contrasts nicely with:

It's true that WoW did cannibalize from other games in order to get their figures,

Wow, nice contradiction.
--

The problem is that the market doesn't reward the companies that [make "new" experiences]

As soon as the market shows they're interested and willing to pay for "new experiences", you will likely see more of them.

That's some beautiful circular reasoning. Also, claiming that graphics somehow equates to how much of a "risk" developers take is completely invalid. WoW isn't exactly "cutting edge" in the graphics department, yet that wasn't "completely ignored". It's not even possible for me to make a real point here, because your arguments are so convoluted and self-reinforcing, there's no way to break them down logically.

But hey, I'm not the "professional game designer". You must know what you're talking about. That's probably why your game needed a buyout just to stay alive...

I'm sure this'll get blown off as 'corporate spin' too then I guess, and I absolutely hate sounding like a fanboy, but oh well...

I like that I can actually play with some of my buddies from Australia, Europe, and other parts of the world in the same game environment. Not just know what they're talking about. *shrugs* I know that in some MMO's you can pick international servers and such, but transferring servers is generally a pain at the least - and usually costs. I gave EverCra^E^E^EQuest a try not too long ago, and I've still seen some things better done in a few MUDs. Well, except for the obvious graphics...

I think it just turns some people off due to a pace that's not quite as breakneck as, "signing on, turning off brain, kill, KilL, KILL!".

Each to their own I guess. I used to like first person shooters too before I got bored to tears and nearly a coma with them. I'll definitely agree with the GP's statement above of his "statement of bias". I just got sick to death of Elves, Goblins, and the fantasy motif too.

Only a few games has been able to hold my interest for longer periods of time. Two MUD's that I've played and still stop in at after more than a decade or so, and now this one that I've been playing for two years and having a blast (no pun intended).

In humble opinion there's a fairly good reason why it won MMORPG's Reader's Choice Best Game award though despite, how do you put it, it's (comparative) lack of player base. 100,000 registered active players is nothing to sneeze at, but it seems to have something, and getting bigger all the time. *shrugs*

PS: My only corporate affiliations are with the internet dept in a food company, and my Eve Online player corp. :P

Naah. who cares about market leaders? That is the sort of mentality that makes Top40 music so..... so..... mund-numbing and yet nauseating at the same time.

Anyway, Eve won Lots of awards elsewhere

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/ 122

What happened to these other 4 games? And are those graphics and sketches indicative of their "better than UE3" quality? I know I would invest in a company of 20 people led by inexperienced teenagers who are planning to unveil multiple MMORPGs at once with bad art and generic ideas!

After all, those talentless saps at Blizzard had to use over 200 employees just to get their little game off the ground!

Seriously though, something doesn't add up here. Creative directors are usually not very young because experience is a GOOD thing. New ideas are great, but ideas can only get you so far. The most important thing in any large undertaking (like creating the most complicated type of game available) is knowing how to schedule, how to pace, how to get your work done on time and under budget (or as close as you can manage!). That old adage about perspiration over inspiration has endured because there is a lot of truth to it.

On top of that, exactly how is such a tiny team going to produce such amazing assets? Where did they get the funding to either buy or create technology that supports normal mapping and tone mapping in an upgradeable and portable way? Where is their customer support team? Where did these "8 months to a year" numbers come from? Not from some tawdry thing like "experience" I imagine...

After Gizmondo and Infinium, articles and interviews like one this start to leave a sour taste in my mouth...

several games that are based in space that have fairly large and well balanced economies. server population on the other hand... not so good.
the sci-fi games in this list are mostly all based in space. http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/gameId/0

I like the Eve Online model, myself. The game is free to buy and can be downloaded from their site. Monthly fees are about average for the market, and go down if you buy them in larger quantities at a time. You can cancel your subscription and they will hold your character and account for a -very- long time (they did it for me for 8mo) without you paying a nickel, and you can resume with all your cash, skills, items, etc. later, so cancelling a subscription for a 1mo vacation, or while you move if you know it will take a month or two to get the 'net hooked up again, or whatever, and it's all good. Also, the server goes down for 1hr. a day for maintenance, and patches / x-packs are released (free of charge) on a regular basis. That's not to mention that they regularly set records for most players simultaneously playing on a single server, or that they are ranked at the top on mmorpg.com for quite some time. It's an awesome model, and something I would love to see other companies strive to meet.

Have a look at Hero's Journey - an upcoming fantasy MMO that apparently will have even greater opportunities for customization:

http://www.play.net/hj/

http://www.kmtdesigns.com/hjfaq/index.php

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setView/screens /gameID/174/setStart/1

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion.cfm/load/forums/l oadforum/51/loadthread/37720/setstart/1/loadclass/ 35

love the screen shot of the official GOLD game just being spindles after spindles of cd-rw's (note they DID ship just run of the mill burnt cd rw's in a small box with no artwork, as the official game....)

BULLSHIT

Gamespot 8.2 "Great"

RPG Vault Final Fantasy XI is a well-made , evolutionary online world that doesn't present a lot in the way of innovation, but does present an extensive list of adapted and enhanced features that combine to offer deep, solid play. Perhaps the single most noteworthy element is storytelling, something for which Square Enix is renowned.

AVault Final Fantasy XI succeeds on so many levels.

GameSpy 4/5 Stars

MMORPG.com Tied for 5th highest rated MMORPG with a user score of 8.0. The highest rated score is only 8.4.

MMORPG.com has quite a few things from E3, including a review for Hero's Journey by Simutronics, which blew them away.

I personally feel http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/sort/rating/gam eID/0 represents the quality of mmorpg's better then other sources i have seen.

But more people should know about it. 2 points I can make to get interest going:

1: $10 lifetime membership, no monthly fee. (There is an optional monthly fee plan, not required)

2: Nicest MMO world community I've ever been a part of.

Seriously, just try it. Infact, get the extended trial here.

I've played every MMORPG since Everquest

*EVERY* MMORPG? Meridian 69? ATITD? Progress Quest? Saga of Ryzom? Planetside? Puzzle Pirates? EVE Online? Horizons? Lineage? Ragnarok Online? Phantasy Star Online? The Sims Online? Or just the biggies: EQ, UO, DAOC, AC, SW, COY, FF11 and AO?

In any case, there are a lot of MMORPGs out there, I don't know how you had the time to play *ALL* of them.

(P.S. I know this is a troll, but overexaggeration is one of my pet peeves. That and people who say "They should do this...They are going to do that...." WHO IS THEY?!?!?!)

Here's a game who's graphics will blow you away and settle this once and for all, Java can be used when performance is REALLY needed. BEHOLD! The ultimate 3D java MMORPG game, Runescape! Screenshots here.

:P

Hardware and driver compatibility. Nvidia chipset-based motherboards and ATi-based video cards do not play nice together. Not Linux's fault, but Nvidia's and ATi's. I got my motherboard and video card playing nice together (sort of), but the framerate was poor and as a result unplayable (compared to Windows, think 15-20 fps versus 30-35 fps).

The other problem is the lack of wide-spread adoption of Linux by game developers/companies. Yes, I know Unreal Tournament [200x] as well as many other games run on Linux. My main concern is MMOs. As is, most MMO companies only develop for Windows. I've dabbled with Wine to play games, but it isn't compatible with the latest advances. MMOs are (usually) constantly being updated.

And yes, I've tried many times on many occasions. After hours of trying to get Linux working the way I wanted, I got frustrated, and decided to dump it for Windows. This is one other thing that keeps others from switching to Linux: ease-of-use. If I had more time to spare, I'm sure I could get it work how I want, but time is precious to most. 5 years ago when I had no committments (wife, baby, full-time job), and wasting away 24 hours a day in front of the glowing orb of computation, I could've done it, would've done it. As is, I can't.

List of MMORPGs

May want to check that out before you say we are not being flooded by MMORPGs. Just because most are bad and you never hear about them, doesn't mean they are not there.

The more that I've been reading /. lately, the more it seems that Game Myth aka Risk Your Life has the right way to go about it (at least in terms of the various games that I've been looking at). Although the English engine is currently in development, it seems to be the solution that a lot of pvp type MMORPG players are looking for. It is a persistent world with character development and learned skills and such, but the combat (spell, ranged, and melee) is all FPS like. Meaning you have to pick and choose which abilties you want to learn as you 'level'. It really is a neat-o system.
Its too bad that