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Last time I checked, this company also makes a tidy profit.

The benefits can be seen in less obvious ways, too: MMPORGs seem to be making money for at least one company I can think of. Not to mention the impact had on software companies, who can now release beta software on a human-scale cycle, and trivially manage patching and upgrades for all their customers via the Internet.

I think the rule of thumb is that companies who use the Internet in support of (or as an extension of) a well-established business with a proven model are doing quite well, thank you very much.

Well in short the EverQuest engine as it stands now sucks. Modern MMO type games like DAOC are alot faster, have larger environments and generaly load faster. They have also released 3 expantions, the last one with an upgraded rendering engine. Too bad it's brutaly slow on my 1.2 Ghz Athlon at 800x600 and DAOC runs very quickly at 1280x1024 on the same system. But to be fair it looks great, in the new areas the old places still look the same. So there's a lack of consistancy in the world as it stands and that's only going to get worse if they just keep tacking addons on. They've needed a proper rewrite for ages, and after looking at the screenshots for Vernat's other big name venture Star Wars Galaxies I can't help but think it's going to be worth it.

...reminds me of the ShowEQ project, months ago, feverishly releasing fixes for changes made by Verant. Not all of those (if any) were intentional, though.

Somebody obviously hasn't learned that releasing a buggy product receives BAD REVIEWS and NEGATIVE FEEDBACK! Censoring that feedback isn't going to change the quality of the game.

If there was more time spent improving the game rather than trying to engineer public opinion, they wouldn't have this problem.

At least one or two people here avoided AO, UO and EQ as the sole topic in their post... Only one mention of the original MMOG, MUDs (and related) type text-games (of which, one commercial venture done by Simu remains and at least one of their games (Dragon Realms) has an average population of 800 players (lows around 450, highs well over 2000))

Granted, those games mentioned frequently have received the greatest number of players (even in Beta stages, for AO). I just thought I'd mention a few places where I see MMO-type games really taking off. First, I think Verant's other works, such as Sovereign should be considered instead of just EQ. It looks to be an excellent game in both MMO and RTS catagories. The idea of an RTS where once you've won an area, you can continue to resource in that region to fund later attacks is good (though I think it has been done somewhat in games like Earth 2150)... As is the idea of having an entire planet to fight over rather than a small chunk of ground. Without any map edges to build against, players will finally need to surround their entire base with defenses rather than only 2 sides. Also coming from Verant (and Sony), Planetside should be a good extension of games like Tribes. Where Tribes had some nice versions of games (like Capture and Hold) where out-lying base buildings could hold a tactical advcantage, generally there was little in terms of being able to seriously gain or lose ground. The front-line was in the middle, and it stayed there. With a game like Planetside, you have the capability (I don't know if this will occur, mind you) of having a moving front. One of the previous games to do something similar to this was Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, where they had a server set up that allowed the games which were played to alter a more global map. The matches were just standard battles, but what was happening in theory was that each win allowed the player's side to gain or retain a section of land. Enough wins on one side claimed that territory and moved the fight forward into the next. Eventually one team would conquer the planet and the map would be reset.

The expanded nature of these games is a real improvement, IMHO. Instead of having a meaningless battle on planet X over a flag (ok, I'm willing to go further and say that the flag represents data or materials or some other tactical advantage, but the battle remains meaningless as there is no tangible benefit to winning in the subsequent match) the players will be able to achieve a victory that (hopefully) will have other benefits to aid them in later attacks. If a few good commanders appear in Planetside who happen to know where various useful buildings are, coordinated assaults on outposts would be possible, lending to the atmosphere and frankly to the fun factor in the game.

Of course, if winning a section of land in Planetside has no benefit other than more land to retreat over, I'd say it probably isn't worth the effort of making the game function in a MMO fashion... I'd even put forward small benefits gained, like capturing a vehicle factory allows for faster or better or even just more available vehicles for your team would be good enough.

(This is mainly in response to anothr comment) As for Neverwinter Nights being MMO... That's debatable. Some might say something like, "Massively Multiplayer should mean more than a standard Multiplayer. If NWN is MMO, then so is Tribes..." Almost. Tribes allows for an equal number of players on a given server (I believe NWN is currently slated for a maximum of 64 players per server). However, the NWN servers can be linked via portals, which would allow for a set of 10 servers so linked to handle 640 clients. The other complaint leveled is in regards to a persistant world. Nothing in MMO says persistant, though a good NWN server should be able to maintain itself for several months if so desired.

WW2 Online sounded like a good idea gone wrong. Personally, I wouldn't have played it, but I can see how it might've been a good game. Especially if they'd included hooks for other games to be linked in, such that you could have an FPS client, a commander client (available to those who've risen far enough in rank, so only a few get the priveldge is they want it) plotting out attack routes for the FPS people, a flight simulator so you could allow bomber runs and fighter-plane pilots to join in, and a few tanks and such (which I believe were included)... things to take all the fighting aspects and include them.

The only other game I know of in the works that looks interesting is Star Wars: Galaxies... but not for the RPG aspect. Instead, I'm looking at the propsed Space Expansion, which is the only genre I feel is seriously missing from the current MMO arena. A good MMO Space-Sim would be a lot of fun, I think... Having the capability of being a trader, a fighter pilot, a gunner or maybe even a capital ship commander would lend itself to some great gaming opportunities. Especially if space was limited to play-bubbles (here I'm thinking of something like Wing Commander or maybe Terminus, where you might be able to range over a single solar-system in your ship, but interstellar travel would be limited to jump-points) it could be an excellent strategic game as well as a fun Space Sim. Having blockades and blockade runners alone would be something neat...

I think I'll cut this short here and not go on to mention the plethora of other MMOGs that have been announced. I've covered those genres where I think expansion into the MMO arena will be good. I don't think many other game types will be able to make the switch (Sim City Online? Pharoah Online? Maybe some trading or something...)


~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"

At least one or two people here avoided AO, UO and EQ as the sole topic in their post... Only one mention of the original MMOG, MUDs (and related) type text-games (of which, one commercial venture done by Simu remains and at least one of their games (Dragon Realms) has an average population of 800 players (lows around 450, highs well over 2000))

Granted, those games mentioned frequently have received the greatest number of players (even in Beta stages, for AO). I just thought I'd mention a few places where I see MMO-type games really taking off. First, I think Verant's other works, such as Sovereign should be considered instead of just EQ. It looks to be an excellent game in both MMO and RTS catagories. The idea of an RTS where once you've won an area, you can continue to resource in that region to fund later attacks is good (though I think it has been done somewhat in games like Earth 2150)... As is the idea of having an entire planet to fight over rather than a small chunk of ground. Without any map edges to build against, players will finally need to surround their entire base with defenses rather than only 2 sides. Also coming from Verant (and Sony), Planetside should be a good extension of games like Tribes. Where Tribes had some nice versions of games (like Capture and Hold) where out-lying base buildings could hold a tactical advcantage, generally there was little in terms of being able to seriously gain or lose ground. The front-line was in the middle, and it stayed there. With a game like Planetside, you have the capability (I don't know if this will occur, mind you) of having a moving front. One of the previous games to do something similar to this was Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, where they had a server set up that allowed the games which were played to alter a more global map. The matches were just standard battles, but what was happening in theory was that each win allowed the player's side to gain or retain a section of land. Enough wins on one side claimed that territory and moved the fight forward into the next. Eventually one team would conquer the planet and the map would be reset.

The expanded nature of these games is a real improvement, IMHO. Instead of having a meaningless battle on planet X over a flag (ok, I'm willing to go further and say that the flag represents data or materials or some other tactical advantage, but the battle remains meaningless as there is no tangible benefit to winning in the subsequent match) the players will be able to achieve a victory that (hopefully) will have other benefits to aid them in later attacks. If a few good commanders appear in Planetside who happen to know where various useful buildings are, coordinated assaults on outposts would be possible, lending to the atmosphere and frankly to the fun factor in the game.

Of course, if winning a section of land in Planetside has no benefit other than more land to retreat over, I'd say it probably isn't worth the effort of making the game function in a MMO fashion... I'd even put forward small benefits gained, like capturing a vehicle factory allows for faster or better or even just more available vehicles for your team would be good enough.

(This is mainly in response to anothr comment) As for Neverwinter Nights being MMO... That's debatable. Some might say something like, "Massively Multiplayer should mean more than a standard Multiplayer. If NWN is MMO, then so is Tribes..." Almost. Tribes allows for an equal number of players on a given server (I believe NWN is currently slated for a maximum of 64 players per server). However, the NWN servers can be linked via portals, which would allow for a set of 10 servers so linked to handle 640 clients. The other complaint leveled is in regards to a persistant world. Nothing in MMO says persistant, though a good NWN server should be able to maintain itself for several months if so desired.

WW2 Online sounded like a good idea gone wrong. Personally, I wouldn't have played it, but I can see how it might've been a good game. Especially if they'd included hooks for other games to be linked in, such that you could have an FPS client, a commander client (available to those who've risen far enough in rank, so only a few get the priveldge is they want it) plotting out attack routes for the FPS people, a flight simulator so you could allow bomber runs and fighter-plane pilots to join in, and a few tanks and such (which I believe were included)... things to take all the fighting aspects and include them.

The only other game I know of in the works that looks interesting is Star Wars: Galaxies... but not for the RPG aspect. Instead, I'm looking at the propsed Space Expansion, which is the only genre I feel is seriously missing from the current MMO arena. A good MMO Space-Sim would be a lot of fun, I think... Having the capability of being a trader, a fighter pilot, a gunner or maybe even a capital ship commander would lend itself to some great gaming opportunities. Especially if space was limited to play-bubbles (here I'm thinking of something like Wing Commander or maybe Terminus, where you might be able to range over a single solar-system in your ship, but interstellar travel would be limited to jump-points) it could be an excellent strategic game as well as a fun Space Sim. Having blockades and blockade runners alone would be something neat...

I think I'll cut this short here and not go on to mention the plethora of other MMOGs that have been announced. I've covered those genres where I think expansion into the MMO arena will be good. I don't think many other game types will be able to make the switch (Sim City Online? Pharoah Online? Maybe some trading or something...)


~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
"Veni; Vidi; Vi C++"

" Role play is dead. "


47.5% Slashdot Pure(52.5% Corrupt)

You are right about Europe. As far as I remember about Austria, their laws specifically differ from the rest of Europe. It should be checked out by professional lawyers, not by us.
They still could change their protocols to some extent, though.

BioWare is going to be creating a Single/net-Multi Player RPG, I assume (No time to read the links), and Verant Interactive, makers of EverQuest, are making a MMORPG version, which I can't wait for.

Sounds like Lucas has a good revenue stream lined up for the next couple of years... (as if the already released SW games and movies, and t-shirts, etc etc etc didn't already bring him enough cash)

I wonder if this effects the deal LucasArts made with Sony/Verant, makers of EverQueer, to do something similar. Here's the press release.

I run a fairly large EverQuest-related humor site, so I've been following this issue since it started (even if only to make fun of it).

What's happening here is a thorny problem where individual "privacy" headbutts with everyone's best interests.

A quick background for those not in the know, Verant Interactive produces and maintains EverQuest, a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game. Thousands of players connect to Verant-administered servers and play alongside other players in a persistent world. It's the second major-market title in the MMORPG genre started by Ultima Online.

The way these games work is centralized servers store all the state information about the virtual world. To be general, nothing is stored client-side. This is required, because unlike games like Quake, the world is persistent. An early incarnation of this type of game was Diablo. The main difference between the newer games (UO and EQ) and Diablo is that with Diablo, all your character information was stored client-side. This became a major problem for the game, as it was only a matter of time before the file formats were reverse-engineered and people started modifying their characters to be super-powered.

By storing the information server-side, this type of cheating is avoided. No matter what you do, there will always be people who want to cheat, and if the information is stored server-side, people will try to exploit the server to cheat, or will "enhance" their client software in order to give them an unfair advantage in the game. Ultima Online has had a long history of dealing with this type of problem. Many security weaknesses in the UO servers were discovered (and fixed), but at the same time, these weaknesses were exploited by people, most often to do devestating things to other players of the game.

Recently, EQ has had the same things happening to it. A program known as "Show-EQ" has been around for quite some time, which simply gives a player an unfair advantage in the game. Verant has dealt with this in a subtle manner, changing their client/server data stream every so often to set back development of the utility.

In the past couple weeks, other programs for EQ have begun to pop up, with more nefarious purposes. The EverQuest servers have been crashed on more than one occasion by these programs. This is what brought Verant to suggesting drive-scanning. It's one thing if someone is just cheating, but it's another thing completely if they're maliciously trying to crash the game.

They took their first countermeasures not too long ago, by adding a feature to the client software that scans your Windows task list and looks for these "external utilities". If it finds one, it flips a "I'm a cheater" flag on your account and you end up with a cancelled EQ account.

They proposed to extend their search to the hard drive, to see if any of these programs even exist on your system... and this is where people started to get upset.

Verant has been very open and forthcoming about the proposed changes, keeping active discussions regarding the issue on the various websites dedicated to EverQuest, offering reasoning and explantions of the scanning process, and they even required all users to answer a poll question regarding the issue on login to the game (which turned up 80%+ in favor of the scanning).

Even with the overwhelming support of the scanning by their playerbase, they responsibly decided to back down on the issue.

Now granted, what they suggested could be a huge tool for abuse and privacy intrusion, but they did not try to "sneak" it past their users in any form. What they were proposing was nothing compared to some of the things that people thought they were planning on doing (there have been some heated arguments about it the past few days).

In short, its not really that they intended to intrude on people's privacy, but that they were seeking to increase the quality of their service and actually have a way to enforce their "no cheating" rules.

Verant should be commended on their responsible handling of this entire incident, not trashed in the court of public opinion based on reports that only tell half the story, like the one posted here on Slashdot.

Far be it from me to start a flamewar, but it seems to me that you might be experiencing EQ burnout and therefore giving EverQuest a harsh representation.

My experience with EverQuest has been pretty positive. I started beta testing for the game a little bit over a year ago and continued to play it past the release for six months. During that time, I played a variety of characters up to level 20.

If you yourself played EQ long enough to build up a 50th level (highest level possible for you people who don't play the game) and 25th level character, then something must have brought you back to the game night after night.

Both the best and worst part about EverQuest is its addictiveness. It's been called "EverCrack", a name that suits it pretty well. I remember when I was in the high point of my addiction cycle I would stay up into the wee hours of the morning questing with friends. March 16th was EverQuest's one year anniversary and according to EQ Vault, they hit their 200,000 active subscribers mark. Obviously, despite all the people who have quit the game to its negative aspects (camping, large time investment, ebay item farmers), a large number still remain faithful to the game.

In my opinion, Verant Interactive is the best developer of massively multiplayer online games currently out there. EverQuest easily dominates over its competition. While Ultima Online was created first and Asheron's Call offers some innovative features, both lack the customer service and addictive quality that make a truly good online game stand out. One of the reasons I quit EQ was to beta test for Asheron's Call, which I highly regret doing now. Despite being the newest online RPG on the market, the game was poorly developed and rushed prematurely to meet the holiday season. How typical of M$. However, Verant's game design and customer policies allow me to rank it high amongst game developers, almost equaling Blizzard. My advice to all you Star Wars fanatics out there is to keep your eye out for news of when Verant will begin accepting applicants for their beta test and book your spot.

On a side note, The Ruins of Kunark, a expansion to EverQuest is due to be release next month. I'm planning on buying it to begin my relaunching into the world of Norrath.

I thank you for your sweetly faked attention.
~ Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake