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MMOG Subscription Analysis Provides New Insights
Thanks to jer0 for pointing to SirBruce's updated MMOG Subscription Growth analysis page, which tries to "chart the trend in active subscriptions" for major MMO titles using public and private data. This "major revision" has the "chart separated into three tiers" dependent on subscription size, and shows Lineage as the worldwide MMO leader at "just under 2.7 million" (though this may be reliant on bulk 'PC Baang' subscriptions in countries such as South Korea, and the game has "only 7,000 [subscribers] in the United States.") Other notable entries include City Of Heroes ("surpassed 180,000 subscribers... proof that a well-executed MMOG can still garner substantial numbers even in the current competitive climate"), and the also recently launched, but less successful Horizons ("After peaking at around 35,000 subscribers, they have since fallen to somewhere between 20,000 and 25,000 subscribers.")
I consider myself up-to-date on gaming news, but I've never even heard of Horizons. Is it good? I'm interested in trying it out. Has anyone on here played it, and if so, what do you think of it?
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
graph #3 reports 100k Runescape "active subscribers" in Jul 04. Either I'm hugely underestimating how many people pay for Runescape, or they're counting _all_ accounts, of which the majority are neither 'subscribers' or 'active.'
But I'm kinda interested in the Matrix online game.
I'm wondering how they will incorporate bullettime into the online/realtime arena.
I'm afraid it will suck though, but if it's cool, that will be the first online game I will pay a subscription for.
For me the other online MMOPROPRFPRFRPGR's are too boring in the long run.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
By requiring a paid subscription, you virtually eliminate the industry-standard scapegoat of "piracy" when your game fails...
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
does anyone here play any of those Asian based MMORPG's? I'm just curious, do they have enough english-speaking players or english language servers so that playing doesn't become a chore of finding something you can understand??
Horizons had some nice ideas but the implementation was horrible. The game felt incredibly lifeless and boring.
There were no equipment drops as far as I was aware. Only items that could be used by crafters to create equipment.
The combat was extremely boring and had little to keep anyone interested.
The only interesting things was the extensive crafting system but it wasn't enough to keep this game from dying a slow death.
They keep saying how it's the biggest thing in the world, but I've tried it...it sucks. And if this is the biggest thing in the world, then the world needs a reality check. I mean, it's really totally awfull.
Or is it one of those things that "it's world famous in Korea...and Korea is the center of the universe" kind of thing? I know, Korea has more people online per capita than the US, but still, do they have to subjected to such a sucky game? Someone move a EQ server into Korea or something. Those poor poor people!
This shows that being the most popular certainly doesn't mean the best!
"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it." - John Lennon.
Horizons has a really good crafting system and one of the best UIs I've seen. It has some major flaws though. Really bad performance on ATI cards and a lack of high level content for example. I hear they are getting better on the content though. It has a 7 day free trial, so if you like crafting or being a dragon give it a go. http://www.istaria.com/
I played that once a long time ago. Very cool.
Do not touch -Willie
There's a free trial if you want to try it (www.istaria.com), but Horizons has a ... colorful history.
Since a corporate takeover from the inside by David Bowman (of Asheron's Call fame, who was fired for "agressive ladder-climbing"), the game underwent an extreme redesign, and hasn't been the same since.
It made its retail debut around December of this year, still very much in beta, for which it received sound derision. The bugs were incredible. The game was a flop
Artifact Entertainment filed for bankruptcy a few months ago, and last month handed pink slips to half its developer staff. This seemed aimed at making the game a viable target for a buyout, but nothing has happened as yet.
David Bowman ran AE and Horizons into the ground. All in all, I wouldn't play an online game with no future. Subscription numbers are dropping steadily every month. Horizons is on its deathbed, waiting to die.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Most of the people are the same. Jumping from one addiction to the next. See, you thought Everquest wasn't very addictive, so you took that first hit...er... month for free. Then when you got into that second month, they asked for money. Soon that got expensive, so you switched from crac...errr... Everquest to cocai.... errr... city of heros. Its a little cheaper to pay for, but the high you get is a little better.
Yes, I feel that in 10 years we will see a sharp decline of subscribers from ALL MMOGs due to OD'ing or parents kicking their 30 year old kids out of the house and force them to get jobs.
Seriously, though, I don't get it from the players perspective. You pay $30-$50 a shot to BUY the game and the first month. Then you pay $10 a month to play. You, then, PAY (?!?!?) for major updates to the system (cleverly named 'expansions')???
What does that $10 go to? Just playing on the servers?
The other sad thing is that the games aren't fun to a casual gamer. You have to be a teenager or college kid without any outside distractions to do well in these games. Once you are good enough, its your duty to be an ass to all casual gamers so they eventually quit and never play again.
What MMOG really need is a 'death' time. You 'age' in the game, and once you hit like 60 you die. That way kids that play the game 8+ hours a day can start at level 16 and work to super massive skills, but the casual gamer can start at 30 when a few skills have been mastered and they can play without fear of some child named 1337 d00d smacking them around and being an ass.
</rant>
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Horizons was something that I watched for a few years. The original premise and descriptions were really cool but sometimes about a year ago, maybe, they started releasing real information and it wasn't going to be anywhere near their ideals. I never tried it.
significant attention to them
after playing SWG for a few months and getting tired of paying for it, I tried some free MMORPGs. There's a list of some here.
It will be interesting to see how free MMORPGs in the future such as Guild Wars (http://www.guildwars.com/) do. For me, I personally refuse to pay 10 or so bucks a month when I don't have the time to commit to such a game.
I for one don't mind paying 50-80 bucks for an online game. But I have a problem paying the full price for a game in addition to a monthly subscription. Sure it's a great business model for the game industry however it's not a good bargain for me as the consumer.
I never understood that MMO crafting thing. Why craft fake stuff? If I want to craft something, I'll do that in real life.
It's decent. Pretty big world, good crafting system, lots of stuff to kill. There is a market for used items. Lots of races to play as, including Dragons which have thier own crafting system. Of course I havn't played it since the beta.
Technoli
Hence all this is just a shouting/boasting game depending on which side of the coin you are. Too many of these companies do not publish numbers and I don't believe the old rule of 5xpeak online is really relevant much.
Take Horizons, their subscriber base in the US is probably less than 10K, but that is in essence a seperate game from the European operations under GN. Artifact Entertainment is in Chapter 11 as we type, they have a big show down with their provider at the end of the month, a provider whom they basically defrauded for many months. Their bankruptcy documents provided a lot of insight into these groups.
As for AC/AC2. Who knows, they won't tell as their numbers have never been good. A company proud of its numbers will tell you. A company with something to hide from players and investors tells a whole different story.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
what proportion of their subscribers are griefers?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
If you haven't tried the A Tale in the Desert Beta you really should.
It's just hard to describe.
http://www.atitd.net/ Current - Non Beta version
http://www.atitd2.com/ Beta Version
http://www.atitd.info/ Info on the game
In the game: Karsus
There is no standard for the data. For example, Star Wars Galaxies is in the habit of reporting the total number of unique numbers in their database. So everybody who downloads a free trial counts as "a new subscriber"
Finally, we have the biggest laugh of them all. "...proof that a well-executed MMOG can still garner substantial numbers even in the current competitive climate." The problem is that "substantial numbers" does not equal success. City of Heroes has been out for about 3 months. Most of the people currently playing CoH are still in the MMORPG "honeymoon" phase where everything is new, the end-game content is still unexplored, and people are trying out new ideas and new play styles. A year from now, we'll see if CoH is still succeeding.
The same goes for World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, and whatever new games come out. The only measure of a game's success is staying power.
Bowman stole the company right out from David Allen (founder of Artifact Entertainment and Pharaoh Productions) and then had the gall to get Allen fired. Allen came up with the original idea for Horizons, and when he left, the new AE mashed and changed it so much, it was no longer the same game. It has about all the similarities that the book series I, Robot has with the movie. David Allen has since shut down Pharaoh Productions and left the game development industry in disgust.
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
played it for like an hour in the beta, couldnt figure out how to do basic things (too sharp learning curve on the interface) deleted it.
planetside was fun if you like a sort of FPS/RPG type massive multiplayer game.
1 - all info on each game is provided by the game maker, so take it with a grain of salt.
;) But I doubt the makers would provide that data.
2 - the stats don't differentiate between "players" and "accounts". So a single account with 3 characters may show up as 3.
3 - the stats don't differentiate between active accounts and inactive accounts.
4 - the lineage figures are crap as massive bulk of them come from South Korean cybercafes. It's noted that South Korea apparently doesn't get many Japanese import games, thus it figures that Lineage may have a disproportionately high user base there.
A much better chart would be the server population figures for these games
------- "From bored to fanboy in 3.8 asian girls" ----------
City of Heroes is fun, and I commend them for doing something different when too many people are just trying to be Everquest.
It goes to show that there's a lot of different things that attract different people; CoH was my first MMO, despite being a long-time MUDder who wrote 100,000 lines of code to expand the Diku/ROM base for a mud I helped make. (I do have an SWG box still gathering dust that I'll use sooner or later)
I think there's two concepts that are waiting to make a lot of money:
(1) MMORPG for people with money. People are desperate to target the $10-15 range. But I think there's a substantial set of subscribers who would pay a lot more for better service. I think the MMO to exploit this will be two tiered. Much like EQ's premium service, but far more so. It will be at least $75/mo -- or possibly not flat rate. It may be $50/mo + $2/hr or something. I know a lot of players are price sensitive, but I paid $3/hr on weekends to get onto compuserve and move an asterick around in a dungeon at 300 baud. And $2/hr doesn't mean squat to me, and if I can get a party of 6 into some real "DM-controlled" sort of adventures at $2/hr, I'm on it. I'd probably want some perks, but it could be very profitable. I know a lot of people who would do the same.
(2) Skill-based play. By which I mean reflexes. I'm a broken record on this topic, sure; but MMOs are "the same". One needs to implement semi-twitch gameplay... perhaps a Q3 style play, with a level of auto-aim that decreases with level. (or simply easier-to-hit monsters) I don't want to completely twitch-base it, I think anyone should be able to fight and win (at least at lower levels), but I think there should be an in-game effect of "skill". Please don't mention planetside; I still want level progression; I still want it to be playable by people who don't have the reflexes. I just want those that do to get an edge for them.
<rant>
On another note, I'd like to pre-emptively predict the utter failure of Dungeons and Dragons Online. They were SURE to get a subscription out of me, until I read an interview, and discover they are MANGLING the D&D ruleset, one of the best things about it... doing things like allowing a +5 attack bonus to let you "perform 5-hit combos with the proper key sequence". What? Are these crack-monkeys making D&D Online or Street Fighter II Online?
</rant>
I've been looking this study over and I don't see any documentation for any of his facts. Granted this isn't the New York Times or the Washington Post but whenever I need to provide a report or an article I need to site my references, been that way ever since 6th grade. Why should he be held to any other standard though if he expects us to take his work seriously?
Take for instance his SWG numbers. SOE does not release their population numbers at all, so if they didn't want people to know their numbers why would they tell him as a secret source and not just release that information publically? And the only guess we have is between 200-300k subscribers based on a quote from one of the suits at SOE. A range of roughly 1/3 of the possible total volume can not be taken as accurate. Which makes me wonder how he was able to determine subscription drops +-15k when the only number we have is between 200k and 300k.
Yeah, it's nice he spent the effort to plot this stuff out, but it should really only be looked at as an analysis of what he thinks their subscription numbers are when he fails to provide any sort of sources or documented references. Quite frankly, his guess is as good as mine on most of these games regarding where their subscription numbers are. As a SWG player I can say It certainly appears there are more people playing now compared to six months ago, but that could just by my server(Bloodfin) seeing a population spike while others fall. Not enough for me to make a conclusive argument one way or the other on their total subscriber numbers.
Sorry for the AC post, moderators have been kind of flaky lately and don't want to get burned as a troll for raising a valid concern.
I actually just registered for Second Life last night. It's kinda interesting. I don't think it qualifies as a conventional "roleplaying" game, although you do have an avatar in a massive multiplayer online world, and you can configure how you look and amass all sorts of objects in an inventory... as well as virtual money. But there's no "experience", per se.
;)
One aspect that may definitely disqualify it as a MMORPG for sure, is that it actually has women in it.
Second Life has a scripting language (C++-based) and basically allows anyone to create freeform objects with behaviors and properties. The economic model is interesting. You can do things like create an automated dispenser which charges people to create copies of objects you have created. You can also own virtual real estate.
Someone has created an adventure-within-a-world in it that tracks experience. I haven't checked it out yet, but it sounds interesting. You have to "buy" an Adventurer's Pack which gives you all the relevant objects.
So I don't know if it counts. What do you think?
My name in it is Roark Spinnaker, in the event you run into me while I'm flying around in it. I haven't decided yet if I will stay after the free week trial is over.
Hehehehehehe.
I just watched an episode of G4TechTV's "Icons "profiling Will Wright and it was before the full launch of The Sims Online. Someone said something like "it could do well, or fall flat on its face."
Boy did it ever fall flat on its face.
They will just force you to run it at a resolution of 65536 x 49152 with 16x antialiasing, and there, you got it, bullet time on your PC.
This unique feature gives real strategic depth to an FPS game, because you can think a minute for every move.
And it will contain a programmable backdoor so that you feel how it is to be in the Matrix when it is hacked.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I've been toying around with writing me own games for a bit now, and I've been thinking about writing them much longer than that. And I've gotten into no small number of arguments on various IRC #gamedev channels about MMORPG's in particular lately.
Though I don't claim that it's foolproof or that it's guaranteed sucess, I don't think it's a guaranteed failure either. Here is my idea:
A smaller, more focused MMORPG, perhaps even the "massive" part needs to be removed. Target subscription is 500-1500 subscribers, with a set upper limit of probably 1500. Target subscription fee $50 a month (read on before you just dismiss everything outright). Before anyone explodes over that rate, consider that for every other product, there are people interested in paying a premium for just about anything. (Also consider that the hardcore gamer has a bigger game budget than that anyway... but will he devote so much of it to this?)
Not sure about the world itself, but I will admit that it probably has to be either a starwar'ish space thing, or medivieval fantasy (dragons, elves). If you wanted to play, you'd submit an application, and assuming it's not all booked up, you'd be given a choice of up to 2 dozen characters to play, complete with biography summaries of those (and if they were completely unsuitable... wait another day, while we find some other choices for you). I'd also try to weed out all the obnoxious players, too, for that matter. People who want to play in character are important, and if you chalked up more than a few infractions (talking about monday night football in game, using too much modern slang, etc) I'd probably end up canceling the subscription.
Player death would be permanent (choose another character). There would be skill levels, but this isn't pacman and they aren't power pellets (numbers hidden from the player). There would be a true storyline/plot going on, but it's up to the players what happens with it (will the evil lord dominate the known world, blah blah). Also (and I'm still conceptualizing what the tools would have to be to allow this) the DM's in the game would work hard to come up with alot of subplots for players, while encouraging players to not only maintain the plots, but invent/help out/ grow them.
For instance, let's take a very boring character that no one would choose to play. An owner of a small bookshop in the village that passes for a major city in the kingdom. One day walking to the market, a DM uses his "godlike" powers to put a old hag in his path, in a way that he can't help but walk into her, knock her down. She casts a curse, which the player might not even choose to believe (I tend to go for the flavor of story where magic is truly rare, though this world may or may not be that way). That DM flags that player, so that if another DM takes over, they can keep a fairly close watch on him. For the next week of play, whenever he logs in, bad (but not really evil) things happen to the character. Keeps stepping in horse turds, or if he walks past a candle, his head catches on fire (though not allowing it to do significant damage). Let the player decide how to handle it. Will the player seek someone out to reverse it? Will he seek out the old hag and apologize? I don't know.
And I could cook up a few dozen other subplots, for this *boring* character. Town guards extorting protection from him (which is actually an intersecting plot for another character I use an example). Some evil creepy stranger asks you to track down a rare book. Etc.
Among other things, each player would be flagged as to what subplots had been used with him, and maybe the software should even keep track (suggest?) of possible subplots. With at most 300 simultaneous players, it just might be possible, if everything were automated well for the DM. (They'd have to be good typists though, to keep up with everyone, talking through so many NPCs).
Anyone care to comment on how stupid all of this is?
Meh, my favorite is still Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates. It's a free download, runs on any platform that runs Java, it has skill-based gameplay and a friendly community. Of course if you're a PHAT LEWT whore who enjoys crapping your pants so that you don't miss a mob it's probably not for you. It's better suited to more casual players.
To me they really are not that entertaining. I can understand every once and awhile playing a store bought game, but in order to do well, you have to dedicate a sizeable ammount of time to character bulding. Sorry, its just not for me.
Tyler: You don't know where ive been, Lou. YOU DONT KNOW WHERE IVE BEEN!!
RPGs arent necessarily my bag in the first place. However, I'll pay to play the first MMOFPS. Or a MMOGTA, massively multiplayer online grand theft auto! Get to work, Rockstar.
I'll assume you never heard of (The now defunct) 10Six. It was an MMO FPS with RTS aspects. Your only opponents were players, and their automated turrets/vehicles. An amazing amount of fun, hosted through the even more defunct Heat.net.
Also, PlanetSide is pretty much a MMOFPS. Likewise with WWIIO. I can't claim to make a solid recomendation on either, but I'm sure someone could.
--LordPixie
I'm working on next month's Oscar nominations. Any preference?
CIGARETTE-SMOKING MAN:
I couldn't care less. What I don't want to see is the Bills winning the Super Bowl. As long as I'm alive, that doesn't happen.
JONES:
That'll be tough, sir. Buffalo wants it bad.
CIGARETTE-SMOKING MAN:
So did the Soviets in '80.
JONES:
What're you saying? You rigged the Olympic hockey game?
CIGARETTE-SMOKING MAN:
What's the matter? Don't you believe in miracles?
LYDON:
The boss gave the Russian goaltender a pre-game good luck pat on the back... unseen novocaine needle on a bogus wedding ring. Goalie's a little slow on the stick side... four-three, home team.
So you make money with an MMORPG even if you have a game that's not very good. Horizon "only" has 20,000 or so subscribers but at around $12.95 a month they are pulling in around $250,000.00 a month. That's not too bad if your company isn't very big and it's really not that bad when you figure it doesn't take in to account the money you get from people purchasing the boxed game. Which itself is probably $30-$50. No wonder everyone and their mom is making an MMORPG. I guess the only problem would be the money drain that these things are on publishers before they get to market. It could take a couple of years for a good one and 3-5 years to make a great one (look at WoW or EQ2). But if you can get it published the odds are with you that you'll make some good money (just maybe not for very long).
I never understood that MMO killing thing. If I want to kill
monsters, I go hunting for spiders in my apartment, or track down
the bear that killed a local farmer's sheep.
The article complains about how the Legend stats completely dwarf the rest of the data in a linear graph. Doesn't this dataset just beg for a logarithmic presentation? This is like compairing populations of countries or any number of other scenarios where power laws apply.
Anyhow, the absurd comparisons of random untrustworthy data sources and the poor presentation just shows that this guy needs a good statistics teacher to whack him upside the head. I'm going to go read some Tufte.
It's something that can and will work - it's like EQ legends taken to the next level.
The trick is, it needs to piggyback on a successful service. You can't develop a game for 1500 people @ $50/mo. Even if you could provide the service at that rate (and I think $75/mo would be more likely, or $30 + a per hour rate), that still won't nearly cover development. But you can have a standard service and have some custom content on the premium service as well as route all content through a period of exclusivity there. The key is the GM/DM intervention to set up quests, make the world come to life, and do things like reward good roleplay.
It's a lot like what you'd get if you were able to join an NWN server with good content and a dedicated DM any time you wanted. I'd happily pay a *ton* of money for it... certainly $100/mo.
Its just may not seem that way as so many MMO's are tanking because they plain suck ass.
But the netx gen is about to kick in with some really intersting games that will do very well.
ie Guild Wars, EQ2, and World of Warcraft.
Although GW doesnt quite fit in with those due to its unique business model and it not being a full blown MMO, its still going to be a measuring stick for future MMO's in not only gameplay, but business model.
It is a long story but be aware that several people are in love with Allen as with a love that never got real - it stays a dream thing that never got corrected by daily live or reality so of course it would have been the best thing ever...s p?m=38875 6? m=39056 7
Read what Allen says, how unporfessional he slams AE and the people working there and from this judge his reliability. Many very talented people left AE early before Bowman got on board and they got it finally running from vaporware to a MMORPG. Why those people left? Because they couldn`t stand working with Allen who promised everything in forums the actual coder had no way to make real technically and at the same time wasted millions of dollars and not even got an alpha client done. So the board finally decided to throw him out of the company when he tried to throw Jones out of it.
Those following Allen still love praise him like being the deity on earth himself, they went crazy that he he go those two possibilities from AE in early 2001: work with Jones and the other member of AE or leave instead of behaving like the little king. Of course he couldn`t agree to that and left. And in best Allen manner those Allen-Lover now go to every board or forum to slam the company, Bowman and the game.
I think this as example for what they cause pretty much stands for itself:
http://www.tazoon.com/releaseForums/tm.a
Go and try the trial to see if you like it. Its the full game too after one week so you don`t need to buy the box.
And if you want some videos some player did ingame, watch this:
http://www.tazoon.com/releaseForums/tm.asp
I'm sure that some people will stumble across a niche game they like... but if they're giving it away, that probably says something about it.
I have to agree with parent's sentiment - ATITD2 (I just started playing the beta) is amazingly well done, but p0w3rg4m3rz will be bored within minutes...a plus as far as I'm concerned.
The game takes place in the Egypt of antiquity, and all players begin as peasants. The goal of the game is to build "the perfect society" according to the Seven Virtues. You learn how to build structures, and learn new skills at "state sponsored" schools dedicated to the Seven Virtues, eventually completing tests to move higher in the tech tree.
Three things I find of particular interest: cooperative learning (wherein citizens donate materials to Universities in order to unlock higher skills for *all* their region), the ability to teach skills to other players, and player-written laws.
If you don't like the way something works in the game, propose a law. If it has enough votes (and doesn't break game mechanics), the "law" is written into the game by the devs. And speaking of the devs, they seem *very* responsive to player ideas. You really get the sense that they care about the enjoyment factor.
I still play EQ and CoH, but ATITD2 looks like it will appeal to people who like a challenge, but want to go a different route.
- Jack
http://www.archonon.com/artifact.zip
Please mirror this item, it is 770k and I doubt my rented web server can handle the strain.
Contains publically available documents on their declaration in PDF format.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If I see a spider in my appartment, I run and scream like a girl. (Not too difficult cause I am a girl!) Then I go play my MMO, kill things, and pretend they're spiders in my appartment.
Back in my day it was MMPOLRPG, then MMPORPG, later MMORPG, and now MMOG? How long before it's just M? Just a thought...
A while back ( about 2 years ago) there was a MMORPG that was free to download and free to play. You just had to exchange your $$$$ for "credits". I played it for a half an hour, wasting 10$ and a half an hour shooting creatures and making my 10$ sword useless. It was a total rip off! Does anyone know if it is still around? Has anyone had similar experiences?
Tyler: You don't know where ive been, Lou. YOU DONT KNOW WHERE IVE BEEN!!
I am a girl!
Will you marry me?
how about the astronomical number of Progress Quest players??? there must be millions of people out there with Double-Wookie Mu-Fu Monks, or Enchanted Motorcycle Bastard-Lunatics... ;-)
Are you sure its not a good bargin? You correctly point out that buying Doom3 for $40 is cheaper than a years subscription to any MMOG. But the trick happens to be, are you going to play Doom3 for [i]an entire year[/i]?? Most stand alone games can be played through in less than a month and have zero replay value. MMOG have months on end play value.
When viewed that way games like Doom3 are worth $40 but no more of a value than playing City of Heroes month after month.
I would consider playing such a game. The problem with all the MMORPG of today is that too much is handled by the computer. You camp an orc village, monster spawns, you kill it, rinse, repeat. There needs to be DMs. MMORPG are just graphical chat rooms, where players shout "*DING* Lvl 58!". I wish there was a MMORPG where professional DMs ran adventures.
But your price tag is a little too steep. Perhaps paying 9.99 a month, while charging extra for adventures. Sunday afternoon, 3 hour adventure - Only $10.00. It would be cheaper than a movie, more entertaining than TV, and would require some thought. Now that I would pay for.
On another note, NPR had an interesting feature this morning on Dungeons and Dragons turns 30; where they discussed it's affect on computer gaming.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Lois, this isn't my Batman glass. - Peter
I'd pay more, up to $29.99/month, for a game in which player death is NOT permanent, so if I'm like killed in a car crash or something then the game company resurrects me (presumably so they keep getting my subcription monies...)
Talk about customer service!
Yet the sims online was a total failure. I think the reason for this is both simple and important.
What was the difference between The Sims and The Sims online?
The sims is a non-competitive game. It is totally impossible to compare the "performance" of one player vs another. The Sims as played by those still playing it is perhaps even a coorperative game. Most of the content is not created by Maxis/EA but by the users and shared by the users. I even think that people don't by the expansions for the extra content but for the extra capability it gives the community to create their own content.
Compare this with the sims online where there is no user created content and that introduces competition with other players. Plus now you gotta work for every credit in game (Many The Sims player use the moneycheat to get the money they need for their family). The Sims is a game where you let your creative juices flow. The Sims online is a grind to compete.
The Sims is also a good example because the sales figures show that the people that play it are not afraid to spend money. Even content downloaded is often paid for as most of the "free" content is hosted from a central site that requires a subscription to offset hosting costs. Add the constant expansions and The Sims player have easily spend hundreds of dollars.
Most MMO games seem obsessed with adding competition even PvP. Sure online combat games are popular but is it popular with the right crowd? Is it possible that people who like Counter Strike will never pay for a MMO version of it? After all why should they, they got their MMO free.
Paid for MMO games perhaps should aim at a different audience. An audience that prefers to have something more then just a grind to compete on a ladder game. Competition gives winners and losers. People are not going to pay money each month to loose to some 12 yr old kid that can afford to spend 24/7 learning every exploit in the game.
Game industry take note. With every leet counter stike kiddie you attract to your game you loose 10 people that just want to have fun.
I am not saying the a massive CS game won't work or sell. Just that at their is a different market as well. Second Life is an example of this.
What I would like to see in a game. No PvP except maybe in arena's with very clear rules and no cheats. A low lvl/irregular player is not worthless, read this as not making it compulsery to first grind to lvl X before you can do anything fun/usefull. Police that constantly checks for assholes ruining it for everyone else. Ban people that can't behave. 1 asshole can easily turn of dozens of players.
Growth would be nice too, you start as a kid with no skills and weak stats, then grow up and eventually grow old and then die. Give the option to retire and make the next character related to the first. A child an apprentice or similar. This neatly would avoid insanely high characters but a child would inherit money and some basic skills avoiding you to start a new low lvl character once you reached the XP ceiling.
But most importantly the game should still be fun when you remove the multi player element.
To many games now are very basic Diablo clones. Nothing wrong with diablo but not everyone likes it and there is no market for dozens like it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Given the bankrupcy filings I don't forsee them standing a chance in hell. 180k in monthly colocation and bandwidth? That's just plain negligent to your investors.
Check out Aardwolf if you want something to keep on one of your windows in Screen. Its also free.
A nifty MUD client to make your play sharper: TinyFugue
In case you were wondering, an aardwolf is an African hyena that eats termites. Why they called the game that, I'll never know...
Would rock... I even spent a year coding something like it.
http://pathofdreams.net/crazyj/roaming.html
There wasn't really a sentence there in the middle.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
I see the replies here are sort of one-sided, so as a current Horizons player I guess I should post my views. As good as any first post, I guess. =P
First off, let's deal with the "corporate takeover from the inside." There are two camps in regards to this. There are the Allen camp and the anti-Allen camp. David Allen was the CEO of Artifact Entertainment before the "takeover," and provided most of the early days ideas, concepts and designs.
The Allen camp claims it was a vicious, ruthless takeover, taking Allen's baby away from him and then ruining it.
The anti-Allen camp claims that Allen was fired due to incompetence and inability to make all his nice ideas into something real, and then the remaining staff created a game as best as they could with the funds and time left at their disposal.
Thing is - WE DON'T KNOW. We can never know either. All we have are Mr. Allen's biased articles and interviews and AE's official (and thus, naturally, biased) comments. In the end, this becomes a non-issue, since it's the game itself that is important, and not who made it and who not made it.
Also, AE did not file bankruptcy, they filed bankruptcy -protection-. The difference is huge, and the story is long. Details can be had www.istaria.com, for instance.
Alright, now for the game itself.
Horizons of today is a completely different game than Horizons of pre-launch, or even at launch. I'm not going to say much, in order to not come off as biased, but I will bring up a few of my personal likes.
Variety and freedom: Character development in Horizons is very flexible. You can decide to do anything at any moment. You can build complex characters with multiclassing, leveraging individual strengths of the different classes. For instance you can train up a warrior based class for the melee capability, and then switch over to a mage based class to get some magic support, then to a cleric based one to enhance your survivability. Since you can join any and all schools available in the game, you can do a lot of things. (Exception is dragons, more on that later.) Tired of killing things? Go join any of the crafting classes and start building weapons, armor, houses, food...
Construction: Unlike many games where you buy a premade house to put your things in, in Horizons you buy a Plot. The plot has a set size and any of three zonings which determine what structures can be put on the plot. (RCI - Sim City players will be familiar with those.) When you've placed a building on your plot only the basic scaffolding is actually placed. You then have to build it yourself. Putting in that final stone block on a building and seeing it complete is very gratifying.
Crafting vs fighting: While Horizons is very crafting centric, it's hardly a must. I know several players who have opted to ignore crafting in favour of more adventuring, and they are doing well. Likewise, if you don't like fighting you don't have to do that either - as long as you can outrun the occasional monster wandering around dangerous resource places.
Dragons: To my knowledge, Horizons is the only current MMORPG that allows players to play as dragons. Playing as a dragon is a -very- different experience to any other race.
Community: Due to how Horizons plays, it tends to attract social people, or "team players." In no other game have I met a community so helpful, kind and cooperative as in Horizons.
In the end, Horizons is not for everyone. It is a niche game, and everyone knows it. Chances are it might be for you. In fact, you know what? Don't listen to me. Don't listen to what anyone else says about this game either. Go download the trial and play the game to get your own perception. It won't cost you more than your time and some bandwidth. If you don't like it, fine, leave it. If you like it, a winner is you! I will give you one advice, however. Don't be afraid to join the community. Ask for help, trade, just plain chat. The communication inte
That almost sounds like we're going to see "Horizons 3000AD" soon...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Go fetch small piece of natural resource X.
Go fetch small piece of natural resource Y.
Put X and Y together to make tool A.
Go fetch small piece of natural resource Y.
Go fetch small piece of natural resource Z.
Put Y and Z together using tool A to make item B.
Repeat until you have 80 units of item B.
Go fetch small piece of natural resource P.
Bake P in item B.
Removed baked P.
Stack baked P.
Call all your friends to gather around and see your abstract art, created entirely of baked P!!11!
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Hi. I am a former Artifact Entertainment (Horizons) employee. I was a systems administrator for their production server and networking equipment. If you have questions, post them and I will answer, so long as it won't get me into trouble.
I agree, if you want a personalized, well done RPG experience you can get it with a small group of your friends and any one of the many tabletop RPG systems out there. (NWN has some elements of it, but still depends far too much on prescripting to ever provide the wonderful on the fly turns in plot and action that make table top gaming so enjoyable and memorable.)
But to deliver this sort of experience on a scale past 10 or 20 people just isn't possible while maintaining the quality level.
And that's what's so exciting I think about getting into this area, taking a concept that is currently not possible to implement, and figuring out how to do it.
And on a side note, if you're successful, online RPGs will be far from the only area where this technology will find use. I suspect that in twenty years we'll be talking about the person that finally nails the problem the same we think about Linus Torvalds or Gordon Moore today. Even very brilliant people just shake their heads now and scoff at the impossiblity of the task. I know I do lol, but there's always a solution, you just have to find it.
What I don't get it why there aren't any smaller coding / artwork groups doing really well with MMORPGs.
Release the client for free, make it open source even, ditto for the server, and then charge, say, $10 a month to use a centrally hosted 'world' (which has all the good stuff). Even a 25,000 players (less than most of the games in this study) would rake in $250,000 per month.. and imagine what, say, 15 hardcore people (who might ordinarily be working on free software anyway) could do with that!
Okay, I'm not saying this is an easy venture by any means, but it strikes me as odd that I haven't heard of anyone trying this. There seems to be so much money and opportunity in it.
My wife, who works in the MMORPG Industry, tells me that she believes that Sir Bruce's numbers should be taken with a grain of salt.
I'd like to point out that some companies, including the one my wife works for, are extremely reluctant to reveal these kinds of numbers and consider them closely held proprietary secrets. Therefore, it's unlikely that all these numbers came from the game companies themselves. Numbers that did come from game companies might be a bit inflated. It's hard to resist the temptation to make your game look just a little bit better.
Just a word of caution that you shouldn't believe everything you read.... even on /.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
http://www.opendreams.net/jesse/images/20040722_ar izona_bark_scorpion/
David Allen and David Bowman BOTH showed the world how NOT to run a company.
Don't call the kettle black.
I have nwn installed, and host City of Arabel, which generally owns the PW Story category. But the DM:player ratio is a PITA to deal with; PW servers are largely unattended or understaffed. Great for free play, but for people who value their game time more than their $2...well, you get where I'm going.
Horizons is hands down my favorite of all of those. I foresee myself playing this game for years to come.
The game has a much more mature player base than any other I have seen, a complete lack of d00ds/griefers (the lack of a PvP element probably is a part of this). The game certainly is less attractive to power-levelers who do become bored with it rapidly. The game is also the most "solo friendly" of anything I've played since AC1. I have always hated forced-grouping games, and Horizons gives you both the ability to participate in a community, as well as a chance to be self-reliant if you choose.
For me the attraction is the very immersive world. The world itself is a beautiful one, the player models from Dragon to Dryad are great, the crafting system is first-class, and the multi-schooling system is much more enjoyable and intriguing for me than rigid class systems like EQ/DAoC had. I love the *process* of playing Horizons, and just interacting with the world. If you are a goal-oriented person in a race to level 100, then yes this game may not be for you.
There ARE issues with the game at this time, and they ARE making some major improvements, which I expect to really transform the game over the next 6-12 months. For a game like Horizons, I am willing to give this game the time it needs to fully mature. I currently play mainly on the Blight test server and there are a LOT of changes coming in the very near future.
Visit Tazoon.com to see a greater amount of positive feedback from CURRENT players who really love this game, and learn WHY they like it. It has a loyal diehard fanbase that I have not experienced since my three years with AC1.
But most of all, try the 7-day free trial and make up your own mind about this game.
Heh, considering crafting normally consists of:
1) Hunting around endlessly looking for a fancy materials drop, repeatedly
2) Running back to the "craft station"
3) Hitting "craft repeatedly" to create as many items as you can
4) Holding your "great" item over everyone's head as if you made some huge accomplishment, only to sell it at the store so you don't get screwed in a trade.
I'll stick to programming. At least the time and effort is normally worth it.
The last MMORPG I played was Dark Age of Camelot. The last one before that was UO, and before that was Realm. I played Realm when I was maybe 11 years old. I played it for a few months, got to the max level, then they did this thing we called "The Big Update" where the increased the max level from 100 to 500 and changed the whole game. I quit after that, too many bugs. Then I played UO for years. Ultima Online was the best MMORPG there ever was hands down, when it FIRST came out. There was nothing better than it, there will never be anything better than the first UO. But then they started changing things. An old MMORPG proverb says "When the company starts changing things due to complaints from users, that's when the MMORPG starts to crumble" And it is true, I've seen it in every game I've played. The lesser skilled people complain, bitch, and moan, and they all bark at the company to change something to suit them, once that trend starts the game will die, I've seen it with over 4 different games. Ultima Online was amazing because it was unforgiving. When you died, you lost everything in your back pack. You could be PK'ed at any second outside of town, even if you just started. When the game was new and the first day I joined, some guy was like, want to go on an adventure? I was like sure! He took me out on my boat, stole all my money, killed me. I logged back in as a ghost, on an island, and it took hours for me to get back to town. There is nothing like that today, everything is too easy. Everyone wants their secure worlds where they won't be killed, that's just lame. You worked for weeks to get a house in UO, then when you finally got one, someone could come along, kill you, take the key, and it was their house. Being a PK was fun back then, because you could basically take over dungeons. I remember I was "leveling" in a dungeon and 2 blue portals appeared, out stepped 5 guys in jester hats with 2 pet dragons, they killed everyone and posted dragons at the entrance of the dungeon, killing everyone. Sounds lame maybe, but it was so fun compared to the bullcrap safety stuff today. Then they introduced a reputation system where when you killed enough people (like 4!!) you were permanently a murderer, you couldn't enter towns (which was how it was before however if you were good long enough you could get rid of bad status), and when you die you lost alot of your skill points, which took days and days and days and weeks to get back. They effectively killed PK'ing, especially when they introduced the "non pk world" and the "10 hour newbie invulnerability from pvp". I got my ass kicked constantly, but you learned how to get strong and kick butt back. Now everyone just bitches and moans, because they can't handle being weak. And the company listened to them, and UO started to fail. Dark Age of Camelot was a big thrill to me. I didn't play an online game for years after UO, as I thought they all sucked, but I played a hour of DaOC and I was sadly hooked. It was exciting because the world was so huge, and I loved the concept of 3 different countries where communication was impossible (different languages in the game), and the only place you could meet them was on the battlegrounds where you tried to take over their keeps and their treasurers. That was cool, and it had a very nice PVE (fighting NPC's) element. However guess what...people started bitching and moaning. DaOC was very responsive to people and they actually did a good job in keeping the game relatively good while changing stuff. But eventually it went a little too awry, hell go on the VN boards over at IGN and all people do is bitch. This ruins games if the company changes stuff for them. And it did. I was off of the game for 2 weeks due to computer repair, I come back, there was a major change, and the game was dead. Completely dead, all my friends quit. MMORPG's need to be hard, they need to be unforgiving. PVP is not only a good option it is essential in MMORPG's, because eventually fighting those NPC's becomes predictable, and easy. The game becomes boring.
Does anyone know if there is something similar to Mankind out there? I played that game for 3 years before I quit out of disgust.
Its not perfect by any stretch, but COH had the smoothest release and has the least problems of any of the MMO products I have tried.
Its a fun PvE game, the AI on the mobs is quite good - again far better than any other MMORPG game I have tried - and the developers seem to have a handle on what the game needs. They listen and respond to public feedback.
Currently its a bit content light, but they are adding new content and new features quarterly at the moment, and the first (and only) patch was pretty problem free.
I went to DAOC from EQ because Mythic looked like they were doing things right and addressing the aspects of EQ that really bothered me, and the whole RvR thing looked neat. I played it since release until the release of City of Heroes, and was a pretty big DAOC fan. I don't think I could return now, COH has spoiled me. It is lightyears ahead of the competition in my opinion, and while its early still, being only 3 months old, I think it has a very bright future.
Its well worth checking out City of Heroes if you are looking for a new game.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
One of my friends who was really into Everquest was bought into all the hype about Horizons. He had thankfully retired from Everquest a while before Horizons was released and actually acting like a normal person for a while. However, once he found out about Horizons, he was like, "Dude! This is going to be the best game EVER! All my old Everquest friends are going to be playing it! Check out all the cool features! You gotta buy it when it comes out!" I didn't think it sounded nearly as good as he said.
I've never been a fan of subscription based gaming. So when it came out, him and a few real life friends and several online friends bought it and played it for a while. In fact, he made me install his copy on my computer to try it out on his account. I must say that I was not impressed with what I saw. My computer exceeded the recommended requirements and I have a DSL connection, but the game lagged to the extreme. I mean, you couldn't even walk with nobody else in sight without your guy jumping all over the screen. I quickly uninstalled it from my computer in disgust.
My friend kept trying to say that, "Oh, it's still in development. They haven't implemented all the awesome stuff yet. The game still rocks!"
He and all his friends quit playing after another month or so.
Everytime he wants me to try a new game, I just remind him how stupid Horizons was. I mean, playable dragons? That just takes all the awesomeness factor away from them.
To be fair, though, my friend was right that they had some ideas that sounded good, but the realization of those features weren't so great.
Fetch Text URL - Firefox Extension
I did see one thread since starting in June, discussing ATI/nVidia cards but it seemed to have very mixed outcome, with some people running two computers with one of each brand saying their nVidia system played better, and others saying their ATI system actually ran better.
I am also not aware of any GUI issues. What was the specific issue there? They have made a lot of changes in the past few months.
Planetside was (and is) a pretty solid online MMOFPS. It's more tactical than UT or Quake, but if you're good, you can still wreak havok on your fellow man.
The thing that stopped me playing wasn't the gameplay (which was damn good), but the people who were playing. In a game where teamwork and cooperation were KEY, it was really difficult to deal with lamer 12 year olds making up 50% at least of the players. Though it was completely satisfying to TK their sorry asses.
I've thought of getting back into it, but the expansion is still more than I want to pay, so nah. Maybe later.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
> Please don't mention planetside; I still want
> level progression; I still want it to be
> playable by people who don't have the reflexes.
> I just want those that do to get an edge for
> them.
I dont consider me to have good reflexes.
But I still do very well in PlanetSide.
For example I lay mines, spitfires,
drive the mobile base and am sniper.
PlanetSide is a lot about thinking,
amongst others carrying the right gun
for the current situation. That means
less emphasis on reflexes.
However I still think the PvP is hurting business. It will never be as good as PvP counterstrike style with some of those game becoming very big, played a demo with 256 players in the field.
It simply isn't fun to be a casual player in a game dominated by kiddies. SWG is the prime example, they are so focussed on the balacing of combat that they fail to see the constant drain of players going on. The recent 14 day demo had plenty of new players coming in and many many played the full 14 days and then asked, so what can I do now. I fought everything, is there anymore. The answer? No. An MMO game where you can see everything in 2 weeks is not going to sell many monthly subscriptions.
That is the real killer. Some people like diablo games. Some don't. Sales figures suggest that current MMO games are targetting the wrong audience.
Then again maybe it is just the bugs.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
> I've thought of getting back into it, > but the expansion is still more than > I want to pay, so nah. Maybe later. Just ignore the expansion. You dont need it to play and most players would say you should not bother to buy it. There are still "free" "weekly" updates to the game. For example the past week all skydomes have been revamped and one map (Oshur) has been replaced by 3 new smaller maps.
I very much like Horizons, and expect to be playing it for several years to come. Maybe I was very lucky having come into Horizons six months after release. I generally stay away from games right after their release, and especially ones with a lot of this-is-gonna-rock! hype attached to them.
Personally I would never go near a game if someone told me "Dude! This is going to be the best game EVER! All my old Everquest friends are going to be playing it!"
That alone would send me running in the opposite direction ...
if you are interested in a 'mature' mmo, meaning if ur a l33tOMFGWTFH4X4U kidiot you get banned, that is both fun, and relativly inexpensive (10 a month), try www.darkspace.net
The client is free, and the community is small (maybe 1000 players total, no more than 100 online at any one time). Everyone knows everyone, and the devs are very responsive. The game plays similiar to the starfleet command games, but with more skill and less tedium involved. Its def. worth a look..,
If Frontier 1859 ever gets beyond the vapour-ware stage,
that would be just what you want. True wild west - players make
the laws, you only get one life, but you can pass on your genes.
http://frontier1859.com/
I only played Horizons for about two weeks, but I can tell you this... the Horizons community is very touchy and defensive about their game. Recently a group of people from various fan forums descended upon the Wikipedia article for Horizons and ran it into the ground. The dust has settled and it looks good now but there were about 2 days of constant reverts, blatant bad POV edits, and vandalism.
It even has a special 3rd party patch for winex. I think it was more fun playing it in taiwan that america, but I perfer polite players. In american beta I had to kill 4-5 trouble makers a login. Best PvP I've seen, and it uses the unreal2 engine like UT 2003. The sexy dark elf models help too. =)
http://www.lineage2.com
Your perceptions are really distorted. I'm not saying there are no 20-30s loosers that do nothing but play, but they are not the majority. Last one I played was Star Wars Galaxies. I joind a big PA (collection of players, in other games a guild) that used voice chat. I discovered some things that many would consider supprising:
1) A good number of women. The stereotype seems to be all males and that wasn't true. Our PA was probably 30-35% women.
2) Lots of married people, with children. Some couples, some single, some father-son teams, and so on. It wasn't just the "single people with lots of time", the married people may have even been the majority. For them, this is what they did INSTEAD of watch TV or other more classic American persuits.
3) High median age, probably about 25, maybe 27. 18-25 was the biggest group, but there were plenty of 25+s. Not a bynch of teenagers, in fact under 18 was pretty rare.
4) Plenty of successful, skilled, people. I hung out with a group that knew eachother in real life, being all engineers for a JPL contractor. One guy was one of the designers for the Mars Rover communication system (the ground side).
5) Plenty of casual gamers, me being one of them. I lack the attention span to be hardcore in those kind of games. Even when I have loads of free time, I just can only play for so long. There were plenty of hard core ones, but plenty of casuals too.
So your stereotypes are not at all correct. No doubt there are plenty of people that do fit your description, but there are plenty that do not. I find MMORPGs entertaining in a way that other games are not, so I play them, as I do other games. However I own my own house, have a full time job, and spend time on other things.
Do they wear this t-shirt during the day?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
The T-shirt isnt too funny ... the fact that it is available in 5xl is though :)
Like what, exactly? I've ready the FA and all the comments, and I'm still not feeling insighterated (made up word).
Unless the fact that millions of Koreans play a game I've never heard of constitutes an insight?
fish and pipes
I've known about this site for close to a year now.
;-)
If watching the competition between EQ (a 3D game) and Ultima Online (primarily old school 2D) has told me anything, it's that the time of the MMORPG has not truly arrived, and won't until the Internet develops into the kind of environment that William Gibson wrote about.
Anyone who's interested really ought to consider giving this book a serious read where this topic is concerned. I first read it close to ten years ago, and even back then it predicted the idea that the net or certain regions of it would basically become their own geopolitical entities in the full sense of the word, complete with all the economic implications that entails. Castranova doesn't realise just how right he is.
Although there are a few wily early birds, such as this guy for instance and some others who are already scratching a reasonable living out of it, virtual tourism and commodity speculation isn't going to truly hit the mainstream radar for a while yet.
Once it does though, it doesn't need mentioning that a lot of the rules most people take for granted will change. One of the main reasons why I'm suspecting that this will be so big when the technology gets here is actually because of the terrorism problem. With environmental degredation reaching fever pitch in some places, most governments in the developed world rapidly moving towards an Orwellian wet dream, and meatspace being as dangerous as it is in general these days, 3 days in Norrath is going to end up being the only way most of us who get afflicted with the travel bug will be able to scratch our itch. You could also eventually hear about such things as newlyweds spending a honeymoon at a resort on Britannia's Magincia Beach.
What does it need to get to this point, however? It needs the Matrix, boys and girls...not necessarily Keanu's, either, in the photorealistic sense...but definitely in the Shadowrun/Gibson sense. Some fringe dwellers play text-based MUDS, sure...but just as there's talk at times about how "Linux isn't ready for the desktop," so we have a scenario where Joe Sixpack is going to insist on full-blown VR before he'll even bother...mainly because although some of us do, he doesn't have the imagination to parse text and create an evironment from that in his head. The addiction problems associated with EQ and its initial explosive popularity tell me what I've always suspected...that the net ain't really going to *be* the net in any sense that's genuinely worth talking about until networked VR gets here.
UO/EQ are great for getting our feet wet...but it's worth remembering that nobody yet has created a real swimming pool. That I think is also why they're losing popularity...the novelty has worn off, and people want more...but the technology isn't quite here yet to give it to them.
Scorpions shmorpions. It could be worse. Would you like camel spiders climbing up your walls instead?
Anyone care to comment on how stupid all of this is?
There is nothing stupid about being constructive.
A smaller, more focused MMORPG, perhaps even the "massive" part needs to be removed. Target subscription is 500-1500 subscribers, with a set upper limit of probably 1500.
To my mind, the problem here is more the number of people online at anytime than the actual number of suscribtions. A game that has "dead" periods is in bad shape to start with.
If you wanted to play, you'd submit an application, and assuming it's not all booked up, you'd be given a choice of up to 2 dozen characters to play, complete with biography summaries of those (and if they were completely unsuitable... wait another day, while we find some other choices for you).
You can not enforce characters on the players. Game masters like to try this to improve game balance, but the end result is always unhappy players that can't play the style they want and unhappy game masters that have "good characters" played "wrong" by players. This is good for tounament style of play, not MMORPG.
Inststead make a limited number of choice ( 5 or 8 instead of dozens ) and make sure they are all playable and balanced. Earth & Behond is a good example of this aspect. Allow non-linear evolution for each of them ( E&A fails in that ) and you have a good recepie.
I'd also try to weed out all the obnoxious players, too, for that matter. People who want to play in character are important, and if you chalked up more than a few infractions (talking about monday night football in game, using too much modern slang, etc) I'd probably end up canceling the subscription.
Sorry, won't work. You cannot stop your players from doing off topic chatting. A MMORPG is more than just a game, it's a community. You have to accept it.
Player death would be permanent (choose another character).
As a result, players will leave the game upon loosing everything to a simple bad luck. Eve-online is a good example of this. Not good. Do it the other way around, allow players to die as many time as they want, but with consequences. This is a game, everything happening in it should be enjoyable to players, even loosing.
The main problem of many MMORPG is that the GM staff cannot afford to micromanage the game. When a player start, the discovery of the game is good enough to make him stay. At "high level" new quest and plot are aimed at you. But in between, this is where things go wrong. Fill this void and you'll be in business.
I'm one of the developers on the free (in the sense of not having to pay money to play it) MMORPG game called PlaneShift (http://www.planeshift.it). The MMORPG engine is fully Open Source (GPL). This game is still in development and the current released demo is getting old. But even if you can't do a lot in it yet (only explore, chat, hunt crystals) it still has 100000 registered accounts. The next version which will soon be released will have magic, combat, ...
The game is fully free. You don't have to pay to download the game and you don't have to pay to play it.
Greetings,
Project Manager of Crystal Space (http://www.crystalspace3d.org). Support CS at http://tinyurl.com/cb3x4
You are just a Care Pirate, you want to be able to kill people in MMORPGs and you care about them caring.
Up untill that credit card part its actually a pretty good idea. The credit card part will be impossible to sell to investors so such a game would never be made anyway.
I think a MMORPG with permanent death. After witch you can create a new n00b character is a pretty good idea.
Sindri Traustason.
I think I would take the that isn't venomous over the one that is.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Anyway Quake and its ilk are one segment of the market. Most MMO are trying to copy the PvP element but making it in such a way that casual players only got the pistol while the hardcore kiddies got an unlimited ammo BFG and that is costing you 15 bucks a month.
Would CS be so succesfull if you could only start hunting terrorist after first spending a month shooting bunnies?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I really enjoy MMORPGs, but these days there are so many it seems physically impossible for one person to even begin to experience them all. Add a job, school and a family and its really hard to even follow single game.
It used to be that staying informed about the games on the market was a relativly easy task. I think this underscores the importance of game reviewing. Since it is about impossible to try out all of these games you must rely on others to do it for you.
Grrrrr... don't bother me, I'm thinking.
Or maybe it should be +Ironic. In any event, it's sad.
But don't look to Slashdot for remedial training. If you want to do yourself a favor, spend a few weeks teaching yourself some simple mathematics. Just because your school failed you is no reason to live the rest of your life incapacitated by choice.
I play ww2 online. No craft, no "beaming". Plain old opels and rifles and all ww2 stuff.
:)
Its REAL strict simulation. You can't run all the time too. Also if you rambo a tank in a city, prepare to be sapped with 2-3 newbies playing you like cat with mouse...
Check playnet.com
I would think that this would greatly reward the casual but long term player and punishes the power player who frankly is more suited to the "Big Buff Axe Warrior." Like real life we need people like this as fodder and they are more than happy and willing enough until they get bored and move the next newest game.
However, technical issues are inexcusable and a completely different topic.
It's hard to believe no one has mentioned Ragnarok Online yet. In North America, people seem to doubt the success of MMORPGs, but South Korea seems to be producing a considerable amount of them. In addition to Lineage and the new Lineage 2, there's Ragnarok Online, a Diablo-like socially-centered MMORPG that has 5000-7000 users online at a given time on either of their "unpopular" international servers, as well as more successful franchises with more servers in Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Thailand, Indonesia, recently Europe, and through a company called "GungHo," Japan.
Standing on its own, it gets to be a boring diablo-ish game once you've finally travelled the world and know all the dungeons (though they keep adding more with new monsters/gear/skills/player classes) but the community of players in this game is like none I've ever seen. It really keeps things entertaining.
Interesting, but I'm really burned out on most of the games that are out now and even most of the ones coming out. I've seen Matrix Online and it's like City Of Heroes without the superhero charm. City of Heroes is fun for a month, and then it's on to new things. EQ/2? Don't make me laugh. World of Warcraft? It's alright, I've played the beta, but it's the same old things other MMOs have done, with that little bit of spit and polish Blizzard puts on everything it does. It's a refinement, maybe even a perfection, of the old-style MMOs. Wish is a goat-herding simulation and a joke. Meanwhile, let's survey the current MMO landscape. UO is ancient by MMO standards. EQ is home to a legion of hardcore poopsockers, people who can create drama by pretending to sleep with sexy wood elves played by fellow sweaty geeks. SWG is a bunch of Star Wars geeks playing a broken game and Jump To Lightspeed will be Geeks In Space, which is basically that Pigs In Space sketch from the Muppets. Horizons is a joke, Shadowbane's a walking corpse, Lineage 2 is populated by a bunch of insane Asians and some Americans trying to convince themselves they're having fun staring at jiggling Dark Elf boobs. Really, the only things that give me any kind of hope are Pirates of the Burning Sea, which looks like a pretty cool pirate MMO, and The Saga of Ryzom, which looks like awesomeness distilled into MMO form. Definitely looking forward to the Open Beta period on both of those. The rest? Just EQ clones and Tolkien ripoffs.
Our good friend, SirBruce's traffic quota has been reached... can anyone recommend a mirror, or am I forced to patiently wait 'til Sept. :-P
Much obliged...
You don't mention Anarchy Online...
It's quite a good game, you might want to give it a try. In my opinion better than all the others you mention, except for UO (which is outdated now), and City of Heroes (which I love, but is better suited for casual players like me than it is for powergamers). I think it fell off the map due to one of the worst launches in MMORPG history, but it has since been fixed up into a solid game. There is a 7-day trial available, and check my journal for a couple of 30-day trial keys.
http://www.anarchy-online.com/
Thanks to slashdot again for overloading my bandwidth quota. I got 17,290 hits in one day, which is a new record.
i ons.htm l
Here's a temporary backup site, but it won't last very long at this rate:
http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce3/Subscript
Bruce
Hmmm, my previous comment was deleted?
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Again, the web page is currently up at an alternate URL:
http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce3/Subscriptions.ht
Bruce