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The Last Days of an Online World
These are the last days of Asheron's Call 2. We've known since late August that the online world was slated for sunset, and Wired has a stirring look at the final days of a dying world. From the article: "The economy has also tanked. When the announcement first came down, players say, a majority of gamers immediately fled. Previously, you'd log on and find several hundred people online; now you'll get nine or 10. High-powered character accounts used to sell for as much as $500, but the online auctions have gone silent. That's partly because, as the end nears, Turbine is tossing out some freebies and giving away more "rare" items, making them less rare. Without a sense of a future, capitalism ends. There's no demand in a condemned world."
A privately run MMORPG server for games who no longer have any official support.
I mean, thats gotta be freaking better than paying 15 dollars a month just to lose the ability to play.
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Nobody wants to admit it, but Star Wars Galaxies is probably going to be the next big MMORPG to go down. There are too many resources dedicated to that system and not enough players. The desperation the producers have in trying to keep the game from tanking is evident in the constant changes they make to virtually every system.
It should come as no surprise that AC will be shut down. It's amazing it lasted this long. The game suffered horribly under the strain of its initial launch and complaints that the servers were buggy and unstable. I don't think it ever recovered.
What's even more depressing than entering an empty game world, is entering a game world filled with people and not being able to participate. Everquest I has become like this to some degree now, with the world being so big and so many players at high levels, it's easy to be ignored.
Netcraft confirms: Asheron's Call 2 is dead.
AC2: I'm getting better!
N: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
AC2: I don't want to go in the cart!
N: Oh, don't be such a baby.
AC2 (singing): I feel happy. I feel happy.
[thud]
but it probably has a lot less overhead to keep running. I wonder how AC2 would have fared if it had still been microsoft behind it... (Turbine, the developer, bought the franchise back from Microsoft)...
The AC2 world had some fatal flaws, but that didn't stop some people from getting very wrapped up in it. For one brief instant, it was the place to be, and in less than two months that spotlight was gone.
Turbine had long since shifted all its hopes towards DDO and MEO.
I do wax nostalgic on it now and then. More the original AC than AC2. Even though the original is still up, it is still true that you can't go home again. It isn't the same, never will be. In part its the peole, in part its the moment in time. Still, this isn't exactly Jack Vance's The Dying Earth.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
That was a sad read.
/played time is 40 days. I could only imgain login to see a world where I have spend a good part of my life about to die.
I almost had a tear.
I am one of the sad individuals that plays WOW too much. my
The article talkes about people visiting places that had created momories and taking photos while they still could.
That first challenging boss, that scary spot that made your heart stop, or that spot that you could have been killed fro the first time by a player 40 lvls above you but he choose to spare your life.
How would you spend your last moments in a dying digital world?
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
Release the source code\ server code under a restricted license (non-commerical use) and allow people to take up the falg of using the old dated-engine to create new worlds or preserve the old world. Anything on the Internet can live forever, so long as there is space and people with time on their hands. It would be great to see those of us that still to this day use DIKU and ROM and SMUAG etc.. to run smaller, more imtimate worlds have tools to do the same but with graphics.
Free the code and AC will live forever.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
You can then see for yourselve what it is all about.
But okay, most will not want to bother because it is easier to just talk about.
So here is my review of Star Wars Galaxies, New Game Experience.
First is the same as it was before. Create a new character on a server of your choice. DO NOT CHOOSE RECOMMENDED. That is the most underpopulated server. It could well mean that for the whole trial you never see an other player. Choose the one in red (if there still is one)
Now the character creation itself is still as good as it ever was with you really being able to design a character you like better then in any current MMORPG. Breast size, fatness make sure that not all characters look alike even from a distance. You can now also decide you starter outfit and this introduces you to another SWG good point, the wide selection of clothing further allowing you to make your character unique.
Satisfied with your character (don't worry it can be changed in game by a specific player class) you then get put in the game.
Well almost, SWG used to have a short tutorial and then dump you in the main game (lately Mos Eisley) but now the tutorial is bigger.
The old tutorial is gone and your now being called by C3-PO to do some basic stuff. Look around, move, talk to droid, get gun from cabinet, equip, shoot at target. WHOOPS. BIG FUCKING CHANGE. The first change is cosmetic. The camera now hovers behind your character offset to the right. Meaning you sorta look over your characters gun hand. Odd, I don't like it but livable. Now to the big change the NGE brought. Most MMO's you target your enemy, then trigger attack and from then on attack the target on auto doing the occasional special move.
No longer. NGE is FPS. You click, you fire. You actually have to aim at the target to hit it. For now it seems easy enough but these boxes take one hit to destroy. I can forsee difficulty later.
Anyway next task is to blast open door and there nobody else then Han Solo and Chewbacca (on a diet) is waiting to safe you. Follow him and you come to a big hangar with a lot parked vehicles as well as the Millenium Falcon and 3 storm troopers. You are told to take cover and you get in a brief fight. Here the FPS switch starts to show its ugly head. Yes you got to aim in a mode that looks a bit FPS like. Yes you got to hold the mouse button down to keep firing BUT it feels nothing like a fps. There is no ducking, there is no AI there is no cover, really this is FPS pre-wolfenstein. Played GTA San Andreas? Well it is like that but worse. You just stand there, hold the mouse button down over you enemy, watch their health drop, hopefully before yours do and rince and repeat.
Before NGE your first fight would actually be a challenge. Now it isn't. I didn't die ONCE!
Run aboard the MF and you will take off. Here we see a second change, a lot more FMV cutscenes. In fact I don't remeber any apart from the intro before.
You are now in space "YEAH" about the MF (you need to be told this as it looks nothing like in the movies. Here another problem starts to emerge. SWG did not have much in the way of scripting. So now they have to add story telling scripting to an engine that does not support it. The result that the following bit is incredibily slow and unbelievable and prone to you rushing ahead and getting stuck.
Your under attack and told to man the turret. WAIT. DO NOT MOVE. Wait for the script to catch up and after a number of pauses you will be instructed to climb in. If you do it before the game will not realize you did and will keep telling you to climb in. Have a character stuck there.
Shoot at the TIE's actually looks decent but no real challenge, get out and go to the cockpit (this engine just isn't desinged to render the MF I guess) and next bit.
You are now
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Do you have any links or information about NWN servers? I played it single player and have played multiplayer with friends - but I don't know anything about the persistant worlds that people have set up.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Leaving an MMO is practically the same thing. It "hurts" a bit at first, your uber character, your favorite places, your guildies - giving all those things up. If your like me, you've left to play something else and once you get sucked in you remember the sense of discovery and wonder that is missng from an MMO once you've "seen it all".
I'm a nostalgic dork myself however. I make heavy use of the screenshot button as I play through a game. I also tend to make some videos using FRAPs that I can view long after the game is gone or changed or I'm no longer playing it.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Just because there is only one abondoned animal left, does it make sense to close a pound? Just because there is only one patient, dows that make it right to close a hospital.
Yes. Just move the last remaining one to another equivalent facility. Of course you don't just drop them on the streets when you close the facility. In fact, the animal may be more likely to be adopted or the patient more likely to be healed if they're at a facility where there's more traffic, professionals, funding, etc.
Nobody's saying the AC2 players can't go play another video game. It's just not in even their own interests to maintain a world that very few people are playing anymore.
AC2 should have never been released. At least never under the AC name.
//Turbine// were warned off the bugs and exploits remaining yet released anyway. The most famous of exploits was to use terrain versus tyrants (their dragons). Get them stuck and missle them to death and voila, you could level to max in a month or two. Took them a while to fix and that was only the tip of the exploit iceburg. The Turbine motto assigned by fans is , "Exploit Early, Exploit Often". It is a well deserved motto they earned in AC1 and carried into AC2 with abandon.
:)
AC2 had a horrid open beta and terrible end of beta event that lead of a ho-hum release. They
The whole dev team was just inept. They could not get pathing right so they allowed mobs to move through trees and rocks. To make matters worse one day we found nearly all mobs had ranged attacks! Yippee! They made a half-hearted attempt at RvR like DAOC. Half-hearted might be too strong, they put 3 kingdoms down, 3 plateaus, and forgot about it. Basically they had no idea other than what they saw someone else did but after copying the concept they could not figure out how to implement. Improvements sometimes were worse than what was before. To spice the lands up group mobs were put in. Trouble was there were too many and they aggro'd when you attacked nearby of the same. Old bugs would resurface from patch to patch, exploits were left in for whole patches.
The game was a mess. They put together a world without NPCs but didn't provide the players a means to compensate. They had huge wrecked cities that supposedly would repair if the players spent time in them and used their crafting facilities. Trouble was the cities were huge and dead, monuments to the egos of developers. They only improved through downtime! They even launched with a wrecked chat system. Half the time you could not use world or allegiance channels! Hilarious fun.
Worst feature, their "vaults". Quest dungeons where you get a story at the end. While beautiful in looks they showed the flaw of the game. Turbine wrote the game the developers wanted to play, not what their players were clamouring for. They then attempted to ram that idea down player's throats. Play it the way we intend or forget it. Well you could always exploit it...
Attemps were made to fix crafting and they came close, but the promised change to make crafting work took over 1 and 1/2 years beyond when promised. Which about summarizes the game, promises made and rarely delivered and if delivered so late it mattered not. A visually beautiful game with no real point. A game so diametrically opposed to its predecessor that it alienated those fans of the franchise.
To top off all the insults to their player base they released an expansion in late summer only to announce a few months later they were closing. Before then they chopped monthly updates to push their expansion for their older game AC1 because that expansion was so far behind as to be near vaporware.
Turbine is a gaming company without management or programming discipline. They take overly long to deliver on promises, they leave exploits in their games, they even condoned "Attended Combat macroing", and their updates had some bugs that smacked of last minute developer sneak ins (cowboy programming).
Fans of D&D and Middle Earth can only hope the franchise owners keep a tight leash on Turbine else these games will be travesties. Already both games have been pushed back beyond relevance, with MEO having even gone through a name change to boot! D&D looks and plays like NWN in FPS style but without player ability to customize the world (promised for "later") and a monthly fee! MEO, well, hell, with their previous history everyone will have a copy of the "one ring" before the first quarter is out.
Turbine is proof the Dilbert principle works in the business world, fail badly and your noticed, being assigned even something bigger
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The Last Days of an Online World?
:(
Well, Pluto's Kiss is just a few days away.... December 24th 2005.
Just doesn't seem to exist. It is a real case of americans not being able to understand that the rest of the world is not like america.
Credit Cards in europe are expensive, rarely accepted and just not popular. Some american companies realize this, most don't. The ones that don't are the ones who say that europe doesn't do business over the net. Despite the fact that europe got more money, more people, more broadband AND a bigger reason to buy via the net (get dvd's NOW instead of 6 months later).
Oh well.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
MMORPG developers all seem to suffer from the same delusion: their game is going to last forever. TV shows seem to be the same, but if they've been around for more than a couple of years usually they have the good grace to bring some kind of conclusion to the show- they may not tie up every plot thread, resolve every conflict (because who knows, maybe it will be brought back, or made into a movie) but there's a two part last episode to cap it all off.
MMORPG need to have a concept of an endgame, where something happens to bring an end to the game that is consisent with the virtual world. The obvious thing is to literally have the world end- there's a comet, an invasion of a far superior foe that spares no one, or something, but maybe there is one last thing to accomplish before it all crashes down (to keep players hooked before the servers go offline). Maybe 99% of all the players are killed permanently during the last pay period by calamity, the final players hole up in a mountain fortress and make a final stand, and die nobly rather than just logging out for the last time...
Or maybe it's all a stunt to reinvigorate the game and it turns some heroes actually did save the world. It costs a little more money for extra content, but they should just budget that or create that content when the game is first developed.
The idea is that instead of all your previous players just being disappointed and looking for the next interesting MMORPG before it too decays and withers, and then eventually getting burnt out by the whole concept, actually give them some kind of sense of closure (and hopefully accomplishment).
We still have http://cities.totl.net/
L
HOWEVER that is not a system accepted by default by american companies. See those little symbols behind a credit card form? American Express, VISA, Master card and another? Well those are american, some banks do offer a combo but then you simply have a combo debit credit card with each credit payment being charged to your credit account. With very bad conditions like interest and subscription fees.
Paypal? Credit Card. it is a well known problem and the reason companies like Global Collect and Bibit exist. They take the hassle away from companies like sony and do the collecting for it. Bibit offers sometimes a dozen ways to pay for each country. I know I worked with them for a european wide ISP.
Sadly like you, and the guy I responded to before american just can't get their head around the fact that europe has a different banking system.
Oh and the GDP of europe is a bit bigger. Although I do suppose I must clarify that I did not mean just the EU. Even fairly advanced countries are not in the EU and you would be suprised by how many poles and other ex-soviets play online (yet for some reason can't get a credit card) http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ranko rder/2001rank.html
The eu is fraction behind the US count the non-eu european nations and you will have a larger GDP.
As to the reason online shopping here could be bigger. Easy, why wait 6 months to buy a dvd when it is on sale in the US already? Region protection you say. Fraid not. France ruled it illegal a while ago. meaning that you can now legally circumvent it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I was part of the original AC beta when it was on the Zone, and when the beta was announced as being over, and was going to go live in a week, Turbine announced there would be all kinds of crazy things, like a comet appearing in the sky (I saw it) and that it was supposed to crash and destroy the world (which I'm not sure if it did...wasn't on when the end came).
Because I think only one person got to keep his/her beta character through some contest, everyone else knew theirs would be removed, so I saw people dropping stuff all over the place...I logged in and found one high level fighter laying out all his treasure on the ground in a straight line, for any and all to take.
I guess it comes down to economics....the reason why they're ending the game was the lack of participants, so to spend the time to "end the world" in some dramatic way which might be seen by 10 people isn't worth it.
>> High-powered character accounts used to sell for as much as $500, but the online auctions have gone silent. That's partly because, as the end nears, Turbine is tossing out some freebies and giving away more "rare" items, making them less rare.
It's not at all because of the freebies. It's because the game is SHUTTING DOWN!
PowerLevel.com - A next generation marketplace for virtual items and services
I've never been around at the end of an online world, but I've has similar experiences, most notably the recent Dungeons and Dragons Online stress test. I thought a had another couple days left, but alas, I did not. However, I found a fun party and we threw a little apocalyptic bash, admiring the graphics, emotes, and downright coolness of what it was while it lasted. We did much the same as they say here, collecting memorable screenshots, blowing our inventory money, and generally dancing in the streets, but that didn't stop it from having a very somber feel to it, but unlike the end of an era of which they speak of here, it's more like "what could have been". Well, I'm certainly considering purchasing it after that experience.