Dungeons and Dragons Online Beta Impressions
The NDA for the Dungeons and Dragons Online Beta is now a thing of the past. F13's piece prior to the lifting of the NDA is a good place to get started. They also have a lively discussion going, discussing all aspects of the upcoming game, which launches February 28th. From the f13 piece: "The most important thing to understand about DDO is Turbine is trying a different take on the genre. People looking strictly for a WoW clone in a D&D flavored wrapper won't find it. For some that may be a good thing, for others not so much. Oh to be sure, it has a lot of the same trappings as your previous favorite graphical-Diku-mud; after all, most fantasy computer role playing games owe a little or very large portion of their structure to the granddaddy of all pen and paper rpgs, Dungeon & Dragons. So it comes as no surprise to find this game with familiar fantasy races, defined character classes, and easily recognizable fantasy monsters, magic items and spells. But, as I have grown fond of saying these last several years, the devil's in the implementation. To that end, DDO is almost as easily defined by what it is NOT as by what it IS."
and the basic game itself is pretty impressive in implementation.
Unfortunately, making any real progress while soloing is completely impossible. This has gone back and forth throughout beta. At the present time, due to "diminishing returns" when you re-enter a dungeon, you can forget "leveling through perseverence".
I don't group with strangers, and my friends are only available occasionally (and the chat system is abysmal, which makes identifying competent players with which to group extremely difficult), so I'll be passing on this one.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
...seems to require registration on F13.net.
Here's what I see happening:
When the game is released, the classes and creatures will feel a lot like they are described in the rulebooks. After a while, they'll nerf this and boost that until we are left with a game that is D&D in name only.
You'd think that after what, 25 years, the rules would be fairly well tweaked out. But once you move from 5 friends on a table to 5,000,000 on a server, some things will have to change.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
Not so much, really. From the article: all quests take place in private instances.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
it's really fun and addictive for about 2-3 months. Then the glory really just dies. The main problem with how the game is setup that as stated above you can only get xp by finishing a quest completely. and all of the early quests are geared for either full grps or lone fighters. try soloing a dungeon as a mage and you'll pretty much end up dead. This then leads to masses of people only playing the dungeons that grant the most XP. but ofcourse playing a dungeon to many time will lead to no xp. overall the graphics and sound is pretty good though. I loved my 3 months i played hard-core but i def. will not pay to play it.
Combat : Here is where DDO shines. As a MMORPG, it blends click with dodge very nicely. I can backstab, jump, tumble, climb, and never feel like I'm doing "the WoW thing" (aggro-heal-tank repeat) by just standing there and pressing my combos. Firing my bow yields a satisfying woosh-thunk. Wielding my dagger from the shadows is a treat when I do it right. Its somewhat disappointing to hear there's no PvP in the game, but they promise it will come. In the end, the RPGs that are about fighting stuff should make sure that the task is fun. WoW is not. DDO most definitely is!
Gameplay : Aside from combat, the instances are very interesting. Even though the adventures I experienced were basically linear channels through a dungeon, I still felt like I was exploring and discovering. There are environment puzzles to solve and secret doors to find. Very different from every MMORPG that I've ever played, and I have to admit quite satisfying.
The World : The hub style of MMO really bums me out, for many reasons. Every aspect of the gameplay exists within private instances. Groups are found in the town areas, ala Guild Wars. Due to this, all open-ended gameplay disappears and is replaced by simple, directed instancing. Your mileage may vary, but I prefer plundering vast open plains and mountains. Worlds are fun. Boxes less so.
Story : Hrm. I saw very little "story" in the game. None of the NPCs even speak, so this generally bleeds away any characterization or drama from the experience. Perhaps there will be larger "world arcs" to follow in the actual game.. I'm hoping so.
And thats about all I have time to say. Will I get the game? Well, seeing as how I'm a fan of Dungeons and Dragons and RPGs I will definitely be there on opening night. Whether I see enough to justify the monthly fee remains to be seen. I have high hopes, and my experience thus far has been quite positive. Will it unseat WoW? Doubtful. But rest assured, its the best WoW alternative out there.
Just my humble opinion.
I didn't like Guild Wars enough to buy it in the first place (friends bought it, I didn't steal it). I can't think of a single reason why I'd want to pay a monthly fee for basically the exact same thing.
I got into the closed beta a day after the FilePlanet Stress Test was over.
Don't get this game expecting to solo. A lot of folks have pissed and moaned about that, but they are trying to be pretty true to the Pen and Paper (PnP) rules and designs. You almost never see a DM spend all this time to create a world, dungeons, and the like, and then have them sit down at a table with a lone player with a lone character. Get over your wish to solo. It's a MMO. You are supposed to be grouping!
With the launch set for the 28th, there are a ton of bugs still in the game. They finally got the party and voicechat server fixed after a week of downtime. They have a good half dozen important quests that are broken. They have had to close one dungeon due to an exploit that was being done ad naseum by players abusing invisibility. Characters are still in their skivvies on the Character Select screen. Some characters die and can't rez when they release from their corpse. Some folks have gotten stuck in the Marketplace for more than a week. And the bank has been known to randomly lose items.
They are taking their time in between beta patches. I'd like to see some of these things tested in house and then pushed into the beta quicker, but they are making progress. The fix some things, and have proven to be cautious in how they work. Circle-strafing was a huge problem, so they did a tweak to make the mobs work better against it. Now it is a little less effective, but still works darn well. I expect another fix to that tactic.
There is a significant lack of content. While Turbine expects characters to repeat dungeons to gain XP and gear, it almost borders on the ridiculous. It is so bad that same folks deliberately don't level up, so they can gain XP at their last trained level, instead of the level they could be. Instead of losing out on groups due to their level, they just make sure they form their own groups. This lack of content means that they will have to have some expansions ready to go within 3 months, to keep customers happy. Not a healthy sign.
The system of collectables to gain minor magic items gets really old after a while. They fill up your inventory, and many of them aren't worth the time, especially as you gain levels. By lvl 5, over half of them aren't worth the effort, but unless I keep a list out, I end up collecting the stupid things.
Inventory space can be crowded, depending on your class and other things. But, there is a reason. Fighter types tend to carry one of every type of Bane weapon they can find, so they can whip out whatever works best for every mob. It borders on the absurd, really. Realistically, a character carrying a half dozen 2-handed weapons would trip over them constantly.
Mob AI is pretty darn good. The mobs tend to choose spells to much better effectiveness than most MMOs, where they just cast 1-2 spells. Having an Arcane Skeleton cast CloudKill on your group, then switch to Fireball or Lightning Bolt is pretty effective. Ray of Enfeeblement, Curses, and the like are also thrown about liberally.
There are more traps than you can shake a stick out. Rogues become a necessity for once in MMOs. However, trap placements are static in a dungeon. Do that dungeon a few times, and you start to remember where they all are. Really hurts, since the previously mentioned lack of content means you learn those dungeons by heart. I think I can find my way through some easier than I can get to the grocery store, now.
The social part of the game leaves a lot to be desired right now. I hope it improves. Pickup groups, like in most MMOs, sucks. And at release, new players are going to get stuck playing with beta testers that know all the lvl 1-5 dungeons by memory, and are going to push through at breakneck speed in the grand effort to be highest level of that class, first. (The MMO version of the e-penis award, I guess.)
I really want to track down my old PnP group, which has scattered around the country after coll
So basically, it can't do anything new, anything Neverwinter Nights hasn't done for years. Plus, the review says combat rules are nothing like D&D and more like Diablo?!? Oh my, what a letdown. Wake me up when there is a persistent world that obeys D&D (or better: Hackmaster) rules.
DO NOT PLAY MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAMES!
Please understand that this is not a troll, but there's nothing more infuriating than trying to talk to some running-around asshat who won't even acknowledge you. Totally ruins the atmosphere, dontcha think?
I mean, why log on to a server with well over thousands of players if it's only to do quests alone, play alone, and not even interact with other people? It's the basic premise of an MMORPG, roleplaying! Talking, drinking an ale at the inn while sharing stories, discussing current events, exchanging gossip, political information, creating ties between guilds/factions/whatnot, haggling for prices with a player craftsman, going in to feel how it would really be if you lived there! Not a chatroom with a fantasy backdrop! Not an FPS for people who can't aim, either.
Soapbox session over.
Designing an MMORPG must be a bitch. It doesn't matter wich choice you make it will always upset someone who will bitterly complain that your game wich they have no intention of really paying for anyway is not exactly like the game they are paying for.
Look at the reactions so far to DDO. It ain't WoW. Well no fucking shit sherlock. It never tried to be. In fact if you looked at the design docs it is very clear that they pretty much designed the game to be not WoW.
The world doesn't need another WoW or EQ or Guild Wars or Age of Camelot or Lineage because all these games already exist.
We get countless articles bemoaning that games are just endless sequels with no originilaty but beware the company that actually tries to do something different.
So DDO does not have PvP. Must every MMORPG game have PvP? It reminds me of a few years ago when every game had to have a multiplayer mode no matter how silly. Or the days of the bubble when even the local bakery had to have a website.
DDO also seems to want to get rid of the level grind. Levels are the bane of MMORPG games. Why? How much trouble do you have in forming a team for Capture the Flag in quake? Oh none? Just join and your in a group? Might this because there is no level in quake and anyone can group with anyone else?
Now imagine quake where the longer you have had the game the more damage you do with your weapons. How attractive would it be to buy the game 3 months after launch? Yet this is exactly what happens in games like EQ1/2 and SWG NGE has added it as well. If your a real newbie then good luck. You will maybe wonder where the hell everyone is. Well they are in the high level areas wondering why there are no new players. Grouping up with a high level was added to EQ2 with the high level then lowering his level to yours but it is a pain. You got to find a really nice person who is willing to help you level up and that is exactly what they will be doing, trying to get you to level up as fast as possible. You even get more XP when being mentored to make the grind faster. The notion that its is the journey that matters not arriving seems not to exist in MMORPG land. Perhaps I am just a weirdo who likes to quest and doesn't care if it is at level 1 or level 1000th.
Levels create yet more problems. If you have crafting then high levels usually have no need for low level crafters items. Low level crafters can only gain XP by grinding low level items. CUE SWG and its "bought" crafter levels where a player would get money being a combat class to then pay for grinding to master crafter. No new player wanted to be a pure crafter could make it work. You would simply go bankrupt.
DDO seems to have dropped crafting altogether. Bad news for those who like a player run economy but at least it saves them a lot of problems. Since no game has ever gotten it right before.
PvP is yet another Level nightmare. Obviously a level 10 is goint to beat a level 1. Great fun for the level 10 especially if the level 1 was AFK because noobs just deserve it you know (there may be nice PvP fans but I never seen one). PvP fans want to race to the highest level and then wack their e-penis at lower level players. Nothing a PvPer enjoys more then challenging players in the starter area to duels.
DDO so far has 10 levels. Or does it? With 4 mini levels it could be said to have 40 levels. What of course really matters is how much difference there is between levels. Lets just say that a level 1 ddo player will get his ass handed back to him by a level 10 in the same way as a level 1 EQ player will get his ass handed to him by a level 60 EQ player. Oh and the ruleset for DDO allows for far higher classes. If they come you will have peasant players and virtual gods trying to exist in the same world.
Will it avoid the level grinding trap of other MMORPG games or will it to have endless walktrhoughs for levelling up the fastest and then complaining there is not enough high level content and there just don't seem to be new players
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Here's a suggestion for soloers... DO NOT PLAY MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER ONLINE GAMES!
Wrong. A better suggestion is to find a MMOG that supports soloing. They do exist.
Guild Wars supports solo and casual play fantastically well, because henchmen are available in towns for you to recruit into your team in place of other players. This eliminates at a stroke the "LFG downtime" problem that is so common in traditional MMOGs.
And what's more, the AI of henchies in GW is extremely good, often better then the natural intelligence of players, and certainly more responsive to your demands and direction. It makes playing a pleasure.
Sadly, that's a universal truth.
After suffering the trials and tribulations of pickup groups in various MMOGs for some years now, I've finally found a solution that avoids the problems of pickup groups entirely: henchmen in Guild Wars:
Henchmen are a wonderful answer to the many problems of building and playing with teams in MMOGs. It's sad to see that DDO doesn't provide their own version of GW's henchies, and therefore suffers all the old problems that player teams bring with them.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
themselves! One of the major things that killed their last game, AC2, is that they made the game they wanted to play, not what the players were asking for.
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Ken Troop's comment (he is one of the mains behind this game)
A large part of the lack of randomness in DDO is deliberate. Our philosophy has typically been very "anti-random". Personally, I have a very hard time caring or enjoying content that is either completely random, or scaled in difficulty based on, say, the size of my party. Where is the challenge? Where is the learnable/masterable experience? (Some of my best memories of early online MUD play are playing an area over and over again, learning how to succeed, learning how to master it -- if an experience is endlessly mutable, that thrill of mastery is gone).
---
In other words, if he don't like it you ain't going to get it.
Turbine is going to have to hope people see the "D&DO" part before their name. Too many gamers associate Turbine with cheating and exploiting for good reason.
Turbine used to be run by dreamers, now its run my egotist and marketers.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
because lord knows that no DM can every be exploited either....
I mod everyone down who says "I'll get modded down for this." I hate to disappoint.
The core idea of D&D has always been the adventuring group venturing into the dungeon to face the dangers, alone. There's possibly only ever been 1 dungeon in D&D that receives enough traffic to make a non-instanced dungeon feel right, and that's not in Eberron(Undermountain). As Turbine seems to be going to great lengths to make it feel authentic, the instanced quests make perfect sense.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
So heres the final word as to why I dont like this game:
The art style.
Its not about weither or not its gritty. Its about the artist copying the bad dnd 3rd ed art. I can quote atleast one friend saying that the Elves look like they all have downs Syndrome. I know, probably spelt that wrong, but you get the picture. The art is just plain Ugly overall, and stickfigury.
The only plus I've seen to it, is that it avoids the "Busty Female with no pants" syndrome. If the character = female, than they're armored to the gills just the same as the male counterparts.
I played and posted my two cents on Blue's News on 12/14/2005:
/laugh, /dance, /p for party talk, etc.
"I played it last night for an hour. It looks pretty especially the indoor places, but for some reason the engine wasn't smooth like WoW. I thought it was lags, but it was still not smooth even at 6 AM PST. Taverns (those are cool -- better than WoW's inns) are so laggy for me. Solo instances(?) are smoother, but not that smooth. Outdoor areas lag too for me. The game was choppy for me with everything ON and without antialias on my XFX NVIDIA GeForce 6800 (128 MB), Athlon 64 3200+, and 1.5 GB of RAM. I had turn things down like use billinear, distance view lowered, etc.
I did not like its GUI. I think it was just too big especially when my maximum screen resolution is 1152x864. I prefer WoW's.
I loved the character setup. I made a hot chick with red long hair [grin]. Its setup reminds me of City of Heroes and City of Villain's. I also like the video clips (I wonder how much disk space these took up) showing each player class. I played as a barbarian since I like meelee fightings. I only got off the second boat after training. I will play more later hopefully. A lot of commands are similiar if you know WoW like:
To compare, I still like WoW more so far."
I wonder how much has changed since then.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Ok, I've got some questions about the game in general. I didn't participate in beta, but I'm always looking for some MMORPG to satisfy my "jones." I've looked at some of the comments, so I'm not going to ask if it's solo-friendly...
Is there a level grind? It looks like there is, but you have to complete the dungeons to earn the xp to progress toward a level.
Does the game lend itself to the holy trinity-style of group that EQ led to, or is it pretty forgiving of class makeup? I don't want to select a class to get pounced on by the anti-necro "u guyz sux n grpz" crowd that seems to spring up in MMORPGS. Similarly, I'm not wild about having to hang around in town forever as we bid on the next cleric to log in. In PnP D&D clerics were more than just healers, and a group could get by (maybe not perfectly) without having a tank, healer and damage dealer (especially because DMs could get mean and totally ignore the agro rules that are common in MMORPGS).
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
I was totally turned off by the no PvP announcement. The same company is also developing the LOTR MMO, which by the way has no PvP either. PvP for me is a requirement, teaming with buddies to fight NPCs just seems... pointless. I can do that with NWN. I'm not one to go on a gankfest, but PvP just provides more "realism" and opportunities in between mission/quest grinds.
I was even more disappointed with the No PvP annoucement with the LOTR MMO. When LOTR was first announced, I imagined the possibilities of joining an Orc Band, raiding, and pillaging.
It makes me wonder if they even have the necessary experience to develop a good PvP system within an MMO.
Awesome!
these designers know very little at Turbine.
The issue isn't that designers don't what they are doing, it becomes an issue when one of them becomes the overriding force behind what happens.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It sounded very interesting from the promo text, but I dug a little further, and found some other comments from various Beta testers as well as above:
The World : The hub style of MMO really bums me out, for many reasons. Every aspect of the gameplay exists within private instances. Groups are found in the town areas, ala Guild Wars. Due to this, all open-ended gameplay disappears and is replaced by simple, directed instancing. Your mileage may vary, but I prefer plundering vast open plains and mountains. Worlds are fun. Boxes less so.
I agree. While CoH handled zone transitions cleverly, they were still there. Personally, I *like* just exploring, seeing new things, even if there isn't a 'game value' to the exploration. I know many people that pretty much mainly jsut do that. Having everything be intanced is, well, so artifical and constantly reminds you of that.
Don't get this game expecting to solo. A lot of folks have pissed and moaned about that, but they are trying to be pretty true to the Pen and Paper (PnP) rules and designs. You almost never see a DM spend all this time to create a world, dungeons, and the like, and then have them sit down at a table with a lone player with a lone character. Get over your wish to solo. It's a MMO. You are supposed to be grouping!
Uh oh. Frankly, I'm NOT a gigantic fan of grouping. I play MMOs for the unpredictability, the variety of content, NOT to make new friends and gain social interaction. Frankly, most of the groups I've been in sucked, WW2OL being the great exception. I *really* like the idea that they have an integrated voicecomm system - that genuinely may make all the difference.
Finally, I'm simply not convinced that the D&D mechanics really work. I mean, I think I've seen a fair share of RPGs in my time, and *every* one of them had rationalizations, shortcuts, and RubeGoldberg(tm) tables to minimize number crunching and speed play and get back to the interactions. With computers, it's ENTIRELY the opposite - you can have them auto-calculate the ballistic path of an arrow, but they can't make a bartender that will give you a decent conversation.
Does such a system scale to realtime? Doesn't it make more sense to get, say, a Steve Perrin or Robin Laws to design the rules around the capabilities of the venue, rather than shoehorning the rules to work in contexts where they really don't?
Problems: (and if you've read more than me, and found the answers to these already addressed - I'd love the links)
- Woohoo - I'm a wizard, I get 2 spells and then I might as well logoff for the day? How does that work in a realtime world?
- Deaths: in MMOs, deaths are frequent and annoying but in PnP D&D, if you died below level what, 6-7-8 it was rarely worth the trouble to rez you. Even healing in true DnD was a matter of DAYS.
I guess for me a lot of the mechanical questions revolve around the ability of a PnP game to compress time freely, which is absolutely verboten in an MMO.
This game is going to be very rewarding for a group of 6 people that want to play DDO as a cohesive group 2-3 times a week for a few hours each time, with maybe a Saturday session that lasts 4+ hours for those longer missions.
Then why not just get together and play, if one has the schedule time for this?
I don't see any crafting at all - that's a HUGE loss of potential customer base, right there. I've realized that, since playing CoH, this is sort of a subgame that drives a lot of activity, and (for me) is quite fun.
One plus: no "inter mission travel", thus no areas strangely devoid of trees, thus no sleeping on the ground in the middle of nowhere, thus no being eaten by a passing bonesnapper when the DMs pissed at you for something or other.
-Styopa
While I didn't much like DDO, a friend of mine, who is an avid pen and paper D&D gamer, did like the game. It provided the kind of D&D experience he's been looking for. For comparison, we both tried the World of Warcraft free trial, and while I very much liked that game he didn't care for it in the least. His main concern with DDO was the feeling that there was a lack of content especially given the low level cap.
I'm convinced DDO is going to cater to a very specific group of gamers. I don't expect many are going to be lured from WoW, perhaps more will come from EQ/EQ2. One big problem is that the game made me feel very isolated from the larger world. First of all the game is very linear, at least initially. I'm stuck in one small section of the city until I complete a number of quests. Then I can only move on by completing another set of quests or by levelling up, which takes an excruciatingly huge amount of time. The second problem is that the player teleports to every instance. There's some dungeon hundreds of miles away and the hero materializes there suddenly. It hurts immersion.
Of course, there's a more significant problem here with all the instancing. Guild Wars instances all quests just like DDO, but that game is free to play. Furthermore, there's more of a sense of location in that game because you actually travel through the lands outside towns and forts. That game also progresses a lot more quickly than DDO does, but it does provide a very different experience from DDO.
I think Neverwinter Nights provided a very similar, but more fast-paced and entertaining experience than Dungeons & Dragons Online. That's not to say DDO is necessarily a bad game, but I don't think it's going to appeal to most people and given that it's a subscription-based game it's going to be even more difficult to attract gamers, especially given the competition. I guess this game will show whether or not there's a market for a reasonably faithful D&D experience in PC gaming.
They should have designed it so that you could sign up to dm as well as play. You could design your own dungeons or even your own section of the world. This would provide a lot more content for players and give people that like to dm something to do.
Now maybe it's just me, but when I think of "Dungeons & Dragons," I primarily think of settings such as Greyhawk, Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms. When I think of an MMORPG which uses the D&D brand, I'd expect it to use one of these iconic D&D settings (probably Forgotten Realms due to the higher magical content) rather than a newish pseudo-pulp fantasy setting.
Unfortunately, they've decided the latter, and are using Eberron. Not that there's anything wrong with Eberron: If they marketed it as "Eberron Online," I'd be all over it. But D&D Online? Gimme something classic. Something with staying power. Something that D&D fans from five, ten, fifteen years ago will still be familiar with.
Of course, I'd kill for a Planescape MMORPG, but that's neither here nor there.
Soylens viridis homines es
Levels create yet more problems. If you have crafting then high levels usually have no need for low level crafters items. Low level crafters can only gain XP by grinding low level items. CUE SWG and its "bought" crafter levels where a player would get money being a combat class to then pay for grinding to master crafter. No new player wanted to be a pure crafter could make it work. You would simply go bankrupt.
DDO seems to have dropped crafting altogether. Bad news for those who like a player run economy but at least it saves them a lot of problems. Since no game has ever gotten it right before.
True, but there are ways to mitigate the problem:
-Let low-level crafters make at least low-level items in good quality (or drop the dependency of quality on crafting level - if you can make it at all, it is as good as from a master).
-Introduce some consumables that everybody needs which can be crafted at low skill levels. That gives the crafter newbies something to grind on which makes sense.
-Allow limited "batch" crafting to reduce stupid clicking (as reportedly available in WOW, but I would limit the number of items to prevent excessive overnight leveling).
-If you want to be radical, drop crafting levels altogether. Everybody is a master crafter. This one sounds like copping out, but it eliminates crafting grinding which is the most boring of all grinds. At least, I have yet to see a really interesting crafting system that does not get boring with repetition.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Just thought I'd point out that the word 'effect' can also be used as a verb. http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/en glish/data/d0081523.html
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Why is it that naive, idealistic comments get modded up, but harsh realistic comments get modded down?
And naive, realistic comments go in people's sigs?
Anyway, the modding of naive idealistic comments is a mystery to me. But the harsh realistic comments that get modded down generally have the additional virtue of being assholish. Tact is not something that most people choose to employ in that situation, and moderations reflect that. HTH!
Tact doesn't really help anyone in the long run.
Philosophical now! I shall counter your argument suchly:
Assume a hypothetical publically accessed forum where nobody has much prior knowledge of the other participants (afraid I can't come up with a good example ATM). More people are going to want to listen to a well-stated opinion relatively free of ad hominem attacks. More people are likely to tune out quickly when an argument begins with such clever rhetoric as "You are such a n00b!". Statements like that are a good indicator of the level of content to follow. Now if, in this hypothetical forum, it were possible to give somebody a 'volume boost', one would be more inclined to boost somebody who they themselves had enjoyed listening to. Even if the content were essentially the same as the ignored argument. Non?
...who keep bothering me.
DO NOT KEEP BOTHERING ME WHEN I OBVIOUSLY DON'T WANT TO TALK TO YOU!
Please understand that this is not a troll, but there's nothing more infuriating than trying to play a game while being hounded by some asshat who won't even acknowledge that I'm ignoring them. Totally ruins the atmosphere, dontcha think? I mean, why log on to a server with well over thousands of players if it's only to pester me alone and not even interact with other people? It's the basic premise of an MMORPG, roleplaying! Ignoring annoying whelps, pressing onward for greater glory, playing the game! Not a chatroom with a fantasy backdrop! Not an IRC for people who got k-lined for not STFUing, either.
Soapbox session over.
Combat is fun, but there is very little content. You'll pay your 50$ then your 15$ for subscribing, and you'll 'beat the game' in under 4 weeks. What I mean to say is you'll have a near max level character with awesome equipment... When you have +5 weapons and max level, what else is there to do? Its not like you can marry the princess and raise children. Your goal in the game was lewt and power. When you got all the power and played all the missions, there is no motivation to play on. I think the game will be a success, but there will be few long time subscribers.
God spoke to me.
Oui.
Well, if want everybody to know that you think that they're a bunch of turds, than I agree, tact is useless.