No one understands it perfectly, but at this point I'd have to say I have a good deal more understanding about it than you, no offense intended.
Like it or not, Christianity is based entirely on AUTHORITY.
Yes. That would be God's authority, not man's.
Christians believe that certain individuals have direct or near-direct communication with God
Anyone can have direct communication with God. It's your choice whether you choose to engage in that or not.
These people are informally called "prophets", but Christianity has lots of people in the role that AREN'T called prophets like the Pope, "Early Church Fathers", etc.
These are leaders who lead by example, not authority. Their role is to help others along the Christian path. If they are trying to lead authoritatively, you should be very wary of them and look for other leaders.
Christianity is completely antithetical to the concept of "choosing the right path". There are multiple paths to choose, but only one of them (the orthodox Christian path) leads to immortality. Everyone else is screwed (HOW they are screwed is a matter of some debate).
Every Christian will have a different path to walk. However it is true that each of those paths must go through Christ. The essence of Christianity is that each person will have to choose Christ or not. No one can be forced to choose that path, or 'converted'. This is what is known as free will. God could have created humans as beings that had no choice but to follow his will, but he wanted beings to choose him of their own volition. Thus true Christianity cannot be legislated, and it cannot be decreed by any authority. It can only be chosen by each individual. Anything else is not true Christianity, but rather some man-made facsimile masquerading under the name. And there are plenty of those.
Why not? I see no problem as long as they can do a good job of it. Unless you think that being a government official has become synonymous with being corrupt and/or incompetent:).
There's a lot that could be debated here, but I really don't want to get into it. So suffice to say, in most such positions an official is called upon to make decisions that a Christian should not be making.
As to your example about Daniel, my view on that is that's one of those things that's changed from Old Testament to New. Again, there's lots of room for debate there but IMO this isn't the place for that.
Whatever you want to imply about the Catholic church, they are the biggest, most successful (and original one, since the Pope has a direct mandate from Jesus) of all Christian churches.
Martin Luther and all the funders of many other sects can claim they interpret correctly the word of god, but so could I, you, or anybody else (which is what actually happens), but St Peter is buried in Rome under the church that bears his name, if a big hint about who received the word from the Christian god was ever needed.
As a matter of fact in most of the world, Catholic=Christian, which will infuriate people from other denominations but you can't argue with facts like those.
Not that I care, since I am an atheist, but the contempt with which the Catholic church is treated in the US is frankly laughable.
Please note carefully that I specified the Catholic church in history. The Catholic church today has come a long way since then.
If people have not asked to be converted you should leave them alone.
That hits on exactly what most people (including many Christians) don't understand. People cannot convert anyone. If you're trying to convert someone, you're not doing what you're supposed to. The Christian's role is to present Christianity in an inviting manner, and that's it. If your presentation as a Christian is an obnoxious turn-off, you need to spend more time figuring out how to present it.
Precisely. You can't legislate true Christianity, it completely goes against the definition of what Christianity is. (For proof, you need look no further than the Catholic church in history to see what the result is of legislated Christianity.) Christianity is about choosing the right path (which is never the easy path). This is also why as a Christian I cannot support religious people (Christian or otherwise) as government officials. It puts a true Christian in a no-win situation. As a Christian, it is your duty to do everything you can to try to show others the way... but at the same time you have to let them choose their own way.
Couldn't that reasoning be used to justify humans driving any animal to extinction that they don't like? What if I have something against timberwolves? Could I start killing them on sight and claim natural selection?
Yep. Unless you have some explanation other than natural selection for how humans got to be advanced enough to do that.
If the tortoise went extinct not by natural selection, then it may have left a void in its natural ecosystem that could have downstream effects on stability of the same.
And how else would they go extinct? Humans are as much a part of natural selection as anything else. The very definition of natural selection dictates that some species will become extinct while others (humans for example) become obscenely populous.
That sounds about right. I also seem to recall reading somewhere that a patent can take as long as 5 years to be issued, after it's initially applied for. And if that's the case, that definitely lends credence to your statement.
Yes, and no one is arguing that. But that is completely beside the point. The point is, at the time of the release of the Warhammer MMO (now), Warhammer is probably a bigger brand than Warcraft was a little over 3 years ago when the Warcraft MMO was released. And for what it's worth, Warcraft brand value did slide downward a bit with WC3. While it did have a lot of fans, there were also a lot of WC2 fans who didn't like the direction they took with it.
Not that any of it really matters though. You don't have to have a well-known brand to release a game that sells millions of copies, Guild Wars being a prime example.
I don't think pure quality alone is what made WoW popular, it was designed to be very beginner friendly
Same with Warhammer. If anything, it's even more beginner-friendly than WoW.
and had a big brand and all that (Warcraft is a bigger brand than Warhammer Fantasy to me, I and probably many others didn't even know there was a Warhammer besides 40k for the longest time and I still don't care).
Yes, now Warcraft is a bigger brand. But when WoW was released, Warcraft wasn't a bigger brand than Warhammer is now. And any long-time Warhammer fan can tell you that Warcraft IP is basically copy&paste from Warhammer. They just created their own lore for what's basically the exact same universe. (Obviously this is not infringement because Orcs and Goblins and Dwarves etc. in this form have been around longer than either company.)
To beat it you have to do more than just make a good game.
No one is saying Warhammer is going to 'beat' WoW. But it will be a wildly successful game in its own right.
I just got the SE preorder, so I got my head-start Tuesday morning. That was after playing in open beta for a week.
And I have to say, after playing 3500+ hours in WoW and 2000+ in Guild Wars, this game is awesome. One of the big suits at EA Mythic predicted they'd have 1 million subs within a year, and hit 3 mil in the lifetime of the game. Personally, I think he's being way too conservative. My prediction is 1 mil by the end of this year and 5+ eventually. It really is that good. This is the first game that will provide anything close to serious competition for WoW.
They're already having to clone servers to cut population and remove queue times (that's YESTERDAY, before the game even released). Which btw, is IMO a much better solution than free server transfers.
So anyhow, I got my Disciple of Khaine to rank 12 already and it's a blast. One thing I really like is how every class is designed to require strategy beyond just working with cooldowns. For example, my Disciple of Khaine uses 'Soul Essence' as a resource for healing, however this 'Soul Essence' can only be generated by doing attacks which require the basic Attack Points resource.
In current games it won't. We're talking about games where it eventually will.
No, we're not. You're talking about your idealistic MMO where that would happen. But no one will make that game because no one would play it. No one wants to play a game where they have to keep playing in the starting area indefinitely. Except you perhaps.
Yes, but mostly because systems theory isn't on the usual lists of game designer skills. Let someone without a clue about systems theory design such a game, and it'll be either a complete mess or simple never finished.
It's not on the list because it's a waste of time.
They'll be looking for the games with game mechanics (or lack thereof) that are conducive to griefing. If game mechanics make griefing too boring or tedious... yes, they'll move to another game. And good riddance.
Any multiplayer game that allows a griefer to have an impact on the play experience of other players is a prime candidate for griefers. If they can make the game worse for other players, they will be there and they will make it worse.
No it's not. Most MMOs completely lack feedback loops. That makes them completely different beasts from any game that would.
Newsflash: no one (besides you) cares what the number-crunching behind the curtain looks like. People care about results. There's two types of ecologies you can put in an MMO: 1. one that can be affected by players, which will be exploited and ruined. 2. one that cannot be affected by players. There is no in-between. If it can be affected by players, it can be exploited and trashed. Any other system is functionally identical to every other such system. It's a complete waste of programming time and server resources to try to put in a 'player affected' ecology that you then have to put in feedback loops for so players can't trash it. In the end, you achieve nothing that a fixed respawn timer and rate could not have done just as well with far less wasted time and resources. That's why it will never happen, at least not in a successful MMO.
You mean like big quests involving dozens of people without requiring you to form any kind of group?
That would be fairly trivial to add to WoW. In fact, there already were quests like that, remember the prelude to Ahn'Qiraj ? Other games also have this type of quest, for example the zone-specific events in CoX.
Or balanced PvP?
Other games than WoW offer much better balanced PvP. Balanced PvP was never a really big design concern for WoW.
Or large-scale RvR?
DAOC has that, but it's getting kinda old. Eve also has some fairly large battles.
This story is about Warhammer. You said something about making a game with features WoW doesn't have. Those are features WoW does not have.
Yeah, because no one was playing D2 HC, right ? I mean, your precious collection of bits could die permanently, even to things like bad luck, bugs, lag or even the occasional professional ganker. Just like no one's playing Nethack, etc.
And those games are making their developers bucketloads of money, I'm sure.
I think that if the game gets a few basic things right (for example not being buggy as heck at release, or not having a kludge as an UI), players will notice it.
That's a completely meaningless statement. Every game is noticed by players. A lot of them are not noticed by many players, and many are noticed for the wrong reasons. But you will not get enough players to make your game profitable noticing your game unless it offers features they are interested in. Once again, if every major feature in your game is something that appeals to a specific niche crowd, your game will appeal to an extremely small amount of people. Each niche feature is going to exclude players that might otherwise have played your game. That's why, if y
And this demonstrates exactly why the mod system is broken. Even if it's intended to be a 'joke', this is an incorrect mod and in very poor taste.
There needs to be more repercussions for trolls who abuse mod privileges, and more education on what the moderation options actually mean.
If you actually want to know, copy and paste the link from my sig. It goes directly to the section in the FAQ that gives a brief description of each mod option.
They will, if they know that it will eventually affect them.
It won't affect them. They're already done with the newbie area. And trying to put in a system so starting area genocide would somehow affect max-level players is way more trouble than it's worth.
Also, maybe the griefer guild will be more careful on the next server after they find out the impact that their actions have on their own members.
Clearly you don't understand griefers. They don't care what future impact their actions will have. If the game quits being fun, they'll just move on to another game after they've destroyed the last one.
Then again, the in-game ecology can be made large enough that genocide isn't possible. You know the maximum number of players on the server, you can estimate that rate at which they can kill stuff - so you just need to tweak the reproduction curve of the mobs accordingly. It's just a matter of doing some fairly simple math, but most people don't want to bother with anything that even looks like a differential equation.
How the irony of your statement here escapes you is astounding. For all practical purposes, what you describe here is exactly what every MMO uses. They just simplify it with a fixed respawn timer and limit so the mobs never run out and the server doesn't have to waste resources trying to calculate exactly how many mobs need to reproduce in order to keep up with current kill rates. Unless of course you're suggesting a fixed reproduction rate that would counter the maximum amount of slaughter that could theoretically be done to that species, which would result in the whole server being over-run by that species in no time. You really do need to take more time to think things through before you hit Submit.
Unfortunately, if you want to make a MMORPG that appeals to the "vast majority of players", you'll have to compete with WoW and it will probably wipe the floor with you, unless Blizzard manages to screw up royally at some point. If you want to start your own MMORPG - don't compete with WoW in the beginning. It's like trying to take the bananas away from a 600-pound gorilla in a bad mood.
Yeah, see here's what you're missing. "Vast majority of players" in this case doesn't refer to players who want a certain type of MMO gameplay. Rather, it refers to players who want to be able to play an MMO without having to worry about some jackass fucking over the game so it's unplayable. It refers to the players of WoW, Guild Wars, CoX, AoC, Vanguard, EQ, EQII, LotRO, WAR... do I really need to make the whole list for you? So sure, knock yourself out. Go find the other 3 guys who want the same thing you do and go build your own private game. Since there'll just be the 4 of you, you won't have to worry about an asshat ruining it.
Instead, find some features that WoW does not offer, and never will.
You mean like big quests involving dozens of people without requiring you to form any kind of group? Or balanced PvP? Or large-scale RvR?
I'd happily try out and play a MMOG with perma-death for example (nothing gave me adrenaline rushes like D2 HC back then), since I usually get bored with a char after a few weeks and don't really like the system where your reward is mainly a function of how long you play, and only somewhat related to skill. If doing stupid things (or just plain bad luck) gets your character killed permanently, being the top dog on the server will mean more than "yeah, I spend 10 hours a day, 7 days a week in front of the computer".
Whoops, I think you just lost 2 of the other 3 people who were interested in your game.
Ok, seriously, all sarcasm aside. Yes, there's room for niche games. But there's only so much room. And if every big feature of your game goes against mainstream popular demand, guess what - your game will appeal to very very very few players. No, you don't have to make a WoW-killer that appeals to all the care-bears to have a successful game. You do have to have features that appeal to enough players to make it worthwhile. Less than 100K players is not usually considered successful for an MMO.
Warhammer gives XP for PVP, which is something WoW should have done, and I bet will do in the future.
It's way too late to just throw that in WoW, unless they also allow players to switch off EXP gain as in EQ2. Why? The twink scene is way too large at this point. There's thousands of twink players now in every battlegroup. Heck, the largest guild I've ever been in was a twink guild.
Yes, I know all the twink-haters would love that. But currently, there's way more twink players than haters.
Likewise. I've spent too many hours in the last three years on Guild Wars and WoW, and I'm just ready for a new game, like so many other players I know.
This is where I have to take back statements I made in the past, where I said neither Age of Conan or Warhammer would have any real impact on WoW subscriptions. I'm almost 100% certain now that Warhammer will definitely have an impact on WoW. It won't kill it by any means, but I think they will see significant decreases in active subscriptions for pretty much the first time ever.
That said, I'm pretty excited about the game. I've seen very very few bugs. The biggest one I experienced personally was some obscure compatibility error with my onboard ethernet adapter and the game. Something I've never heard of before, but here it is. I use an older DFI Lanparty socket AM2 board with an Nvidia chipset, and the ethernet adapter is an NVidia gigabit model. I've never had any trouble with any other games using this adapter, but for whatever reason there must be some specific type of packets being used by Warhammer that this adapter just can't handle properly. I'm able to log into the game fine, and even log into a character. But when I log into a character, most of the time it doesn't work properly at that point. I can see my character and other player characters, I can run around, but I can't cast any spells or interact with anything. Occasionally NPCs won't even show up. After a short while (30 sec to 3 min) I get disconnected and kicked back to server/character selection. If I log back in, my character will still be at the same place and clearly the game received no input from my system. My laptop has none of these issues, even when connected to the same network switch with the same ethernet cable. And the desktop that has these issues when connected through cable ethernet works fine when connected via wireless. I have yet to check for newer drivers for the ethernet adapter to see if that would solve the problem.
Besides that, the only significant bug I've seen is it's extremely easy to get stuck, particularly in buildings.
Clearly you didn't take much time to think that through. Let's dissect it, shall we?
That's what open PvP is for.
That depends on someone always being around to stop someone else from committing genocide, and on that first someone to be able to stop the second someone from committing it. Do you really think max level players in top gear are really going to sit around in starting areas waiting for other max level players to stop them from doing genocide? Yeah, right.
Also, implement some measures to make this harder (how about royal decrees to leave the wolves and bears alone, and big nasty NPC rangers on the lookout for poachers?)
Right. So now you have to decide exactly how many kills of the same thing in a certain timespan, to be adjusted based on level that players are allowed to get away with before they get pwnt by the big bad rangers. And you have to tweak that for every type of mob in every zone, and you have to make sure you have rangers covering every area, or you have to have rangers spawning out of nowhere. None of which makes the player experience fun. I'm absolutely certain the vast majority of players would much rather just have infinite mobs on a set respawn timer.
But it does try to do something new, in a games industry which mostly just pumps out more clones of whatever sold well last year.
Well, no it really doesn't. That's what it was *supposed* to do. But now finally at release, it's not really anything but a re-skinned level-based RPG. The only difference is, instead of 'gear' you have 'body parts'.
At least it looks different, and that by itself can make it interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't seem to understand Christianity.
No one understands it perfectly, but at this point I'd have to say I have a good deal more understanding about it than you, no offense intended.
Like it or not, Christianity is based entirely on AUTHORITY.
Yes. That would be God's authority, not man's.
Christians believe that certain individuals have direct or near-direct communication with God
Anyone can have direct communication with God. It's your choice whether you choose to engage in that or not.
These people are informally called "prophets", but Christianity has lots of people in the role that AREN'T called prophets like the Pope, "Early Church Fathers", etc.
These are leaders who lead by example, not authority. Their role is to help others along the Christian path. If they are trying to lead authoritatively, you should be very wary of them and look for other leaders.
Christianity is completely antithetical to the concept of "choosing the right path". There are multiple paths to choose, but only one of them (the orthodox Christian path) leads to immortality. Everyone else is screwed (HOW they are screwed is a matter of some debate).
Every Christian will have a different path to walk. However it is true that each of those paths must go through Christ. The essence of Christianity is that each person will have to choose Christ or not. No one can be forced to choose that path, or 'converted'. This is what is known as free will. God could have created humans as beings that had no choice but to follow his will, but he wanted beings to choose him of their own volition. Thus true Christianity cannot be legislated, and it cannot be decreed by any authority. It can only be chosen by each individual. Anything else is not true Christianity, but rather some man-made facsimile masquerading under the name. And there are plenty of those.
Why not? I see no problem as long as they can do a good job of it. Unless you think that being a government official has become synonymous with being corrupt and/or incompetent :).
There's a lot that could be debated here, but I really don't want to get into it. So suffice to say, in most such positions an official is called upon to make decisions that a Christian should not be making.
As to your example about Daniel, my view on that is that's one of those things that's changed from Old Testament to New. Again, there's lots of room for debate there but IMO this isn't the place for that.
The rest of your post I agree with.
Whatever you want to imply about the Catholic church, they are the biggest, most successful (and original one, since the Pope has a direct mandate from Jesus) of all Christian churches.
Martin Luther and all the funders of many other sects can claim they interpret correctly the word of god, but so could I, you, or anybody else (which is what actually happens), but St Peter is buried in Rome under the church that bears his name, if a big hint about who received the word from the Christian god was ever needed.
As a matter of fact in most of the world, Catholic=Christian, which will infuriate people from other denominations but you can't argue with facts like those.
Not that I care, since I am an atheist, but the contempt with which the Catholic church is treated in the US is frankly laughable.
Please note carefully that I specified the Catholic church in history. The Catholic church today has come a long way since then.
If people have not asked to be converted you should leave them alone.
That hits on exactly what most people (including many Christians) don't understand. People cannot convert anyone. If you're trying to convert someone, you're not doing what you're supposed to. The Christian's role is to present Christianity in an inviting manner, and that's it. If your presentation as a Christian is an obnoxious turn-off, you need to spend more time figuring out how to present it.
Precisely. You can't legislate true Christianity, it completely goes against the definition of what Christianity is. (For proof, you need look no further than the Catholic church in history to see what the result is of legislated Christianity.) Christianity is about choosing the right path (which is never the easy path). This is also why as a Christian I cannot support religious people (Christian or otherwise) as government officials. It puts a true Christian in a no-win situation. As a Christian, it is your duty to do everything you can to try to show others the way... but at the same time you have to let them choose their own way.
I would have made a real reply, but these other two did so much better than I could have.
Couldn't that reasoning be used to justify humans driving any animal to extinction that they don't like? What if I have something against timberwolves? Could I start killing them on sight and claim natural selection?
Yep. Unless you have some explanation other than natural selection for how humans got to be advanced enough to do that.
If the tortoise went extinct not by natural selection, then it may have left a void in its natural ecosystem that could have downstream effects on stability of the same.
And how else would they go extinct? Humans are as much a part of natural selection as anything else. The very definition of natural selection dictates that some species will become extinct while others (humans for example) become obscenely populous.
Long John Silver were me grampses olde nuncle ye insensitive clod!
Well if they're trying to use it to download pr0n I can see why they're complaining.
That sounds about right. I also seem to recall reading somewhere that a patent can take as long as 5 years to be issued, after it's initially applied for. And if that's the case, that definitely lends credence to your statement.
Yaarrrr! I be off searching the high interwebs for some booty mate! I be downloading me some movies fer free! And gamez, appz, and pieces of eight!
Yes, and no one is arguing that. But that is completely beside the point. The point is, at the time of the release of the Warhammer MMO (now), Warhammer is probably a bigger brand than Warcraft was a little over 3 years ago when the Warcraft MMO was released. And for what it's worth, Warcraft brand value did slide downward a bit with WC3. While it did have a lot of fans, there were also a lot of WC2 fans who didn't like the direction they took with it.
Not that any of it really matters though. You don't have to have a well-known brand to release a game that sells millions of copies, Guild Wars being a prime example.
I don't think pure quality alone is what made WoW popular, it was designed to be very beginner friendly
Same with Warhammer. If anything, it's even more beginner-friendly than WoW.
and had a big brand and all that (Warcraft is a bigger brand than Warhammer Fantasy to me, I and probably many others didn't even know there was a Warhammer besides 40k for the longest time and I still don't care).
Yes, now Warcraft is a bigger brand. But when WoW was released, Warcraft wasn't a bigger brand than Warhammer is now. And any long-time Warhammer fan can tell you that Warcraft IP is basically copy&paste from Warhammer. They just created their own lore for what's basically the exact same universe. (Obviously this is not infringement because Orcs and Goblins and Dwarves etc. in this form have been around longer than either company.)
To beat it you have to do more than just make a good game.
No one is saying Warhammer is going to 'beat' WoW. But it will be a wildly successful game in its own right.
I just got the SE preorder, so I got my head-start Tuesday morning. That was after playing in open beta for a week.
And I have to say, after playing 3500+ hours in WoW and 2000+ in Guild Wars, this game is awesome. One of the big suits at EA Mythic predicted they'd have 1 million subs within a year, and hit 3 mil in the lifetime of the game. Personally, I think he's being way too conservative. My prediction is 1 mil by the end of this year and 5+ eventually. It really is that good. This is the first game that will provide anything close to serious competition for WoW.
They're already having to clone servers to cut population and remove queue times (that's YESTERDAY, before the game even released). Which btw, is IMO a much better solution than free server transfers.
So anyhow, I got my Disciple of Khaine to rank 12 already and it's a blast. One thing I really like is how every class is designed to require strategy beyond just working with cooldowns. For example, my Disciple of Khaine uses 'Soul Essence' as a resource for healing, however this 'Soul Essence' can only be generated by doing attacks which require the basic Attack Points resource.
Hmm... RIAA suing Ray Beckerman = circumcision discussion? Somehow I'm missing the correlation...
Oh wait, this is /. I'm sorry, carry on.
Which is why I went with the best deal I could find for ~$1,000. But if you want to spend more I'd much rather go with something like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834220364
Just the slightest bit slower than any of the 3 listed in this 'article' and barely half the price of the cheapest of the three.
In current games it won't. We're talking about games where it eventually will.
No, we're not. You're talking about your idealistic MMO where that would happen. But no one will make that game because no one would play it. No one wants to play a game where they have to keep playing in the starting area indefinitely. Except you perhaps.
Yes, but mostly because systems theory isn't on the usual lists of game designer skills. Let someone without a clue about systems theory design such a game, and it'll be either a complete mess or simple never finished.
It's not on the list because it's a waste of time.
They'll be looking for the games with game mechanics (or lack thereof) that are conducive to griefing. If game mechanics make griefing too boring or tedious ... yes, they'll move to another game. And good riddance.
Any multiplayer game that allows a griefer to have an impact on the play experience of other players is a prime candidate for griefers. If they can make the game worse for other players, they will be there and they will make it worse.
No it's not. Most MMOs completely lack feedback loops. That makes them completely different beasts from any game that would.
Newsflash: no one (besides you) cares what the number-crunching behind the curtain looks like. People care about results. There's two types of ecologies you can put in an MMO: 1. one that can be affected by players, which will be exploited and ruined. 2. one that cannot be affected by players. There is no in-between. If it can be affected by players, it can be exploited and trashed. Any other system is functionally identical to every other such system. It's a complete waste of programming time and server resources to try to put in a 'player affected' ecology that you then have to put in feedback loops for so players can't trash it. In the end, you achieve nothing that a fixed respawn timer and rate could not have done just as well with far less wasted time and resources. That's why it will never happen, at least not in a successful MMO.
You mean like big quests involving dozens of people without requiring you to form any kind of group?
That would be fairly trivial to add to WoW. In fact, there already were quests like that, remember the prelude to Ahn'Qiraj ? Other games also have this type of quest, for example the zone-specific events in CoX.
Or balanced PvP?
Other games than WoW offer much better balanced PvP. Balanced PvP was never a really big design concern for WoW.
Or large-scale RvR?
DAOC has that, but it's getting kinda old. Eve also has some fairly large battles.
This story is about Warhammer. You said something about making a game with features WoW doesn't have. Those are features WoW does not have.
Yeah, because no one was playing D2 HC, right ? I mean, your precious collection of bits could die permanently, even to things like bad luck, bugs, lag or even the occasional professional ganker. Just like no one's playing Nethack, etc.
And those games are making their developers bucketloads of money, I'm sure.
I think that if the game gets a few basic things right (for example not being buggy as heck at release, or not having a kludge as an UI), players will notice it.
That's a completely meaningless statement. Every game is noticed by players. A lot of them are not noticed by many players, and many are noticed for the wrong reasons. But you will not get enough players to make your game profitable noticing your game unless it offers features they are interested in. Once again, if every major feature in your game is something that appeals to a specific niche crowd, your game will appeal to an extremely small amount of people. Each niche feature is going to exclude players that might otherwise have played your game. That's why, if y
And this demonstrates exactly why the mod system is broken. Even if it's intended to be a 'joke', this is an incorrect mod and in very poor taste.
There needs to be more repercussions for trolls who abuse mod privileges, and more education on what the moderation options actually mean.
If you actually want to know, copy and paste the link from my sig. It goes directly to the section in the FAQ that gives a brief description of each mod option.
They will, if they know that it will eventually affect them.
It won't affect them. They're already done with the newbie area. And trying to put in a system so starting area genocide would somehow affect max-level players is way more trouble than it's worth.
Also, maybe the griefer guild will be more careful on the next server after they find out the impact that their actions have on their own members.
Clearly you don't understand griefers. They don't care what future impact their actions will have. If the game quits being fun, they'll just move on to another game after they've destroyed the last one.
Then again, the in-game ecology can be made large enough that genocide isn't possible. You know the maximum number of players on the server, you can estimate that rate at which they can kill stuff - so you just need to tweak the reproduction curve of the mobs accordingly. It's just a matter of doing some fairly simple math, but most people don't want to bother with anything that even looks like a differential equation.
How the irony of your statement here escapes you is astounding. For all practical purposes, what you describe here is exactly what every MMO uses. They just simplify it with a fixed respawn timer and limit so the mobs never run out and the server doesn't have to waste resources trying to calculate exactly how many mobs need to reproduce in order to keep up with current kill rates. Unless of course you're suggesting a fixed reproduction rate that would counter the maximum amount of slaughter that could theoretically be done to that species, which would result in the whole server being over-run by that species in no time. You really do need to take more time to think things through before you hit Submit.
Unfortunately, if you want to make a MMORPG that appeals to the "vast majority of players", you'll have to compete with WoW and it will probably wipe the floor with you, unless Blizzard manages to screw up royally at some point. If you want to start your own MMORPG - don't compete with WoW in the beginning. It's like trying to take the bananas away from a 600-pound gorilla in a bad mood.
Yeah, see here's what you're missing. "Vast majority of players" in this case doesn't refer to players who want a certain type of MMO gameplay. Rather, it refers to players who want to be able to play an MMO without having to worry about some jackass fucking over the game so it's unplayable. It refers to the players of WoW, Guild Wars, CoX, AoC, Vanguard, EQ, EQII, LotRO, WAR... do I really need to make the whole list for you? So sure, knock yourself out. Go find the other 3 guys who want the same thing you do and go build your own private game. Since there'll just be the 4 of you, you won't have to worry about an asshat ruining it.
Instead, find some features that WoW does not offer, and never will.
You mean like big quests involving dozens of people without requiring you to form any kind of group? Or balanced PvP? Or large-scale RvR?
I'd happily try out and play a MMOG with perma-death for example (nothing gave me adrenaline rushes like D2 HC back then), since I usually get bored with a char after a few weeks and don't really like the system where your reward is mainly a function of how long you play, and only somewhat related to skill. If doing stupid things (or just plain bad luck) gets your character killed permanently, being the top dog on the server will mean more than "yeah, I spend 10 hours a day, 7 days a week in front of the computer".
Whoops, I think you just lost 2 of the other 3 people who were interested in your game.
Ok, seriously, all sarcasm aside. Yes, there's room for niche games. But there's only so much room. And if every big feature of your game goes against mainstream popular demand, guess what - your game will appeal to very very very few players. No, you don't have to make a WoW-killer that appeals to all the care-bears to have a successful game. You do have to have features that appeal to enough players to make it worthwhile. Less than 100K players is not usually considered successful for an MMO.
Warhammer gives XP for PVP, which is something WoW should have done, and I bet will do in the future.
It's way too late to just throw that in WoW, unless they also allow players to switch off EXP gain as in EQ2. Why? The twink scene is way too large at this point. There's thousands of twink players now in every battlegroup. Heck, the largest guild I've ever been in was a twink guild.
Yes, I know all the twink-haters would love that. But currently, there's way more twink players than haters.
Likewise. I've spent too many hours in the last three years on Guild Wars and WoW, and I'm just ready for a new game, like so many other players I know.
This is where I have to take back statements I made in the past, where I said neither Age of Conan or Warhammer would have any real impact on WoW subscriptions. I'm almost 100% certain now that Warhammer will definitely have an impact on WoW. It won't kill it by any means, but I think they will see significant decreases in active subscriptions for pretty much the first time ever.
That said, I'm pretty excited about the game. I've seen very very few bugs. The biggest one I experienced personally was some obscure compatibility error with my onboard ethernet adapter and the game. Something I've never heard of before, but here it is. I use an older DFI Lanparty socket AM2 board with an Nvidia chipset, and the ethernet adapter is an NVidia gigabit model. I've never had any trouble with any other games using this adapter, but for whatever reason there must be some specific type of packets being used by Warhammer that this adapter just can't handle properly. I'm able to log into the game fine, and even log into a character. But when I log into a character, most of the time it doesn't work properly at that point. I can see my character and other player characters, I can run around, but I can't cast any spells or interact with anything. Occasionally NPCs won't even show up. After a short while (30 sec to 3 min) I get disconnected and kicked back to server/character selection. If I log back in, my character will still be at the same place and clearly the game received no input from my system. My laptop has none of these issues, even when connected to the same network switch with the same ethernet cable. And the desktop that has these issues when connected through cable ethernet works fine when connected via wireless. I have yet to check for newer drivers for the ethernet adapter to see if that would solve the problem.
Besides that, the only significant bug I've seen is it's extremely easy to get stuck, particularly in buildings.
Clearly you didn't take much time to think that through. Let's dissect it, shall we?
That's what open PvP is for.
That depends on someone always being around to stop someone else from committing genocide, and on that first someone to be able to stop the second someone from committing it. Do you really think max level players in top gear are really going to sit around in starting areas waiting for other max level players to stop them from doing genocide? Yeah, right.
Also, implement some measures to make this harder (how about royal decrees to leave the wolves and bears alone, and big nasty NPC rangers on the lookout for poachers?)
Right. So now you have to decide exactly how many kills of the same thing in a certain timespan, to be adjusted based on level that players are allowed to get away with before they get pwnt by the big bad rangers. And you have to tweak that for every type of mob in every zone, and you have to make sure you have rangers covering every area, or you have to have rangers spawning out of nowhere. None of which makes the player experience fun. I'm absolutely certain the vast majority of players would much rather just have infinite mobs on a set respawn timer.
Yeah I agree with you there.
I mostly agree with you. Except...
But it does try to do something new, in a games industry which mostly just pumps out more clones of whatever sold well last year.
Well, no it really doesn't. That's what it was *supposed* to do. But now finally at release, it's not really anything but a re-skinned level-based RPG. The only difference is, instead of 'gear' you have 'body parts'.
At least it looks different, and that by itself can make it interesting.