In holland we had a system that basically split school up into trade schools and theory schools. Plenty of students just don't want to spend all their time in stuffy classrooms. That is great. Go learn a trade. 8 hours of shop will take the boredom right out of you AND the real world NEEDS mechanics and builders etc etc. Trade school didn't teach you much in the way of social studies or language beyond the basics (dutch and english and for the brightest german but no french (except for the cooks/butlers))
So while tech school was supposed to be lower it actually rated slightly higher. They certainly had a better change of getting a job.
This whole system was changed and the two schools merged. The amount of practice hours was reduced forcing the kids who don't want to be in school to be in school. This leads to lots of dropouts and the kids that stick with it learn no usefull trade.
Dropouts, useless school diploma's lack of skilled workers. Great. All because all those poor tradeskill kids were not learning about arts or biology or french.
It was an experiment and it failed completly. It sounds a lot like the american "no kid left behind" idea. Stop social experiments with our schools.
Well talk about taking the big jump. I always got the impression that the US had far less of an ID culture then say mainland europe (for instance in holland you are legally required to ID yourselve at work every now and then and the state can check and fine you)
And then you drop a bombshell like this? Not just an ID but a complete DNA database?
Somebody needs to explain the concept of babysteps to this guy.
And I wouldn't mind being the lesser hero or even one of the unwashed masses for a change. It might be refreshing. That nobody has tried it before is not my fault.
Ever heard of the anti-hero. There was a time when that was new. Before everyone only made movies with the hero who overcame the baddie. Then someone somewhere dared to create a hero who wasn't all the different from the baddie, or even worse who was the baddie.
Could a RPG but made in wich you are not the main hero. In wich it ain't you who gets to become king but are instead one of the people in the background?
The GBA game Fire Emblem seems to do this. You are just the tactician. NOT the heroine seeking her grandfather or later the hero seeking his father.
I haven't finished it yet but you might not even get the girl!!!
Yet it works. Unlike so many other Japanese so called RPG's you are not being forced to much in a role. You are a silent bystander not one of the faggoty princes.
Could an MMO work by not having "real" heroes. Well not in its current form. for an MMO to be an MMORPG there needs to be an element of story and suspension of disbelief. It doesn't work if you have to stend in a line to give the NPC a broom in exchange for her blue stone.
Current quests are static. Very static. That mortally wounded soldier asking you to deliver a last letter will still be mortally wounded centuries later.
Can this be made different. Can game designers come up with "generic" quests that are generated for each player randomly? So that as I am exploring an area I come across a small battle and find a mortally wounded soldier who requests me to deliver this letter and then dies and disappears making this quest unique for me?
It would not be easy. How to balance how many quests to give. How to make quests groupable (do only I get the letter, all the members of the group or the group gets 1 letter to deliver together). Could you add the element of competition. Say while I get the order to deliver a warning by a spy of an assasination an other player gets the order to assasinate? (no pvp all that I need to do is warn the npc to be assasinated)
The problem with "random" quests is offcourse simple. No guides on where to find quests. What quest you would get (and therefore the loot) would depend on a random number generator. Current MMORPG players seem to prefer picking only those quests that give them phat loot.
Abusing the game is offcourse a valid concern but hardly stopped by making the game predictable. In fact it is knowing exactly what the game will do every turn that makes it easy to exploit weaknesses. Camping phat loot spawns only works because you know that the spawn is every 6 hours.
With random quests you could easily make the endboss spawn somewhere out of the way. Perhaps even put the final boss in an instance so he is safe and people don't have to stand inline to slaughter the dungeon boss.
Yes translating CRPG's to an MMORPG is not going to work. But that doesn't mean there aren't other ways.
One idea I like is to make areas develop and collapse overtime. Create say 10 areas/worlds. At the start some are developed with cities and other niceties while others are wild.
Because of player dynamics some of the areas will become more popular then others. SWG had for instance coronet on correlia develop into a hub. It was here that most of the player housing was build for stores, it was where most items were put on the bazaar, where most medics healed, most dancers danced and where the snarf was hunted to extinction. (this is bad, server overload, lag, the death of other areas and boredom/grind)
So the developer changes the game. Because of all the rebels the city comes under strict imperial control (existing game mechanic) with very strict control on illegal goods (existing game mechanic, to pay for it taxes (existing game mechanic) are increased (home ownership and bazaar transaction fees), the snarf being overhunted becomes diseased (existing game mechan
I don't think I seen anyone ever ask when faced with the question "What came first, the chicken or the egg" , "do you mean fertilized or unfertilized". I think most normal people would consider it totally irrelevant. Sorta like asking in the story of the Hare vs the Tortoise what kind of tortoise.
It don't matter. By your logic it should even matter wether the egg was female or male.
That I think is far more needed. I comment a lot on stories about MMO's because deep down I like the idea of an MMO a lot. I always preffered COOP mode in FPS as well so MMO's game just seem right.
EQ2 has plenty of fun inside. Provided you allow yourselve to have fun. There is an option to switch of XP gaining. Since certain quests can't be completed when you reach beyond a certain level this allows you to remain stuck until you complete it.
And stuck you will be because it is very hard to find players willing to do quests that do not "pay out" enough.
Just ask yourselve. Have you ever done a quest that didn't pay out just for fun? Took on an enemy because it seemed right even if it was going to cost you by dying and lost xp/equipment?
No? Then your a grind monkey. Welcome to the rat race.
As for PvP being the answer. No it isn't. First off, cheating will be rife. just look at the halo story below.
Then there is the problem of balance. REAL PvP is about unbalance. You never want a fair war. Ask Captain Blackadder.
As for more orginized PvP well you would have to go to a system like the romans used for gladiators. But these people were very strictly regulated so that fights were as fair as possible.
The only real way is to just make two different games. WoW for the grinders and something else for people who want more. This is impossible. Just check how many people want to turn Linux into Windows. The idea that you would have WIndows for Windows people and Linux for Linux people is unaccetable to a lot of people. Everything must appeal to the largest possible group Elitism of the masses.
A staple diet of RPG's is the rat. You would claim that at level 1 you fight rats and at level 10 you fight rats and at level 100 you fight rats.
The poster you react to would point out that at level 1 it is sewer rats, at level 10 it is dire rats and level 100 it is were rats.
The difference is minor BUT nontheless it is a huge culture shock to try to understand the other person mindset.
To them another high level dungeon is a complete new challenge with an AI that uses different spells and rewards that give different benefits. To you it is just another dump AI wich you can learn with a few tries and dumps yet more loot that gives a few stat boosts so you can do it all over again.
Some people want more of the same, some people want a change now and then.
I fall in the latter group BUT not because I think it is better or something. It is just my taste.
Yes you can ask yourselve what the point is about adding a whole range of Y zombies who are exactly like X zombies except with higher points but the simple fact is that it works for a large group of players. It is also easier.
Adding a new type of play to any game is HARD. The Sims is about the only one to do it. Most other games expand by offering you yet more of the same.
SWG was game with lots of "extra" gameplay. But think of it like this. Wich satisfied more people. Adding another high level dungeon OR a whole new range of clothes and hairstyles? Wich is "easier" to implement?
WoW caters mostly to the more of the same crowd and it seems it is the way to market success. No it doesn't appeal to everyone but to other companies the message seems clear. SWG was WoWed and so was EQ2.
Vanguard is getting heat for not being WoW and so are lots of other games.
You say you need more gameplay elements to keep the game compelling. That might be true for you. Not to the parent. He likes extra dungeons with new enemies and new loot. It keeps the game intresting for him.
Oh and EVE may be the bees knees but they really should get their head out of their ass for their payment system. I can play SOE (GlobalCollect) and I can play WoW (prepaid cards) but EVE does not seem intrested in my money.
Lambast the bigger games all you want but at least they learned rule 1. Never refuse a paying customer.
What exactly is a MMORPG about anyway. A game like tetris is easy. Highscore. Chess is easy. Beat the opponent. Quake is easy, beat the other players.
Well that is what WoW does. The highscore is your level, the opponent is the AI and the other players are the horde or non-horde.
If you look at how most players talk about WoW you get the distinct impression that it is all about loot and levels.
Has anyone ever held a fishing competition in WoW? Or just organized a tour of nice looking spots? A beauty contest? Anything not related to getting loot or XP?
To some players it is this that makes an MMORPG. To have fun. This is to me what made SWG at a time such a nice game. To do stuff that was just fun to do without worrying about how many levels it would give you. IRC with pretty pictures.
An example, SWG, the tour of endor. For all its faults SWG could look pretty nice and it was clear at least some of the artists had spend some time looking at the source material and getting it. Endor was one of those. It was kinda fun to find the stuff from the ewok movies there (yes I liked them, bite me). So with a group of newer players we organized a tour. Just to drive around and see all the spots. It was sorta popular. Plenty of people wanted to join and had fun but we also got some almost violent reactions from players who just couldn't see the point of doing something that did not give XP. There were two ewok villages and visiting just one of them gave you a Point of Intrest badge. So when we set off to visit the other one member became enraged at the waste of time. Never mind that the villages were nicely done, he wanted XP and he wanted it now.
Same with Everquest 2. We were in a small group fighting red conning enemies and not doing to well. Death still carried an XP debt and it even carried over to your party members. Then again our motto was, if you ain't dying you ain't trying. It was simply more fun to defeat an enemy with a sliver off live remaining (and promply get killed by the next spawn) then fighting critters at optimum level wich were from a tactical viewpoint yawnville.
Yet again this led to almost violent confrotations with other players who just couldn't get that we were wasting our time on this. How dare we fight reds when they were having trouble finding people our level for the blue/green areas.
The point is that for us the battles were not a grind. They really required you to think about what you were doing rather then just hit the same special over and over. All those people who complain about repetitive fighting just ain't putting themselves to the challenge.
There is plenty of stuff to do and challenges to be had in EQ2 and SWG (well before both were WoWed anyway) but most people rushed by on the quest to get maximum XP. Just check how few players ever went into the deeper dungeons in EQ2 or how deserted the middle planets were in SWG.
I think I call it the Midnight Club vs Grand Prix Legends Syndrome.
In Midnight Club your enemy is always slighty better then you. If you got a D class car, they have C class, if you have level 1 upgrades, they got level 2. If you got 1 nitrious boost, they got 2. Improving don't matter, you will still be raising enemies slightly better then you. It is an endless grind to the top where your reward is a super car that is no fun to drive because now you still will get knocked out the race by being rear ended by the AI.
Grand Prix Legends on the other hand puts you in a car that is impossible to control but is the same car everyone else drives. If you tune it to just a little bit better performance the other drivers stay the same. So you do gain real benefits by becoming better and better. You don't so much "win" as slowly climb up higher in the rankings, first races you are lucky to finish but there is no price to pay. You can simply advance to the next race and finish a season on 10th place and still have improved. MC you don't improve unless you win.
First off what kind of ADSL modem comes with a standbye switch?
If I cut off my internet or slow it down (I know that is possible) then how the fuck does that affect everyone else in the game?
This could only work if you happen to host the game. In PC multiplayer game the guy hosting it offcourse always has the least lag but surely anyone hosting a game that routinely drops out would very quickly be ranked down?
Anyway you pay for x-box live but still got to host your own games? Surely for the money MS should be hosting the games so everyone plays on a level playing field?
So my question is this. A does this only work for the guy hosting the game, B why does bungie not host the game for you C why doesn't bungie drop people who host games on a connection that drops out?
Well here is a tiny newsflash for you. The reason we eat unfertilized chicken embryos is because that is easier. There is absolutly no reason you can't eat fertilized eggs. In fact that is what you do when you eat "wild" eggs.
The only difference between a fertilized egg and an unfertilized egg is that the fertilized one if incubated will eventually produce a chick. The unfertilized will not.
If you come from a more rural background you will have seen the occasional egg on the breakfast table that was a bit to far along in its development.
Perhaps hen egg laying is just like human females who keep making producing eggs every month regardless of sexual contact. It is just that the hen unfertizled egg develops a lot further then a human unfertilized egg.
I only know for a fact from a semi farm upbringing that the only reason we eat unfertilized eggs is because that is easier to mass produce. Have you ever seen an egg farm? Not a place you want roosters around.
Just for fun, get all the versions of windows and install them with Vmware. I swear to god even the biggest MS fanboy who will happily lick Bill Gates toilet will turn into a MS basher after doing window 3.1 through Windows 2003.
To be fair, XP and 2003 are easier. In roughly the same way that the last guy in the prison gang rape will probably be easier to take (if you catch my drift).
I was amazed by how many crashes I got. Granted linux gives me troubles during installs too but at least they are crashes I can work with and fix. How the fuck can Windows XP crash on a vm setup? It is not like it has any exotic fucking hardware to mess it up?
The funny thing, windows ME was not that bad. Not anyworse then windows 95 really. In fact that whole generation was the same, random crashes during install for no good reason and taking centuries just to get the files on to the fucking HD.
People who say Windows is easier to install then linux have never installed windows.
Next excersise, Install Slacw 1.0, anyone willing to take bets on when my head will explode?
It was just to expensive and never really adopted as a standard. Meaning you had to bring your drive with you. Handy for downloading at work and then take it home where you were on pay by the minute dialup. Far superior to anything else at the time.
The advance of cd burners (and later usb drives) coupled with the click of death and the high cost of zip disks and their small capacity just made them obsolete.
It wasn't bad tech. Just had a very limited lifespan.
Popup ads, the worst tech ever? Hardly, they are very succesfull, in fact this article had one. Well a DHTML popup but that is the same thing right?
As for DRM, well that is still around and doing a brisk trade. Expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
I think you and the article author mean two different things. He means tech that was a failure. Not tech that is hated.
Big difference.
Yes on a list of most hated tech DRM and popups would be serious contenders but that is a list for another time. Granted, IE would again be high on the list. Bill Gates must be so proud.
The robot was not controlled by brainwaves at all. It is simply a japanese girl robot and it had a camera pointed at it. It could not do anything BUT make a v-sign.
Japanese laws of robotics.
A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
A robot shall in the presence of the camera make a v-sign and strike a cute pose. If Rules 1-3 must be violated to do so then so be it. Cute Rules!
This was an article by MSNBC. MSNBC as in MICROSOFT.
A news site owned by Microsoft claims that Vista beta wasn't too good and everyone is falling all over it even claiming it is fud. Right.
You can't have fud on your own fucking product. Geez.
And can we get a slighly better rebutal of how good it is then the ancient "well it didn't crash for me so your insane" line?
Then again this one ain't as hilarious as all the MS shills suddenly saying it ain't MS fault if hardware makers don't have drivers ready while the constant line against linux is that it doesn't have drivers for every piece of shit hardware.
Make up your mind already okay?
The simple fact is that this was trying a beta. Now a beta is not the finished product BUT it is supposed to be as good as finished. Beta is when you say, okay I am done with the design and building and now lets test it to see if it works. Since this is Beta 2 they should be getting very close.
Build (no chance of working on any machine) Alpha (it sometimes works on the coders machine) Beta (Well it works in the development lab, lets see about the outside) Gold (We are fed up and don't give a shit anymore if it works or not just get it out the door already)
Vista Beta 2 should be near gold and then for it not to work easily on a big name laptop is not to good. If a linux distro failed to run properly all the MS shills would be all over it. When Vista fails, oh the user is an idiot.
Reminds me of the old rule of web design. If the site fails under mozilla it is mozilla's fault. If the site fails under IE it is the sites fault.
MS apologists taking the stupid to new heights. There is one clear sample of proof the Vista Beta 2 ain't nowwhere ready. The fact that it currently may and MS itself claims that it won't launch to at least january and possibly later. That could easily mean a full year till launch. If Vista Beta 2 was ready, they wouldn't need so much time to work on it. Not when they got so much riding on it (not just the holidays and saving face but that whole software assurance plan they sold to companies)
For instance the CS design that you have to buy your weapons vs other games where you just get your equipment handed to you.
Wich is better? Neither. It is a design choice and will determine the kind of game it is. Yes there are some things wich should be done the same in most games. The move to TCP/IP for multiplayer games was for instance a good move and every game was right for copying it.
Introducing a system to stop cheating would also be smart to follow.
But not every FPS needs to include a warthog just because Halo has one. Not every shooter needs to be set in modern or near future times just because the most popular ones are.
The example of the corpse run is a clear design choice that determines the game you have.
With the corpse run death has a real risk and requires players to be carefull where they risk their live less they will not be able to get back again to reclaim their body.
Without it death becomes meaningless and people will top themselves to save walking back to their town.
Neither is invalid, it is just that they make for very different games.
In away, corpse run is like Counter Strikes money system. Die in that game and you loose that expensive weapon forcing you to work for it again. Other games just give you the same equipment over and over meaning that there is no penalty for dying.
Would it be a good thing if every game used the CS system? No, so why should it be a good thing in a MMORPG?
Oh and another thing. WoW is already WoW, if you make another game that is WoW why should people play yours?
Enter the "IT IS GOOD BECAUSE IT'S POPULAR" crowd. Less than a dozen comments in this thread thus far and half of them are people who love WoW because it's "dumbed down."
Listen up, guys, WoW has 5.5 million+ subscribers because what it's doing is bad, not good. It's dumbed down, and if - like me - you spent hardcore-style hours raiding to get the best stuff, you'd know that.
But no, like the guys at Vanguard, you can get past appearance. If it's popular, it must be bad.
There, fixed it for you.
By your comments McD serves the finest food in town, Coca Cola is the best beverage ever, Reality TV is the best entertainment in history, Internet explorer is the best browser and CNN has the best news service in the world.
Yeah right.
Just because something is popular doesn't mean it is good and just because something is popular doesn't mean everyone should do the same thing. If we did that we would all be wearing the same clothes, eating the same food and enjoy the same entertainment.
Vanguard != WoW and WoW!= Vanguard. At least not right now. Not playing either I can't say I really care all that much.
But I do care about populist toadies like you wanting to turn everything into the same generic mush that appeals to the largest group. Yuck.
Then again, I am arguing with person who probably likes MTV. More fool me.
Not exactly getting both sides of the story are we
on
Vanguard Beta In Trouble?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My only experience is with other beta's and with other MMORPG's and while I do regonize what is being claimed here I also notice that this post is totally one sided.
There seems to be some hatred against WoW players. I can only imagine that this is the same hatred that Counterstrike players get. I was in a beta for a couple of more realistic shooters and we had good reasons to loathe CS players. They would get their beta key and instantly demand the game be turned into a CS clone.
If you get a post like "they should do X like they it in CS" or "this game sucks because I am good at X in CS and I suck at it in this game" then there really isn't much you can do.
So the players who like the game as it is fight the players who want to change the game. This nothing new. Just try following a debate on language reform.
The example of a corpse run is mentioned. Corpse run is a penalty for dying. Everquest 2 for instance punishes you with an experience debt unless you go back to where you died and reassorb your ghost. Other games leave your equipment lying out in the wild forcing you to go back to get your loot.
It makes the game more of a challenge forcing you to think about a battle. Not just wether you can handle that boss you need for a quest but wether you will make it back out again.
Without a corspe run you run the risk of players just using dying to get back to the city to sell their loot. Ask Star Wars Galaxies with the Trials of Obi-wan expansion. For that matter it existed before where people would kill themselves to get rid of a doctor buff that was about to run out so they could get a new one.
Kinda ruins the atmo when you got people begging to be wiped out. "Hey you want to go hunt rancors tonight" "Sure, let me just kill myself before we head out okay?" "Eh, right".
WoW for all its success is not everyones cup of tea and it can be disappointing to see every game try to emulate it. Again, look at SWG. It tried to WoW people and is near dead because of it.
So yes forum discusssions can become very heated BUT there is always two sides to a story. The person comments we read in the main article claim that the hardcore resisted attempts to add WoW elements to the game. Eheh, meaning he wanted to make the game into WoW. Is he basically upset because he didn't get to mold the game into his vision?
MMORPG's are very hard games to produce and if the designer doesn't 100% believe in what he wants to do there is the risk that he could start to believe that the tiny vocal minority on the forums somehow represents the majority. On the other hand if he ignores them he risks that they are infact the majority.
You can't please everyone but you sure as hell can upset everyone.
Lets use the holiday example giving in the article. So I got a hotel that is 54 dollars per night. That means I am not going to be included in the below 50 dollar search. Hmmm, I don't want that. I want maximum exposure. So I lower my price to 49 dollars + 10 dollars in extra fees that are a suprise when you receive the bill (what you say? 49+10 > 54? Offcourse you idiot, any price cut must be offset by higher charges elsewhere.)
You could already do this semantic web nonsense if people would just stick to a standard and be honest with what they publish.
Nobody wants to do that however. Mobile phone companies always try to make their offering sound as attractive as possible by highlighting the good points and hiding the bad ones. Phone stores try to cut through this by making their own charts for comparing phone companies but in turn try to hide the fact that they get a bigger cut from some companies then others.
It wouldn't be at all hard to set up a standard that would make it very easy to tell what cell phone subscription is best for you. Getting the companies involved to participate is impossible however.
This is the real problem with searching the web right now. It wouldn't be at all hard to use google today if everyone was honest with their site content. For instance, removed the word "review" from a product page if no review is available.
Do you think this is going to happen anyday soon? No, then the semantic web will not be with us anyday soon either.
Everyone here seems to feel the student has the right to freespeech. Okay, does his teacher have the same rights? Does the school? Can they say anything they want about him? Put a blog up about how this kid pissed himself on the school trip and cried for his mommy?
Tell the world he didn't bring a date to the prom?
Freespeech always seems to be onsided.
Frankly in this case I don't know what to think. I myself have once done a school project where we had to make a brochure about something. I parodied the school brochure but highlighted stuff like the fact the computer room could not be used outside class hours and other lacking facilities.
Got called into the directors office but nothing major, he just wanted to ask wich of them were true, and they were corrected. Turned out that the stuff I found stupid were never intended to be that way but had just evolved over the years.
Granted this was holland and nobody had heard of school shootings. Then again I used humor and didn't insult anyone.
As always there is probably a fine line with the case of what people are allowed to say, I just wonder if all the people defending the right of students to insult teachers feel that teachers have the same right to insult their students. Cause I am pretty sure that if teachers were allowed they have some real cursing to get off their chest.
Then again, ALL of them have been defeated so is there any point in being the one that took the most time?
Is TAGES however friendlier to the paying customer? Since none of the copy protections systems work the only thing that can be hoped for is that they inconvenience the paying customer as little as possible.
Offcourse no copy protection at all would be the easiest way not to upset paying customers but lets not get silly shall we? The paying customers must be hurt to pay for the pirates!
I say we whip all airline passengers to punish them for drug smugglers, you know it makes sense.
Slashdot Mirror
So while tech school was supposed to be lower it actually rated slightly higher. They certainly had a better change of getting a job.
This whole system was changed and the two schools merged. The amount of practice hours was reduced forcing the kids who don't want to be in school to be in school. This leads to lots of dropouts and the kids that stick with it learn no usefull trade.
Dropouts, useless school diploma's lack of skilled workers. Great. All because all those poor tradeskill kids were not learning about arts or biology or french.
It was an experiment and it failed completly. It sounds a lot like the american "no kid left behind" idea. Stop social experiments with our schools.
And then you drop a bombshell like this? Not just an ID but a complete DNA database?
Somebody needs to explain the concept of babysteps to this guy.
My controller is just to large!
Ever heard of the anti-hero. There was a time when that was new. Before everyone only made movies with the hero who overcame the baddie. Then someone somewhere dared to create a hero who wasn't all the different from the baddie, or even worse who was the baddie.
Could a RPG but made in wich you are not the main hero. In wich it ain't you who gets to become king but are instead one of the people in the background?
The GBA game Fire Emblem seems to do this. You are just the tactician. NOT the heroine seeking her grandfather or later the hero seeking his father.
I haven't finished it yet but you might not even get the girl!!!
Yet it works. Unlike so many other Japanese so called RPG's you are not being forced to much in a role. You are a silent bystander not one of the faggoty princes.
Could an MMO work by not having "real" heroes. Well not in its current form. for an MMO to be an MMORPG there needs to be an element of story and suspension of disbelief. It doesn't work if you have to stend in a line to give the NPC a broom in exchange for her blue stone.
Current quests are static. Very static. That mortally wounded soldier asking you to deliver a last letter will still be mortally wounded centuries later.
Can this be made different. Can game designers come up with "generic" quests that are generated for each player randomly? So that as I am exploring an area I come across a small battle and find a mortally wounded soldier who requests me to deliver this letter and then dies and disappears making this quest unique for me?
It would not be easy. How to balance how many quests to give. How to make quests groupable (do only I get the letter, all the members of the group or the group gets 1 letter to deliver together). Could you add the element of competition. Say while I get the order to deliver a warning by a spy of an assasination an other player gets the order to assasinate? (no pvp all that I need to do is warn the npc to be assasinated)
The problem with "random" quests is offcourse simple. No guides on where to find quests. What quest you would get (and therefore the loot) would depend on a random number generator. Current MMORPG players seem to prefer picking only those quests that give them phat loot.
Abusing the game is offcourse a valid concern but hardly stopped by making the game predictable. In fact it is knowing exactly what the game will do every turn that makes it easy to exploit weaknesses. Camping phat loot spawns only works because you know that the spawn is every 6 hours.
With random quests you could easily make the endboss spawn somewhere out of the way. Perhaps even put the final boss in an instance so he is safe and people don't have to stand inline to slaughter the dungeon boss.
Yes translating CRPG's to an MMORPG is not going to work. But that doesn't mean there aren't other ways.
One idea I like is to make areas develop and collapse overtime. Create say 10 areas/worlds. At the start some are developed with cities and other niceties while others are wild.
Because of player dynamics some of the areas will become more popular then others. SWG had for instance coronet on correlia develop into a hub. It was here that most of the player housing was build for stores, it was where most items were put on the bazaar, where most medics healed, most dancers danced and where the snarf was hunted to extinction. (this is bad, server overload, lag, the death of other areas and boredom/grind)
So the developer changes the game. Because of all the rebels the city comes under strict imperial control (existing game mechanic) with very strict control on illegal goods (existing game mechanic, to pay for it taxes (existing game mechanic) are increased (home ownership and bazaar transaction fees), the snarf being overhunted becomes diseased (existing game mechan
It don't matter. By your logic it should even matter wether the egg was female or male.
EQ2 has plenty of fun inside. Provided you allow yourselve to have fun. There is an option to switch of XP gaining. Since certain quests can't be completed when you reach beyond a certain level this allows you to remain stuck until you complete it.
And stuck you will be because it is very hard to find players willing to do quests that do not "pay out" enough.
Just ask yourselve. Have you ever done a quest that didn't pay out just for fun? Took on an enemy because it seemed right even if it was going to cost you by dying and lost xp/equipment?
No? Then your a grind monkey. Welcome to the rat race.
As for PvP being the answer. No it isn't. First off, cheating will be rife. just look at the halo story below.
Then there is the problem of balance. REAL PvP is about unbalance. You never want a fair war. Ask Captain Blackadder.
As for more orginized PvP well you would have to go to a system like the romans used for gladiators. But these people were very strictly regulated so that fights were as fair as possible.
The only real way is to just make two different games. WoW for the grinders and something else for people who want more. This is impossible. Just check how many people want to turn Linux into Windows. The idea that you would have WIndows for Windows people and Linux for Linux people is unaccetable to a lot of people. Everything must appeal to the largest possible group Elitism of the masses.
The poster you react to would point out that at level 1 it is sewer rats, at level 10 it is dire rats and level 100 it is were rats.
The difference is minor BUT nontheless it is a huge culture shock to try to understand the other person mindset.
To them another high level dungeon is a complete new challenge with an AI that uses different spells and rewards that give different benefits. To you it is just another dump AI wich you can learn with a few tries and dumps yet more loot that gives a few stat boosts so you can do it all over again.
Some people want more of the same, some people want a change now and then.
I fall in the latter group BUT not because I think it is better or something. It is just my taste.
Yes you can ask yourselve what the point is about adding a whole range of Y zombies who are exactly like X zombies except with higher points but the simple fact is that it works for a large group of players. It is also easier.
Adding a new type of play to any game is HARD. The Sims is about the only one to do it. Most other games expand by offering you yet more of the same.
SWG was game with lots of "extra" gameplay. But think of it like this. Wich satisfied more people. Adding another high level dungeon OR a whole new range of clothes and hairstyles? Wich is "easier" to implement?
WoW caters mostly to the more of the same crowd and it seems it is the way to market success. No it doesn't appeal to everyone but to other companies the message seems clear. SWG was WoWed and so was EQ2.
Vanguard is getting heat for not being WoW and so are lots of other games.
You say you need more gameplay elements to keep the game compelling. That might be true for you. Not to the parent. He likes extra dungeons with new enemies and new loot. It keeps the game intresting for him.
Oh and EVE may be the bees knees but they really should get their head out of their ass for their payment system. I can play SOE (GlobalCollect) and I can play WoW (prepaid cards) but EVE does not seem intrested in my money.
Lambast the bigger games all you want but at least they learned rule 1. Never refuse a paying customer.
What exactly is a MMORPG about anyway. A game like tetris is easy. Highscore. Chess is easy. Beat the opponent. Quake is easy, beat the other players.
Well that is what WoW does. The highscore is your level, the opponent is the AI and the other players are the horde or non-horde.
If you look at how most players talk about WoW you get the distinct impression that it is all about loot and levels.
Has anyone ever held a fishing competition in WoW? Or just organized a tour of nice looking spots? A beauty contest? Anything not related to getting loot or XP?
To some players it is this that makes an MMORPG. To have fun. This is to me what made SWG at a time such a nice game. To do stuff that was just fun to do without worrying about how many levels it would give you. IRC with pretty pictures.
An example, SWG, the tour of endor. For all its faults SWG could look pretty nice and it was clear at least some of the artists had spend some time looking at the source material and getting it. Endor was one of those. It was kinda fun to find the stuff from the ewok movies there (yes I liked them, bite me). So with a group of newer players we organized a tour. Just to drive around and see all the spots. It was sorta popular. Plenty of people wanted to join and had fun but we also got some almost violent reactions from players who just couldn't see the point of doing something that did not give XP. There were two ewok villages and visiting just one of them gave you a Point of Intrest badge. So when we set off to visit the other one member became enraged at the waste of time. Never mind that the villages were nicely done, he wanted XP and he wanted it now.
Same with Everquest 2. We were in a small group fighting red conning enemies and not doing to well. Death still carried an XP debt and it even carried over to your party members. Then again our motto was, if you ain't dying you ain't trying. It was simply more fun to defeat an enemy with a sliver off live remaining (and promply get killed by the next spawn) then fighting critters at optimum level wich were from a tactical viewpoint yawnville.
Yet again this led to almost violent confrotations with other players who just couldn't get that we were wasting our time on this. How dare we fight reds when they were having trouble finding people our level for the blue/green areas.
The point is that for us the battles were not a grind. They really required you to think about what you were doing rather then just hit the same special over and over. All those people who complain about repetitive fighting just ain't putting themselves to the challenge.
There is plenty of stuff to do and challenges to be had in EQ2 and SWG (well before both were WoWed anyway) but most people rushed by on the quest to get maximum XP. Just check how few players ever went into the deeper dungeons in EQ2 or how deserted the middle planets were in SWG.
I think I call it the Midnight Club vs Grand Prix Legends Syndrome.
In Midnight Club your enemy is always slighty better then you. If you got a D class car, they have C class, if you have level 1 upgrades, they got level 2. If you got 1 nitrious boost, they got 2. Improving don't matter, you will still be raising enemies slightly better then you. It is an endless grind to the top where your reward is a super car that is no fun to drive because now you still will get knocked out the race by being rear ended by the AI.
Grand Prix Legends on the other hand puts you in a car that is impossible to control but is the same car everyone else drives. If you tune it to just a little bit better performance the other drivers stay the same. So you do gain real benefits by becoming better and better. You don't so much "win" as slowly climb up higher in the rankings, first races you are lucky to finish but there is no price to pay. You can simply advance to the next race and finish a season on 10th place and still have improved. MC you don't improve unless you win.
A game like EQ2 is like Midnight
If I cut off my internet or slow it down (I know that is possible) then how the fuck does that affect everyone else in the game?
This could only work if you happen to host the game. In PC multiplayer game the guy hosting it offcourse always has the least lag but surely anyone hosting a game that routinely drops out would very quickly be ranked down?
Anyway you pay for x-box live but still got to host your own games? Surely for the money MS should be hosting the games so everyone plays on a level playing field?
So my question is this. A does this only work for the guy hosting the game, B why does bungie not host the game for you C why doesn't bungie drop people who host games on a connection that drops out?
The only difference between a fertilized egg and an unfertilized egg is that the fertilized one if incubated will eventually produce a chick. The unfertilized will not.
If you come from a more rural background you will have seen the occasional egg on the breakfast table that was a bit to far along in its development.
Perhaps hen egg laying is just like human females who keep making producing eggs every month regardless of sexual contact. It is just that the hen unfertizled egg develops a lot further then a human unfertilized egg.
I only know for a fact from a semi farm upbringing that the only reason we eat unfertilized eggs is because that is easier to mass produce. Have you ever seen an egg farm? Not a place you want roosters around.
And how many of you commented on the story anyway without knowing what it meant?
Only one of you needs to be a virgin.
To be fair, XP and 2003 are easier. In roughly the same way that the last guy in the prison gang rape will probably be easier to take (if you catch my drift).
I was amazed by how many crashes I got. Granted linux gives me troubles during installs too but at least they are crashes I can work with and fix. How the fuck can Windows XP crash on a vm setup? It is not like it has any exotic fucking hardware to mess it up?
The funny thing, windows ME was not that bad. Not anyworse then windows 95 really. In fact that whole generation was the same, random crashes during install for no good reason and taking centuries just to get the files on to the fucking HD.
People who say Windows is easier to install then linux have never installed windows.
Next excersise, Install Slacw 1.0, anyone willing to take bets on when my head will explode?
The advance of cd burners (and later usb drives) coupled with the click of death and the high cost of zip disks and their small capacity just made them obsolete.
It wasn't bad tech. Just had a very limited lifespan.
As for DRM, well that is still around and doing a brisk trade. Expect to see a lot more of it in the future.
I think you and the article author mean two different things. He means tech that was a failure. Not tech that is hated.
Big difference.
Yes on a list of most hated tech DRM and popups would be serious contenders but that is a list for another time. Granted, IE would again be high on the list. Bill Gates must be so proud.
Japanese laws of robotics.
A news site owned by Microsoft claims that Vista beta wasn't too good and everyone is falling all over it even claiming it is fud. Right.
You can't have fud on your own fucking product. Geez.
And can we get a slighly better rebutal of how good it is then the ancient "well it didn't crash for me so your insane" line?
Then again this one ain't as hilarious as all the MS shills suddenly saying it ain't MS fault if hardware makers don't have drivers ready while the constant line against linux is that it doesn't have drivers for every piece of shit hardware.
Make up your mind already okay?
The simple fact is that this was trying a beta. Now a beta is not the finished product BUT it is supposed to be as good as finished. Beta is when you say, okay I am done with the design and building and now lets test it to see if it works. Since this is Beta 2 they should be getting very close.
Build (no chance of working on any machine) Alpha (it sometimes works on the coders machine) Beta (Well it works in the development lab, lets see about the outside) Gold (We are fed up and don't give a shit anymore if it works or not just get it out the door already)
Vista Beta 2 should be near gold and then for it not to work easily on a big name laptop is not to good. If a linux distro failed to run properly all the MS shills would be all over it. When Vista fails, oh the user is an idiot.
Reminds me of the old rule of web design. If the site fails under mozilla it is mozilla's fault. If the site fails under IE it is the sites fault.
MS apologists taking the stupid to new heights. There is one clear sample of proof the Vista Beta 2 ain't nowwhere ready. The fact that it currently may and MS itself claims that it won't launch to at least january and possibly later. That could easily mean a full year till launch. If Vista Beta 2 was ready, they wouldn't need so much time to work on it. Not when they got so much riding on it (not just the holidays and saving face but that whole software assurance plan they sold to companies)
Wich is better? Neither. It is a design choice and will determine the kind of game it is. Yes there are some things wich should be done the same in most games. The move to TCP/IP for multiplayer games was for instance a good move and every game was right for copying it.
Introducing a system to stop cheating would also be smart to follow.
But not every FPS needs to include a warthog just because Halo has one. Not every shooter needs to be set in modern or near future times just because the most popular ones are.
The example of the corpse run is a clear design choice that determines the game you have.
With the corpse run death has a real risk and requires players to be carefull where they risk their live less they will not be able to get back again to reclaim their body.
Without it death becomes meaningless and people will top themselves to save walking back to their town.
Neither is invalid, it is just that they make for very different games.
In away, corpse run is like Counter Strikes money system. Die in that game and you loose that expensive weapon forcing you to work for it again. Other games just give you the same equipment over and over meaning that there is no penalty for dying.
Would it be a good thing if every game used the CS system? No, so why should it be a good thing in a MMORPG?
Oh and another thing. WoW is already WoW, if you make another game that is WoW why should people play yours?
Listen up, guys, WoW has 5.5 million+ subscribers because what it's doing is bad, not good. It's dumbed down, and if - like me - you spent hardcore-style hours raiding to get the best stuff, you'd know that.
But no, like the guys at Vanguard, you can get past appearance. If it's popular, it must be bad.
There, fixed it for you.
By your comments McD serves the finest food in town, Coca Cola is the best beverage ever, Reality TV is the best entertainment in history, Internet explorer is the best browser and CNN has the best news service in the world.
Yeah right.
Just because something is popular doesn't mean it is good and just because something is popular doesn't mean everyone should do the same thing. If we did that we would all be wearing the same clothes, eating the same food and enjoy the same entertainment.
Vanguard != WoW and WoW!= Vanguard. At least not right now. Not playing either I can't say I really care all that much.
But I do care about populist toadies like you wanting to turn everything into the same generic mush that appeals to the largest group. Yuck.
Then again, I am arguing with person who probably likes MTV. More fool me.
There seems to be some hatred against WoW players. I can only imagine that this is the same hatred that Counterstrike players get. I was in a beta for a couple of more realistic shooters and we had good reasons to loathe CS players. They would get their beta key and instantly demand the game be turned into a CS clone.
If you get a post like "they should do X like they it in CS" or "this game sucks because I am good at X in CS and I suck at it in this game" then there really isn't much you can do.
So the players who like the game as it is fight the players who want to change the game. This nothing new. Just try following a debate on language reform.
The example of a corpse run is mentioned. Corpse run is a penalty for dying. Everquest 2 for instance punishes you with an experience debt unless you go back to where you died and reassorb your ghost. Other games leave your equipment lying out in the wild forcing you to go back to get your loot.
It makes the game more of a challenge forcing you to think about a battle. Not just wether you can handle that boss you need for a quest but wether you will make it back out again.
Without a corspe run you run the risk of players just using dying to get back to the city to sell their loot. Ask Star Wars Galaxies with the Trials of Obi-wan expansion. For that matter it existed before where people would kill themselves to get rid of a doctor buff that was about to run out so they could get a new one.
Kinda ruins the atmo when you got people begging to be wiped out. "Hey you want to go hunt rancors tonight" "Sure, let me just kill myself before we head out okay?" "Eh, right".
WoW for all its success is not everyones cup of tea and it can be disappointing to see every game try to emulate it. Again, look at SWG. It tried to WoW people and is near dead because of it.
So yes forum discusssions can become very heated BUT there is always two sides to a story. The person comments we read in the main article claim that the hardcore resisted attempts to add WoW elements to the game. Eheh, meaning he wanted to make the game into WoW. Is he basically upset because he didn't get to mold the game into his vision?
MMORPG's are very hard games to produce and if the designer doesn't 100% believe in what he wants to do there is the risk that he could start to believe that the tiny vocal minority on the forums somehow represents the majority. On the other hand if he ignores them he risks that they are infact the majority.
You can't please everyone but you sure as hell can upset everyone.
You could already do this semantic web nonsense if people would just stick to a standard and be honest with what they publish.
Nobody wants to do that however. Mobile phone companies always try to make their offering sound as attractive as possible by highlighting the good points and hiding the bad ones. Phone stores try to cut through this by making their own charts for comparing phone companies but in turn try to hide the fact that they get a bigger cut from some companies then others.
It wouldn't be at all hard to set up a standard that would make it very easy to tell what cell phone subscription is best for you. Getting the companies involved to participate is impossible however.
This is the real problem with searching the web right now. It wouldn't be at all hard to use google today if everyone was honest with their site content. For instance, removed the word "review" from a product page if no review is available.
Do you think this is going to happen anyday soon? No, then the semantic web will not be with us anyday soon either.
lets use that and sit back as the US army bombs the shit out of redmond. (and misses and hits apple instead)
Tell the world he didn't bring a date to the prom?
Freespeech always seems to be onsided.
Frankly in this case I don't know what to think. I myself have once done a school project where we had to make a brochure about something. I parodied the school brochure but highlighted stuff like the fact the computer room could not be used outside class hours and other lacking facilities.
Got called into the directors office but nothing major, he just wanted to ask wich of them were true, and they were corrected. Turned out that the stuff I found stupid were never intended to be that way but had just evolved over the years.
Granted this was holland and nobody had heard of school shootings. Then again I used humor and didn't insult anyone.
As always there is probably a fine line with the case of what people are allowed to say, I just wonder if all the people defending the right of students to insult teachers feel that teachers have the same right to insult their students. Cause I am pretty sure that if teachers were allowed they have some real cursing to get off their chest.
Yikes.
Then again, ALL of them have been defeated so is there any point in being the one that took the most time?
Is TAGES however friendlier to the paying customer? Since none of the copy protections systems work the only thing that can be hoped for is that they inconvenience the paying customer as little as possible.
Offcourse no copy protection at all would be the easiest way not to upset paying customers but lets not get silly shall we? The paying customers must be hurt to pay for the pirates!
I say we whip all airline passengers to punish them for drug smugglers, you know it makes sense.