Yes, until the next expansion comes out, people's gear will eventually even out and skill will start to matter a bit again. But due to the constant "have to grind equipment so that I can compete" nature of PvP in WoW, it'll never be a fair, professional competition.
This is exactly why I think PvP in World of Warcraft is so lame. It's not the best player who wins, it's the player who has invested the most time in getting good equipment for his avatar, chance, and class/talent specialisation, generally. Yes, skill plays a role too, but only a small one. World of Warcraft's game mechanics do not require ultra-fast reactions like in FPS games or strategic thinking like in an RTS.
For example, say I've got a roughtly an equal chance of winning against 'AllianceEnemy' with my avatar. If I could teach a friend of mine who plays games but doesn't know anything about WoW the basics of how to control my avatar and tell him what stuff he needs to use against 'AllianceEnemy', he could probably win against him like 40% of the time.
I've played the game for 2 years and considered my understanding of the game and my overall skill to be top-notch before The Burning Crusade (I don't play anymore). Now, in real skill-based games like Quake, Counter-Strike, Starcraft or whatever, a newbie has no chance against someone who's intensively played for 2 years. None at all. In those games the limit on how good you can get is impossible to reach for Humans - we can't instantly aim at our enemy's heads, or perfectly micromanage our entire army.
In World of Warcraft, most spells and skills activate a 1-second "global cooldown", so you can't execute spells and skills as fast as your cognitive system allows you to. And because there are only very few such abilities that require precise positioning of your avatar, you don't need precise mouse-look skills either. It's all very easy to control. The only challenge in WoW is learning about all the abilities and how to use them effectively, but that should come naturally to anyone who properly plays to level 70. (A lot of user-interface add-ons make the use of some abilities even easier. For example there are add-ons which tell mages for how many more seconds their polymorph (sheep) spell will last on their target, so that they know when they need to re-cast it). So by the time someone gets to 70, the main determinants of how good their avatar is at PvP are their equipment (getting good equipment just takes playing time, not skill) and whom they fight (your and their class and talent specialisation).
I conclude that because skill plays only a small role in WoW, because not all avatars start off equally in battles, and because there's a lot of chance involved, WoW isn't a real professional competitive game.
Great artwork running very efficiently trumps fancy graphics technology (pixel shaders, HDR, bump mapping, etc).
Especially in an MMO it's damn important to keep poly-counts and stuff fairly low, so that the game doesn't turn into a slide-show as soon as more than 10 people are in your vicinity.
Although some people don't like the leveling treadmill, all those artificial time-sinks keep the people playing for a long time, and that's what MMO companies want.
What would be so great about an MMO Half-Life or whatever? As far as I know, the HL dedicated server already allows you to create a server with hundreds of players, but either the server can't handle the load, or people's connections aren't good enough to make everything appear smooth. In RPGs it doesn't matter if you're lagging a bit, but in an FPS, even a slight bit of lag can make the game unplayable. Internet technology isn't quite mature enough for a "real" twitch-skill MMOFPS.
Also, imho, in FPS games can have too many players. If you've got too many people shooting rockets and sh*t all over the place in a very small area, the quality of gameplay just deteriorates as you don't really have much control over winning. And if you'd have huge outdoor maps like in PlanetScape, you end up with loads of bland, uninspired terrain and no real exciting maps like in traditional FPS games.
There is one kickass racing game on the PSP: Wipeout Pure. It's got multiplayer modes too and supports up to 8 players, apparently. There are free downloadable tracks and stuff for it too. And the soundtrack r0x. It's a must-have game on the PSP, imho.
You got Lumines? That should be fun in 2 player mode, too.
I've got a Copperhead (had a IntelliEye Explorer which also has 2 side buttons before that), and I use the side buttons all the time in FPS games, but not in RTS games. I've set one of the side buttons to alternate-fire (right-button is always jump for me) which I use all the time, and the other to something game-specific. In Counter-Strike it's "switch to knife", in Quake 3 it's "gesture".
In RTS games, mapping a few of the extra buttons on the mouse doesn't seem like a big benefit to me, because i) split-second actions aren't quite so critical in RTS games (whereas in FPS being a tiny bit too slow will get you fragged), and ii) RTSs have so many hotkeys, you'll have to rely on the keyboard anyway.
True that. I also use all the extra buttons on my mouse in WoW. With my rogue, I've got the bottom thumb button set to vanish, and the top thumb button set to sprint - very useful in PvP. With my hunter, I've set them to feign-death/drop-traps and shoot flare - again, useful in PvP, as being able to do that stuff quickly is critical.
The Razer Krait is just a gimped Copperhead. There's nothing "optimised" about it for MMOs or RTS games if you ask me.
Well, the fact that they're only counted as subscribers for merely 7 days indicates that only very few of those "unloyal" customers people who've only played for, say, an hour get counted as subscribers. 7 days is a very short period of time for an MMO subscription length - that's the key here. Those Internet Game Room account owners who play very irregularly, or only only used it once to get a taste for what WoW's like, should have a negligible impact on the statistics. In order for such unloyal customers have a significant impact on the statistics, you'd need them to create tens of thousands of new accounts every week. Asia's big, but I doubt tens of thousands of people there make a new IGR account every week and then completely stop playing.
It's not like counting every single person who dropped a dollar on an arcade game as a fan of that game, because Blizzard does not count every IGR account every created as a subscription.
I disagree completely. WoW isn't popular because of marketing. It's popular because it's the only MMORPG out there which is fun to play right from the start. You don't need to wait until you're level X before you can go on adventures or get cool items and spells. You don't need to spend a week to get used to the user interface. WoW's a fast MMO that rewards the player immediately, and hardly ever punishes him for things such as getting killed, not having a 2nd account/computer, or not having lots of gold and thus not being able to buy the best possible gear. It's very easy for somebody new to get into the game and start playing right away. It makes you think "hey, this is fun" right away. Most MMOs throw the new player into the complicated game world after a 5-minute tutorial, whereas in WoW the first entire zone is tailored for new players, and there are always directions on where to go next.
If you had read the official Blizzard press released, then you'd know they only count active Internet Game Room accounts which have been active in the last 7 days. So yes, their figures can be taken at face value.
World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.
Who cares about this? PC FPS games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Quake, Battlefield, Doom, FEAR... you name it, they're all much better than Halo. Besides, by the time Vista's out, we'll have Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which will make Battlefield and Halo totally obsolete.
I can understand that Halo's popular on the XBox by people who don't know what they're missing out on on the PC, but why the hell would any PC gamer give half a s*** about Halo 2 on the PC, especially after how terribly unoptimised the Halo 1 port was?
EA don't make high-quality games, they just re-release the same old sh*t every year for the sake of making money. I bet none of the managers at EA are gamers or have a clue about games. They're just businessmen who are in it for the big bucks.
True. People who think Halo's good are totally ignorant to the FPS games available to the PC. Halo sucks compared to titles like Quake, Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Battlefield, and Enemy Territory.
I think the Halo games are the most overrated games in history.
So true. I also liked Generals a lot as a game, even though it's by EA, but it's just not stable enough when it comes to multiplayer. Most of the time I could only play 1on1s because games with more than 2 players either couldn't even initialise, or I'd get "mismatch" sh*t like you said. The few times that didn't happen, the actual network performance was horribly bad. I'm not sure what the cause was, but the game was extremely sluggish. Even on normal/fast gamespeed, everything was moving at snail-speed, as if the server "clock" was just not ticking fast enough. This was with computers with specs well over the recommended ones.
Oh, and unit AI in the Generals was quite crap as well. Those huge Chinese tanks always kept bumping into each other, stopping, and then blocking units behind them, and stuff like that.
Basically, if the suits had given EALA (the developer) time to polish the engine, especially the netcode, Generals could've been an awesome RTS, both single- and multiplayer. Electronic Arts always seem to release games too early and not pay the developers to fix bugs after release. C&C3's most definitely not going to be any different in that regard. Gamers need to be more critical and not buy EA's buggy games, if you ask me. I'm still waiting for Battlefield 2 to get patched to a more stable state before I plan on buying it.
Okay, maybe B&W sold fairly well due to all the hype, and Fable was a decent game for kids, but in my opinion Peter Monyneaux gets too much credit, and the games he works on are just mediocre. It doesn't really matter who publishes them.
I disagree. All the latest PC games published by Microsoft Games I've played were stable and fairly bug-free at release, something that a lot of publishes these days just don't seem to give a f*ck about. That means Microsoft don't rush their developers, they support them. Besides, it's the developer who makes the game, not the publisher. If a game sucks, it's probably the developer's fault. Financing, marketing, and maybe quality assurance - that's the publisher's job. The only way a publisher can screw a game up is by trying to control what the developers make, forcing them to make an early release, or by not paying them to make patches after release. As far as I know, Microsoft Games don't do any of that.
Ever heard of Freelancer, Rise of Nations, or Age of Empires? Those are published by MSG.
Nazi server admins are just as bad as actual cheaters, in my opinion. I got banned a couple of times by some idiots because either i) my score was suspiciously good, ii) they didn't like the way I played (say, vent camping on cs_assault), or iii) because I got some lucky frags (such as through-wall kills, or quickly turning around 180 degrees and getting a headshot).
The map function of ShowEQ was quite neat, but the real powerful thing about it was that it showed all of the mobs in the zone for you. Back then EverQuest would send mob info (names, levels, positions) of the entire zone to the client, even though one could never be in range to see them all. You could also program ShowEQ to play some soundfile when some particular mob spawned.
In EverQuest, a lot of rare NPCs exist around the world which only spawn a few times a day, or less. A lot of the competition in the game was (and maybe still is - I stopped playing about 4 years ago) beating other players to a spawn, so that you could get the loots. ShowEQ gave a huge advantage in this respect. You could just give it a list of rare mobs who've got phat loots, run around the world, and just wait for your ShowEQ machine to go "Beep" and show you a vector to that mob's position.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, until the next expansion comes out, people's gear will eventually even out and skill will start to matter a bit again. But due to the constant "have to grind equipment so that I can compete" nature of PvP in WoW, it'll never be a fair, professional competition.
This is exactly why I think PvP in World of Warcraft is so lame. It's not the best player who wins, it's the player who has invested the most time in getting good equipment for his avatar, chance, and class/talent specialisation, generally. Yes, skill plays a role too, but only a small one. World of Warcraft's game mechanics do not require ultra-fast reactions like in FPS games or strategic thinking like in an RTS.
For example, say I've got a roughtly an equal chance of winning against 'AllianceEnemy' with my avatar. If I could teach a friend of mine who plays games but doesn't know anything about WoW the basics of how to control my avatar and tell him what stuff he needs to use against 'AllianceEnemy', he could probably win against him like 40% of the time.
I've played the game for 2 years and considered my understanding of the game and my overall skill to be top-notch before The Burning Crusade (I don't play anymore). Now, in real skill-based games like Quake, Counter-Strike, Starcraft or whatever, a newbie has no chance against someone who's intensively played for 2 years. None at all. In those games the limit on how good you can get is impossible to reach for Humans - we can't instantly aim at our enemy's heads, or perfectly micromanage our entire army.
In World of Warcraft, most spells and skills activate a 1-second "global cooldown", so you can't execute spells and skills as fast as your cognitive system allows you to. And because there are only very few such abilities that require precise positioning of your avatar, you don't need precise mouse-look skills either. It's all very easy to control. The only challenge in WoW is learning about all the abilities and how to use them effectively, but that should come naturally to anyone who properly plays to level 70. (A lot of user-interface add-ons make the use of some abilities even easier. For example there are add-ons which tell mages for how many more seconds their polymorph (sheep) spell will last on their target, so that they know when they need to re-cast it). So by the time someone gets to 70, the main determinants of how good their avatar is at PvP are their equipment (getting good equipment just takes playing time, not skill) and whom they fight (your and their class and talent specialisation).
I conclude that because skill plays only a small role in WoW, because not all avatars start off equally in battles, and because there's a lot of chance involved, WoW isn't a real professional competitive game.
Yup.
Great artwork running very efficiently trumps fancy graphics technology (pixel shaders, HDR, bump mapping, etc).
Especially in an MMO it's damn important to keep poly-counts and stuff fairly low, so that the game doesn't turn into a slide-show as soon as more than 10 people are in your vicinity.
If it's so f***ing easy, why has nobody managed to make a better WoW yet?
Yeah, they all suck. If they'd hire you they'd end up with twice as many subscribers as WoW.
Although some people don't like the leveling treadmill, all those artificial time-sinks keep the people playing for a long time, and that's what MMO companies want.
What would be so great about an MMO Half-Life or whatever? As far as I know, the HL dedicated server already allows you to create a server with hundreds of players, but either the server can't handle the load, or people's connections aren't good enough to make everything appear smooth. In RPGs it doesn't matter if you're lagging a bit, but in an FPS, even a slight bit of lag can make the game unplayable. Internet technology isn't quite mature enough for a "real" twitch-skill MMOFPS.
Also, imho, in FPS games can have too many players. If you've got too many people shooting rockets and sh*t all over the place in a very small area, the quality of gameplay just deteriorates as you don't really have much control over winning. And if you'd have huge outdoor maps like in PlanetScape, you end up with loads of bland, uninspired terrain and no real exciting maps like in traditional FPS games.
There is one kickass racing game on the PSP: Wipeout Pure. It's got multiplayer modes too and supports up to 8 players, apparently. There are free downloadable tracks and stuff for it too. And the soundtrack r0x. It's a must-have game on the PSP, imho.
You got Lumines? That should be fun in 2 player mode, too.
You'd maybe like Advance Wars DS, or the upcoming Panzer Tactics, if it'll end up being good.
I'm VERY tempted to buy a DS just for Advance Wars DS, actually. I loved Advance Wars 2 on the GBA!
I've got a Copperhead (had a IntelliEye Explorer which also has 2 side buttons before that), and I use the side buttons all the time in FPS games, but not in RTS games. I've set one of the side buttons to alternate-fire (right-button is always jump for me) which I use all the time, and the other to something game-specific. In Counter-Strike it's "switch to knife", in Quake 3 it's "gesture".
In RTS games, mapping a few of the extra buttons on the mouse doesn't seem like a big benefit to me, because i) split-second actions aren't quite so critical in RTS games (whereas in FPS being a tiny bit too slow will get you fragged), and ii) RTSs have so many hotkeys, you'll have to rely on the keyboard anyway.
True that. I also use all the extra buttons on my mouse in WoW. With my rogue, I've got the bottom thumb button set to vanish, and the top thumb button set to sprint - very useful in PvP. With my hunter, I've set them to feign-death/drop-traps and shoot flare - again, useful in PvP, as being able to do that stuff quickly is critical.
The Razer Krait is just a gimped Copperhead. There's nothing "optimised" about it for MMOs or RTS games if you ask me.
Agreed. Even when viewing the PDA and thus being able to zoom in nicely, reading stuff on The Escapist hurts my eyes. >_
They've got nice layouts and stuff, but it's always hard to read.
Well, the fact that they're only counted as subscribers for merely 7 days indicates that only very few of those "unloyal" customers people who've only played for, say, an hour get counted as subscribers. 7 days is a very short period of time for an MMO subscription length - that's the key here. Those Internet Game Room account owners who play very irregularly, or only only used it once to get a taste for what WoW's like, should have a negligible impact on the statistics. In order for such unloyal customers have a significant impact on the statistics, you'd need them to create tens of thousands of new accounts every week. Asia's big, but I doubt tens of thousands of people there make a new IGR account every week and then completely stop playing.
It's not like counting every single person who dropped a dollar on an arcade game as a fan of that game, because Blizzard does not count every IGR account every created as a subscription.
I disagree completely. WoW isn't popular because of marketing. It's popular because it's the only MMORPG out there which is fun to play right from the start. You don't need to wait until you're level X before you can go on adventures or get cool items and spells. You don't need to spend a week to get used to the user interface. WoW's a fast MMO that rewards the player immediately, and hardly ever punishes him for things such as getting killed, not having a 2nd account/computer, or not having lots of gold and thus not being able to buy the best possible gear. It's very easy for somebody new to get into the game and start playing right away. It makes you think "hey, this is fun" right away. Most MMOs throw the new player into the complicated game world after a 5-minute tutorial, whereas in WoW the first entire zone is tailored for new players, and there are always directions on where to go next.
If you had read the official Blizzard press released, then you'd know they only count active Internet Game Room accounts which have been active in the last 7 days. So yes, their figures can be taken at face value.
From http://www.blizzard.com/press/060119.shtml
World of Warcraft's Customer Definition
World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee or purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, as well as those who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.
Who cares about this? PC FPS games like Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Quake, Battlefield, Doom, FEAR... you name it, they're all much better than Halo. Besides, by the time Vista's out, we'll have Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which will make Battlefield and Halo totally obsolete.
I can understand that Halo's popular on the XBox by people who don't know what they're missing out on on the PC, but why the hell would any PC gamer give half a s*** about Halo 2 on the PC, especially after how terribly unoptimised the Halo 1 port was?
Naw, GTA's developed by Rockstar North, who are based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Rockstar Vienna did some PC to console ports. Afaik they ported GTA to the Xbox, and Max Payne to consoles.
But will they be free, or will one have to pay for that Fileshack service to be able to get the high-def videos?
Agreed.
EA don't make high-quality games, they just re-release the same old sh*t every year for the sake of making money. I bet none of the managers at EA are gamers or have a clue about games. They're just businessmen who are in it for the big bucks.
True. People who think Halo's good are totally ignorant to the FPS games available to the PC. Halo sucks compared to titles like Quake, Counter-Strike, Half-Life, Battlefield, and Enemy Territory.
I think the Halo games are the most overrated games in history.
There's no lag in EQ2 because everyone stopped playing it. :p
So true. I also liked Generals a lot as a game, even though it's by EA, but it's just not stable enough when it comes to multiplayer. Most of the time I could only play 1on1s because games with more than 2 players either couldn't even initialise, or I'd get "mismatch" sh*t like you said. The few times that didn't happen, the actual network performance was horribly bad. I'm not sure what the cause was, but the game was extremely sluggish. Even on normal/fast gamespeed, everything was moving at snail-speed, as if the server "clock" was just not ticking fast enough. This was with computers with specs well over the recommended ones.
Oh, and unit AI in the Generals was quite crap as well. Those huge Chinese tanks always kept bumping into each other, stopping, and then blocking units behind them, and stuff like that.
Basically, if the suits had given EALA (the developer) time to polish the engine, especially the netcode, Generals could've been an awesome RTS, both single- and multiplayer. Electronic Arts always seem to release games too early and not pay the developers to fix bugs after release. C&C3's most definitely not going to be any different in that regard. Gamers need to be more critical and not buy EA's buggy games, if you ask me. I'm still waiting for Battlefield 2 to get patched to a more stable state before I plan on buying it.
They've been mass-banz0ring cheaters, hackers, exploiters, and gold sellers since beta. Who said they wouldn't do this?
It's always nice to read these announcements from Blizzard.
Has Lionhead put out anything worth a shit, ever?
Okay, maybe B&W sold fairly well due to all the hype, and Fable was a decent game for kids, but in my opinion Peter Monyneaux gets too much credit, and the games he works on are just mediocre. It doesn't really matter who publishes them.
I disagree. All the latest PC games published by Microsoft Games I've played were stable and fairly bug-free at release, something that a lot of publishes these days just don't seem to give a f*ck about. That means Microsoft don't rush their developers, they support them. Besides, it's the developer who makes the game, not the publisher. If a game sucks, it's probably the developer's fault. Financing, marketing, and maybe quality assurance - that's the publisher's job. The only way a publisher can screw a game up is by trying to control what the developers make, forcing them to make an early release, or by not paying them to make patches after release. As far as I know, Microsoft Games don't do any of that.
Ever heard of Freelancer, Rise of Nations, or Age of Empires? Those are published by MSG.
Nazi server admins are just as bad as actual cheaters, in my opinion. I got banned a couple of times by some idiots because either i) my score was suspiciously good, ii) they didn't like the way I played (say, vent camping on cs_assault), or iii) because I got some lucky frags (such as through-wall kills, or quickly turning around 180 degrees and getting a headshot).
The map function of ShowEQ was quite neat, but the real powerful thing about it was that it showed all of the mobs in the zone for you. Back then EverQuest would send mob info (names, levels, positions) of the entire zone to the client, even though one could never be in range to see them all. You could also program ShowEQ to play some soundfile when some particular mob spawned.
In EverQuest, a lot of rare NPCs exist around the world which only spawn a few times a day, or less. A lot of the competition in the game was (and maybe still is - I stopped playing about 4 years ago) beating other players to a spawn, so that you could get the loots. ShowEQ gave a huge advantage in this respect. You could just give it a list of rare mobs who've got phat loots, run around the world, and just wait for your ShowEQ machine to go "Beep" and show you a vector to that mob's position.