I liked it a lot for the same reason, but the siren's song of EQ2's Kingdom of Sky pulled me back:P
DDO is amazing for the casual player. It's also a ton of fun to play, because positioning and such matters. There's something to be said for a dungeon crawl where all you have is six players and you don't automatically recover mana.
I think I'm going to come back to it later after I binge on Kingdom of Sky for a month or three.
A parent can pretty much involuntarily put a child wherever they want, as long as it's not terribly harmful or dangerous. If they wanted to keep their kids under incredibly strict lock and key with homeschooling, as long as they're not abusing them and their curriculum is okay, they're welcome to it.
I was wondering if you wouldn't mind further explaining the reasoning behind "the Second Law of Thermodynamics requires that entropy can only increase, but if you could go back in time, you could violate this by having greater entropy in the past."
I am certainly not very good with physics, but it seems to me that the Second Law sprung from the observation that heat (and thereby energy) tends to dissipate. Because we think that we can only move in a positive time direction, we conclude that entropy increases with time.
It seems like faulty logic to conclude from this that moving backwards in time is impossible, since that was actually one of the assumptions that we used in formulating the Second Law.
You can claim we haven't observed any effects of matter moving backwards in time, but there can be a whole number of reasons why. If matter was to somehow instantaneously travel backward in time from a future earth, for instance, wouldn't there be a very good chance that it would be impossibly far away from the past earth to catch up with it by the year 2005? And even if it did, that its contribution towards entropy would be unnoticeable?
This does really highlight a difference between the population in EQ2 and WoW, in my opinion. A guild advertised exactly the same thing in EQ2. A couple players questioned their agenda, though only a select few were hostile. After this initial phase of discovering they're legit, they're willing to accept anyone, and they're not evil ghey folks out to convert your children, people stopped bothering them and the guild got formed. I kept seeing 'em around, so I guess they were doing okay.
Another thing that happened on a chat channel was that someone start making borderline racist jokes (being both drunk and stupid), and the guy's friends immediately did the right thing and told him to get some sleep and come back tomorrow. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on the internet - no flame war, no cursing, no angry posts on the forums, it just ended.
As to WoW, if they want to handle everything real world by banning its discussion, I have no problem (though I'm curious if it's equally applied -- their policy might actually get them into legal trouble if it's not). I don't know, maybe they have a point with the kiddies, but I think most people in WoW have seen enough elves strip teasing and people talking about teh cybarsechs that it's not an issue. If we really need to head in this direction, I would absolutely love to see 18+ servers so that we could stop having to worry about offending the kiddies constantly.
"With SWG I looked for the magic of Lucas' original vision... I was stunned by Star Wars in the 70s. It left a mark on my teenage consciousness. In SWG I wanted to start out making deals in the Mos Eisley Cantina, and then form a party and travel to Coruscant to visit the Outlander Club. But no, I had to run around and kill Storm Troopers."
Hell, most of the time you're not even fighting Stormtroopers. You're vaping random nests of critters and small-time pirate encampments. Fine, Luke started off bullseyeing womprats in Beggars' Canyon, but FFS, less Big Game Hunter and more Galactic Civil War. If there were more Imperial installations to attack and a motivation to do so, as opposed to killing random creatures and primitive tribes on backwater planets, SWG would've taken a big step up in the Star Wars experience.
The dungeons went part of the way to capturing this, but they were either non-instanced or Way Too Hard (exception: The Warrens). The Geonosian Lab -- non-instanced and completely 100% camped. Felt like I was waiting in line behind other players. The Corvette -- ridiculously difficult to the point where people just stripped their armor and charged through it. The Death Watch Bunker -- forget about it unless you're have one of the handful of correct templates that are actually able to do useful damage.
Not really. I don't see why you can't have players become as powerful as Boba Fett, Han Solo, or Wedge Antilles. None of them are superhuman, each just excel above average in their careers. Tracking a mark across planets to capture them for a bounty, maybe with a couple of the tools of the trade, would be plenty to let players capture the feel of Boba Fett. Smuggling cargo in a YT-1300 would be plenty to capture the Han Solo feel. Flying an X-Wing for the Rebellion pretty much sums up Wedge's contribution.
Essentially, what the NGE did was collapse professions down so they could have an easier time balancing the game. They chose iconic ones from the movies for obvious reasons, but those professions existed already, and in more pliable form (i.e., a smuggler that engineered some of his own ship components, or a carbine-wielding soldier that trains pets in his off-time -- neither of which is possible now). This bullshit about making it feel more like the movies is the devteam blowing smoke up our collective asses and trying to direct attention from their inability to balance the system they made.
Hehe, that is the easiest example that comes to mind, but there are a lot of tamed animals in the movies. I think all six movies have someone riding exotic creatures or some sort of beast attacking (usually under someone else's direction). In my mind, Creature Handlers should be the ones taming the beasts and the only ones allowed to ride the exotic ones.
"Obviously, pencil-n-paper RPGs are so incredibly superior to MMORPGs, that doesn't need to be discussed. But the author should compare apples to apples (fantasy PnPRPGs to fantasy MMORPGs, etc.) and not crime/dramatic/near-goth jerkfest to MMORPGs."
That's... not true. MMOs are different, with different advantages. You have a computer taking care of the grunt book keeping work, conjuring up fantastic visuals instead of a couple lines of text. The downside, of course, being that you're limited to what the developers can make. Another upside is that there are tons of players around, and you can turn out a bunch of characters to play when you're in a certain mood. I can flip from one RP scenario into another with a different character and an entirely new group of players within fifteen minutes if my old group is finished. The downside being that these characters have less commitment behind them, and tend to be more expendable. A final upside is that it's easier to gather a large number of people together. There aren't many PnP groups that can get twenty or thirty people together in a tavern every night to sit around and shoot the shit.
"It still is a shocker to me that there are tons of people who are currently playing MMORPGs who have never played PnPRPG. That is not so much an issue with games like WoW or EQ2 but it is a huge problem with games like NWN. The number one is PnPer knows why certain things work in a certain way and when those items are put into a video game broken, a PnPer will work to correct those issues (e.g. True Sight broke as hell in NWN)."
Why are they "right" in PnP and "wrong" in NWN (which is not an MMO -- the PWs I've seen max out around a couple hundred and usually have far less than that)? Why can't they be different, for the different media? Just because something is changed from your uber oldsk00l experience doesn't make it wrong.
"The issue they had was that they rushed the release. They are slow on bug fixes. and they're trying to attract the WoW crowd by making it easier. The problem is that EQ2 already had its core gamers! By making it easier to attract new gamers fromw WoW they in turn have killed of the original EQ2 crowd (ie Me). I don't enjoy everything being handed to me. I don't enjoy solo'ing all the way to 60 (much like WoW its getting to be the easiest way to get to 60 instead of risking pickup groups) I want to be grouping, I want to know that if someone is lvl 60 they actualy KNOW THEIR CLASS AND HOW TO USE IT. You have no idea how many people that are 60 still don't know what their class is used for and how to act in a group."
I agree on this front. I kept running into level 50-60 players who would constantly overaggro, tanks that didn't understand how to taunt or hold aggro, people pulling in adds every which way and using armor from the 30s. Also, it's very easy to avoid any challenging areas, like you said. So you end up with level 50 tanks that don't know what body pulling is or social mobs. My last week in the game I had to sit down and explain it to three or four tanks that wiped us after I asked them to body pull and they shot a couple arrows into a room filled with mobs.
"They also are SLOW TO FIX BUGS! High end raiding content is suppose to be their crown jewell. But yet when you go to try and kill a mob that has been in the game since launch, (Drakota in The Ferrot) He still has bugged adds! At least the last time I attempted him which was 2 months ago. I had a neighbor that was in a High end raiding guild that was usualy one of the first 2-3 to beat the new content. They had to wait 2-3 weeks to even fix zoning and agroo issues with mobs. So many issues with the game that they are slow to fix, and they never have fixed. I can understand a few bugs on release. I can understand that. But this many and after this long they still aren't fixed..."
I don't agree that high end raiding content is supposed to be their crown jewel. EQ2 focuses much more on the group and solo content than on the raids, though it has a fair bit of raiding content. One of the three "ultimate" quests in the game right now can be single-grouped, and it's pretty much bug free. Overall they've been great about fixing bugs and adding in useful features, plus they've had a lot of live events -- even if they're not your bag, it's neat to have them trying. That said, they do need to fix raid content, for both "casual" and "hardcore" players. As more guilds get up in level and attempt raids, they're beginning to get as frustrated as the raiding guilds were at that level. No one likes getting 24 people together to fight level 64 epics for level 20 crap loot that's worse than common crafted (guild raids), or getting to Darathar and losing to a buggy encounter instead of poor tactics.
Re:Doesn't matter how you spin it...
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Nah, EQ2 doesn't really compete with EQ1. There's no grinding unless you really want to; a 24 cap on raids, which aren't available in nearly the quantity of PoP; basically four classes, the subclasses only making a huge difference on high-end stuff; very good items that are widely accessible through grouping or crafting instead of raiding (and I'm not talking about LDoN style marathon-grouping); and the gameplay is much less complicated, but more action-oriented. What I mean by the last is that pulling is much easier and chanters are hardly ever necessary, but everyone is constantly doing something, including (especially) the tank.
Personally, I really dig it. It's the Everquest world for the casual player. The playerbase seems to be much, much more mature than any other MMO I've played (I haven't played Eve, which I think would be the main contender on that front). I'd still be playing it if I didn't decide it took up too much of my time.
It's because they implemented the license poorly and had no idea how to fix it. They needed to make the game more "Star Warzy" because they picked a time period where they could literally do nothing substantial with the major characters. Jabba and Han sat around chained to their theme parks all day handing out quests to retrieve power packs.
One of their iconic classes, Bounty Hunter, had its iconic skill borked with no real PC bounties to hunt for god knows how long. Another, Smuggler, had (has) nothing to smuggle. Creature Handlers went from overpowered to useless and then to being omitted entirely. Jedi wavered between non-existent to flooding everything, trivial to kill, and then nearly impossible, and now back to trivial. I'm not even sure how the changes make things more "Star Warzy," it just prunes impotent classes and makes balancing trivial.
Most damning of all, the "authentic" armor took a backseat to one and only one type of armor, composite, which I don't even recall seeing in the movies. Pistols and carbines took a backseat to rifles, martial arts, and mad scientists carrying bottles of disease.
People who play a Star Wars game would want to see locations from the movies and some from the EU. Check. Exciting battles of Imperials vs. Rebels that have consequences. Failed. Exciting blaster fights, as opposed to armies of ninjas in composite chucking poison at each other. Failed. Smugglers smuggling, bounty hunters bounty hunting, creature handlers handling creatures. Failed. Exciting space battles. So-so... and implemented far too late into the development cycle.
And this is not even discussing the incredible gameplay glitches, imbalances, and complete lack of content. None of this has to do with the Star Wars license, except the devs' poor decision about timeframe.
That's not true. Bounty hunters, smugglers, pilots, imperial and rebel soldiers... there are a ton of professions referenced in the Star Wars universe that aren't Jedi Mastaz but would still make for exciting gameplay. Hell, the most dedicated players in the game were artisans and spent time stocking and decorating their stores.
Had they just ruled out Jedi from the start or made them as rare as they claimed they were going to be, and then spent time fixing bugs and tweaking the other professions instead of futzing around with Force Sensitive systems, they would have had a killer game.
Instead they had weak PvE, weak PvP, entire professions that were essentially useless, skill branches in almost every profession that were essentially useless, and horrible servers and bugs. It took them, what, over a year to fix not warping when you're in a sitting animation?
The fact that people played the game as long as they did is a testament to the fact that a Star Wars game could definitely be a hit, if done correctly. Even if most people didn't know about the EU, it would be easy to make a game set after the movies with the weakened Imperials and the Rebels on even footing. There would be plenty of recognizable characters, uniforms, blasters, everything. Even a justification for having Jedi. As it is, they didn't even use the characters from the time period they chose. Vader, Han, Jabba... they were all just cardboard cutouts sitting in a shack in a random corner of some planet giving out missions to talk to someone and retrieve a battery. I think exploring Jabba's Palace as a hostile dungeon filled with those spider-brain monks would've been more exciting than having Jabba reduced to quest_npc_X.
No, no, it's entirely the fault of the devs. This whining about working with existing franchises is a bunch of bullshit.
Google has said it will be up-front about the censorship, which it has when it's censored things previously. What do you think is more beneficial to the dissemination of information and fostering ill-will towards censorship: people that don't know their results are censored, or people who are told that they're doctored?
"The thing is, you're arguing from the limitted perspective of the Chinese, where having any Google results is good, while others are arguing from the perspective of, well... everything else. Namely that working with an oppressive regime to hide facts from its citizens is "evil", no matter how you look at it."
Actually, no, it's more the limited perspective of utilitarianism, which is probably one of the most logical philosophies out there. In my mind, absolutist judgments like "working with an oppressive regime is by its nature evil" are idiotic. Let's look at this logically.
By your own admission, google.cn helps the Chinese people. It does not bolster the current regime -- in fact, it provides a better search tool that admits when there is censorship and ostensibly has a better filtering algorithm to catch fewer sites. At worst, it's a wash. At best, it begins to foster the dissemination of more information that leads to dissatisfaction with the censorship. As for the rest of the world, I'm not sure that you can make a case for it affecting them in any large measure. Google, of course, benefits from the transaction, but that isn't a negative unless we've already established that Google will use the money for harmful purposes. They do enough research and provide a valuable enough service that I don't think this last is valid.
"If you can't trust that Google or any other search engine is presenting the best possible results, then why use them?"
Because some results are better than the 100% best possible results, and there is no better alternative. If you can get around the firewall to use another search engine, then you can use google.com and get your uncensored results. If you can't, then google.cn is probably the next best thing.
And, of course, the most insightful response in this article gets modded down. Seriously, people, what have you done for the common Chinese man recently? And how much have you supported their government by buying their goods?
I'm not saying Google did this out of the goodness of their hearts, but they're providing the Chinese with one of the best search engines out there, letting them know when their results are being censored (something that I am sure the Chinese government wouldn't be doing), and probably using a more refined method of censorship so that less pages are caught in their net. I don't see who loses out on this deal. Revolution has to happen internally, and the best way of doing that is providing the people with better access to information and the ability to see just how much is being censored.
Normally, I'd select some pretty well-acted lines in the dialogue for the trailer. In what we're given, the main character emotes fear pretty poorly, and that's going to be her main reaction. The cop looks to be a pretty major figure, and her sole line in the trailer is comically wooden.
Just as I'm allowed to say from the trailer that the movie looks like a pretty faithful rendition of the game, I'm allowed to say that the acting looks pretty poor. Who knows? They could surprise me. But in the meantime, you can keep on truckin' as an anonymous reactionary, I'll keep posting my legitimate opinions legitimate.
I don't agree. I think EQ2 was an example of a good change, and they did actually experience a lot of positive reactions and a decent amount of renewed accounts. They gained more than they lost, really.
For anyone that's not in the know, EQ2's combat revamp basically went through and fixed a lot of broken/useless spell lines, toned down some overpowered abilities and rethought some underused ones. It made some substantial changes to a couple spell lines, but it did not alter the mechanics or basic theme of any of the classes (barring one or two, arguably, but they retained their original intent). It balanced them out a lot more, and at the same time made content less trivial.
SWG's combat upgrade screwed everything. It completely messed up the theme of the game by requiring class certifications for weapons and armor. It made a whole swathe of attacks completely different from their original intent and rearranged them between skill trees. It changed the basic mechanics of a lot of stats and made some templates pretty gimped. For a newbie starting out in the game, it basically made the space expansion a requirement, as newbie missions from the terminals had always been painful and now they became more difficult. It's an example of having no idea about the game you've created, and so hitting it with a sledgehammer instead of fine tuning it. They repeated this trend with the NGE.
Funny, this article came out right as I was watching the Silent Hill trailer and pondering if it was going to be the first good video game movie that actually held true to the video game.
The acting looks pretty terrible, but holy crap, actual recognizable settings, characters, and plot details. That's half of the reason I'd pay to see a video game movie -- to see it translated onto the big screen.
"It started perhaps with the Composite armour. This armour was so though that it made all other armour useless. But it carried a huge penalty, so they introduced doc buffs to counter them but made those so powerfull that people turned into one man armies able to solo almost everything. So high end dungeons added had enemies so though that had 100% resist on every attack except one, wich had a 90% resist. From there it just went to hell.
If only they had never added that super armour. We would possibly now have a game that was open ended and they could have spent all the time fixing the actuall bugs instead of constantly trying to balance a bad desicision.
Tips to anyother game developers. Do not introduce a piece of equipment that is so leet that it instantly makes everything else worthless."
This, my friends, is a concise summary of why SWG failed. Devs did not, never, ever, think about what would happen if someone managed to make top-end gear or a min-max template. Hell, they made it possible to make a max-max template. And they had absolutely no idea which nerfs were appropriate.
The poster above outlined the composite armor/doc buffs thing. Players were able to wear this 90% resistance armor and build a template to max out defensive mods, which meant that literally I could sit there firing at the player for an hour and not do any damage. This went on for untold amounts of time. And one week they accidentally bugged it so that one attack in two profession lines, called Scatter hits, ignored these defenses. They weren't overpowered, it just meant that with me, having maxed out accuracy and eating accuracy food, at optimal range, laying prone, I could eventually kill one of these stackers. What happened? Fix went in for *that* bug a week later. There are untold amounts of imbalances like this which went unfixed for untold amounts of time while the devs implemented (boring) race tracks and dungeons that were useless to anyone but the maxers.
Also, the effects of these buffs on the game. Since they buffed everything instead of nerfing players, it suddenly became that you couldn't do anything without doctor buffs, entertainer buffs, and food. This is a lengthy ass process. Imagine you enter PvP and five minutes later die, which is not unreasonable. You now face something like fifteen or thirty minutes of healing, rebuffing, waiting for your stomach to empty so you can eat more food, getting back your entertainer buffs, etc. Fighting without these became impossible in PvP.
And, finally, PvP. Supposedly one of the core focuses of the game, the Galactic Civil War. And PvP a year or two in was essentially what it was when it started -- you could build faction bases, but they served no purpose except for you to defend. So you spent a ton of time grinding and grinding to build up enough faction to buy a big faction base so that you could defend it. And people did it, because there was no other PvP content.
"I haven't played SWG but here is what springs to my mind.
Jabba's palace should be one of the high level bounty hunter spots. You should get missions there, they can try and make it a social and trading center too.
Have some cleanup missions on hoth maybe, or have the whole huge battle once every few weeks and just keep reseting it."
Trust me, these ideas and many more were proposed to the devs many times. I, myself, outlined your idea about making Jabba's into a BH/smuggler center in great detail, and I certainly wasn't the only one.
Just to explain how painful it was, you go to the palace and you get bland mission after bland mission to run 1km in a random direction in the desert and kill some thugs. The loot at the beginning was worse than the shittiest crafter could craft and gave out less credits than a lowbie mission terminal (which gave out amazingly small credit amounts). Your reward for beating everything was access to Jabba's bedroom (?), which was sorta neat, I guess. Then there was no reason to ever come back except to pick up Corvette missions, which were introduced later on and didn't exactly attract a big crowd.
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I liked it a lot for the same reason, but the siren's song of EQ2's Kingdom of Sky pulled me back :P
DDO is amazing for the casual player. It's also a ton of fun to play, because positioning and such matters. There's something to be said for a dungeon crawl where all you have is six players and you don't automatically recover mana.
I think I'm going to come back to it later after I binge on Kingdom of Sky for a month or three.
A parent can pretty much involuntarily put a child wherever they want, as long as it's not terribly harmful or dangerous. If they wanted to keep their kids under incredibly strict lock and key with homeschooling, as long as they're not abusing them and their curriculum is okay, they're welcome to it.
I was wondering if you wouldn't mind further explaining the reasoning behind "the Second Law of Thermodynamics requires that entropy can only increase, but if you could go back in time, you could violate this by having greater entropy in the past."
I am certainly not very good with physics, but it seems to me that the Second Law sprung from the observation that heat (and thereby energy) tends to dissipate. Because we think that we can only move in a positive time direction, we conclude that entropy increases with time.
It seems like faulty logic to conclude from this that moving backwards in time is impossible, since that was actually one of the assumptions that we used in formulating the Second Law.
You can claim we haven't observed any effects of matter moving backwards in time, but there can be a whole number of reasons why. If matter was to somehow instantaneously travel backward in time from a future earth, for instance, wouldn't there be a very good chance that it would be impossibly far away from the past earth to catch up with it by the year 2005? And even if it did, that its contribution towards entropy would be unnoticeable?
This does really highlight a difference between the population in EQ2 and WoW, in my opinion. A guild advertised exactly the same thing in EQ2. A couple players questioned their agenda, though only a select few were hostile. After this initial phase of discovering they're legit, they're willing to accept anyone, and they're not evil ghey folks out to convert your children, people stopped bothering them and the guild got formed. I kept seeing 'em around, so I guess they were doing okay.
Another thing that happened on a chat channel was that someone start making borderline racist jokes (being both drunk and stupid), and the guy's friends immediately did the right thing and told him to get some sleep and come back tomorrow. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on the internet - no flame war, no cursing, no angry posts on the forums, it just ended.
As to WoW, if they want to handle everything real world by banning its discussion, I have no problem (though I'm curious if it's equally applied -- their policy might actually get them into legal trouble if it's not). I don't know, maybe they have a point with the kiddies, but I think most people in WoW have seen enough elves strip teasing and people talking about teh cybarsechs that it's not an issue. If we really need to head in this direction, I would absolutely love to see 18+ servers so that we could stop having to worry about offending the kiddies constantly.
"With SWG I looked for the magic of Lucas' original vision... I was stunned by Star Wars in the 70s. It left a mark on my teenage consciousness. In SWG I wanted to start out making deals in the Mos Eisley Cantina, and then form a party and travel to Coruscant to visit the Outlander Club. But no, I had to run around and kill Storm Troopers."
Hell, most of the time you're not even fighting Stormtroopers. You're vaping random nests of critters and small-time pirate encampments. Fine, Luke started off bullseyeing womprats in Beggars' Canyon, but FFS, less Big Game Hunter and more Galactic Civil War. If there were more Imperial installations to attack and a motivation to do so, as opposed to killing random creatures and primitive tribes on backwater planets, SWG would've taken a big step up in the Star Wars experience.
The dungeons went part of the way to capturing this, but they were either non-instanced or Way Too Hard (exception: The Warrens). The Geonosian Lab -- non-instanced and completely 100% camped. Felt like I was waiting in line behind other players. The Corvette -- ridiculously difficult to the point where people just stripped their armor and charged through it. The Death Watch Bunker -- forget about it unless you're have one of the handful of correct templates that are actually able to do useful damage.
Not really. I don't see why you can't have players become as powerful as Boba Fett, Han Solo, or Wedge Antilles. None of them are superhuman, each just excel above average in their careers. Tracking a mark across planets to capture them for a bounty, maybe with a couple of the tools of the trade, would be plenty to let players capture the feel of Boba Fett. Smuggling cargo in a YT-1300 would be plenty to capture the Han Solo feel. Flying an X-Wing for the Rebellion pretty much sums up Wedge's contribution.
Essentially, what the NGE did was collapse professions down so they could have an easier time balancing the game. They chose iconic ones from the movies for obvious reasons, but those professions existed already, and in more pliable form (i.e., a smuggler that engineered some of his own ship components, or a carbine-wielding soldier that trains pets in his off-time -- neither of which is possible now). This bullshit about making it feel more like the movies is the devteam blowing smoke up our collective asses and trying to direct attention from their inability to balance the system they made.
Hehe, that is the easiest example that comes to mind, but there are a lot of tamed animals in the movies. I think all six movies have someone riding exotic creatures or some sort of beast attacking (usually under someone else's direction). In my mind, Creature Handlers should be the ones taming the beasts and the only ones allowed to ride the exotic ones.
"Obviously, pencil-n-paper RPGs are so incredibly superior to MMORPGs, that doesn't need to be discussed. But the author should compare apples to apples (fantasy PnPRPGs to fantasy MMORPGs, etc.) and not crime/dramatic/near-goth jerkfest to MMORPGs."
That's... not true. MMOs are different, with different advantages. You have a computer taking care of the grunt book keeping work, conjuring up fantastic visuals instead of a couple lines of text. The downside, of course, being that you're limited to what the developers can make. Another upside is that there are tons of players around, and you can turn out a bunch of characters to play when you're in a certain mood. I can flip from one RP scenario into another with a different character and an entirely new group of players within fifteen minutes if my old group is finished. The downside being that these characters have less commitment behind them, and tend to be more expendable. A final upside is that it's easier to gather a large number of people together. There aren't many PnP groups that can get twenty or thirty people together in a tavern every night to sit around and shoot the shit.
"It still is a shocker to me that there are tons of people who are currently playing MMORPGs who have never played PnPRPG. That is not so much an issue with games like WoW or EQ2 but it is a huge problem with games like NWN. The number one is PnPer knows why certain things work in a certain way and when those items are put into a video game broken, a PnPer will work to correct those issues (e.g. True Sight broke as hell in NWN)."
Why are they "right" in PnP and "wrong" in NWN (which is not an MMO -- the PWs I've seen max out around a couple hundred and usually have far less than that)? Why can't they be different, for the different media? Just because something is changed from your uber oldsk00l experience doesn't make it wrong.
"The issue they had was that they rushed the release. They are slow on bug fixes. and they're trying to attract the WoW crowd by making it easier. The problem is that EQ2 already had its core gamers! By making it easier to attract new gamers fromw WoW they in turn have killed of the original EQ2 crowd (ie Me). I don't enjoy everything being handed to me. I don't enjoy solo'ing all the way to 60 (much like WoW its getting to be the easiest way to get to 60 instead of risking pickup groups) I want to be grouping, I want to know that if someone is lvl 60 they actualy KNOW THEIR CLASS AND HOW TO USE IT. You have no idea how many people that are 60 still don't know what their class is used for and how to act in a group."
I agree on this front. I kept running into level 50-60 players who would constantly overaggro, tanks that didn't understand how to taunt or hold aggro, people pulling in adds every which way and using armor from the 30s. Also, it's very easy to avoid any challenging areas, like you said. So you end up with level 50 tanks that don't know what body pulling is or social mobs. My last week in the game I had to sit down and explain it to three or four tanks that wiped us after I asked them to body pull and they shot a couple arrows into a room filled with mobs.
"They also are SLOW TO FIX BUGS! High end raiding content is suppose to be their crown jewell. But yet when you go to try and kill a mob that has been in the game since launch, (Drakota in The Ferrot) He still has bugged adds! At least the last time I attempted him which was 2 months ago. I had a neighbor that was in a High end raiding guild that was usualy one of the first 2-3 to beat the new content. They had to wait 2-3 weeks to even fix zoning and agroo issues with mobs. So many issues with the game that they are slow to fix, and they never have fixed. I can understand a few bugs on release. I can understand that. But this many and after this long they still aren't fixed..."
I don't agree that high end raiding content is supposed to be their crown jewel. EQ2 focuses much more on the group and solo content than on the raids, though it has a fair bit of raiding content. One of the three "ultimate" quests in the game right now can be single-grouped, and it's pretty much bug free. Overall they've been great about fixing bugs and adding in useful features, plus they've had a lot of live events -- even if they're not your bag, it's neat to have them trying. That said, they do need to fix raid content, for both "casual" and "hardcore" players. As more guilds get up in level and attempt raids, they're beginning to get as frustrated as the raiding guilds were at that level. No one likes getting 24 people together to fight level 64 epics for level 20 crap loot that's worse than common crafted (guild raids), or getting to Darathar and losing to a buggy encounter instead of poor tactics.
Nah, EQ2 doesn't really compete with EQ1. There's no grinding unless you really want to; a 24 cap on raids, which aren't available in nearly the quantity of PoP; basically four classes, the subclasses only making a huge difference on high-end stuff; very good items that are widely accessible through grouping or crafting instead of raiding (and I'm not talking about LDoN style marathon-grouping); and the gameplay is much less complicated, but more action-oriented. What I mean by the last is that pulling is much easier and chanters are hardly ever necessary, but everyone is constantly doing something, including (especially) the tank.
Personally, I really dig it. It's the Everquest world for the casual player. The playerbase seems to be much, much more mature than any other MMO I've played (I haven't played Eve, which I think would be the main contender on that front). I'd still be playing it if I didn't decide it took up too much of my time.
It's because they implemented the license poorly and had no idea how to fix it. They needed to make the game more "Star Warzy" because they picked a time period where they could literally do nothing substantial with the major characters. Jabba and Han sat around chained to their theme parks all day handing out quests to retrieve power packs.
One of their iconic classes, Bounty Hunter, had its iconic skill borked with no real PC bounties to hunt for god knows how long. Another, Smuggler, had (has) nothing to smuggle. Creature Handlers went from overpowered to useless and then to being omitted entirely. Jedi wavered between non-existent to flooding everything, trivial to kill, and then nearly impossible, and now back to trivial. I'm not even sure how the changes make things more "Star Warzy," it just prunes impotent classes and makes balancing trivial.
Most damning of all, the "authentic" armor took a backseat to one and only one type of armor, composite, which I don't even recall seeing in the movies. Pistols and carbines took a backseat to rifles, martial arts, and mad scientists carrying bottles of disease.
People who play a Star Wars game would want to see locations from the movies and some from the EU. Check. Exciting battles of Imperials vs. Rebels that have consequences. Failed. Exciting blaster fights, as opposed to armies of ninjas in composite chucking poison at each other. Failed. Smugglers smuggling, bounty hunters bounty hunting, creature handlers handling creatures. Failed. Exciting space battles. So-so... and implemented far too late into the development cycle.
And this is not even discussing the incredible gameplay glitches, imbalances, and complete lack of content. None of this has to do with the Star Wars license, except the devs' poor decision about timeframe.
That's not true. Bounty hunters, smugglers, pilots, imperial and rebel soldiers... there are a ton of professions referenced in the Star Wars universe that aren't Jedi Mastaz but would still make for exciting gameplay. Hell, the most dedicated players in the game were artisans and spent time stocking and decorating their stores.
Had they just ruled out Jedi from the start or made them as rare as they claimed they were going to be, and then spent time fixing bugs and tweaking the other professions instead of futzing around with Force Sensitive systems, they would have had a killer game.
Instead they had weak PvE, weak PvP, entire professions that were essentially useless, skill branches in almost every profession that were essentially useless, and horrible servers and bugs. It took them, what, over a year to fix not warping when you're in a sitting animation?
The fact that people played the game as long as they did is a testament to the fact that a Star Wars game could definitely be a hit, if done correctly. Even if most people didn't know about the EU, it would be easy to make a game set after the movies with the weakened Imperials and the Rebels on even footing. There would be plenty of recognizable characters, uniforms, blasters, everything. Even a justification for having Jedi. As it is, they didn't even use the characters from the time period they chose. Vader, Han, Jabba... they were all just cardboard cutouts sitting in a shack in a random corner of some planet giving out missions to talk to someone and retrieve a battery. I think exploring Jabba's Palace as a hostile dungeon filled with those spider-brain monks would've been more exciting than having Jabba reduced to quest_npc_X.
No, no, it's entirely the fault of the devs. This whining about working with existing franchises is a bunch of bullshit.
Google has said it will be up-front about the censorship, which it has when it's censored things previously. What do you think is more beneficial to the dissemination of information and fostering ill-will towards censorship: people that don't know their results are censored, or people who are told that they're doctored?
1. Do you really think gamers are oppressed?
2. Gaming is a voluntary choice.
"The thing is, you're arguing from the limitted perspective of the Chinese, where having any Google results is good, while others are arguing from the perspective of, well... everything else. Namely that working with an oppressive regime to hide facts from its citizens is "evil", no matter how you look at it."
Actually, no, it's more the limited perspective of utilitarianism, which is probably one of the most logical philosophies out there. In my mind, absolutist judgments like "working with an oppressive regime is by its nature evil" are idiotic. Let's look at this logically.
By your own admission, google.cn helps the Chinese people. It does not bolster the current regime -- in fact, it provides a better search tool that admits when there is censorship and ostensibly has a better filtering algorithm to catch fewer sites. At worst, it's a wash. At best, it begins to foster the dissemination of more information that leads to dissatisfaction with the censorship. As for the rest of the world, I'm not sure that you can make a case for it affecting them in any large measure. Google, of course, benefits from the transaction, but that isn't a negative unless we've already established that Google will use the money for harmful purposes. They do enough research and provide a valuable enough service that I don't think this last is valid.
Grr... "Because some results are better than none even if they aren't the 100% best possible results..."
"If you can't trust that Google or any other search engine is presenting the best possible results, then why use them?"
Because some results are better than the 100% best possible results, and there is no better alternative. If you can get around the firewall to use another search engine, then you can use google.com and get your uncensored results. If you can't, then google.cn is probably the next best thing.
And, of course, the most insightful response in this article gets modded down. Seriously, people, what have you done for the common Chinese man recently? And how much have you supported their government by buying their goods?
I'm not saying Google did this out of the goodness of their hearts, but they're providing the Chinese with one of the best search engines out there, letting them know when their results are being censored (something that I am sure the Chinese government wouldn't be doing), and probably using a more refined method of censorship so that less pages are caught in their net. I don't see who loses out on this deal. Revolution has to happen internally, and the best way of doing that is providing the people with better access to information and the ability to see just how much is being censored.
*ahem* "There wasnt a whole lot of dialogue in the trailer so I am not sure how you figured out the bad acting bad." ~ grandparent poster
Normally, I'd select some pretty well-acted lines in the dialogue for the trailer. In what we're given, the main character emotes fear pretty poorly, and that's going to be her main reaction. The cop looks to be a pretty major figure, and her sole line in the trailer is comically wooden.
Just as I'm allowed to say from the trailer that the movie looks like a pretty faithful rendition of the game, I'm allowed to say that the acting looks pretty poor. Who knows? They could surprise me. But in the meantime, you can keep on truckin' as an anonymous reactionary, I'll keep posting my legitimate opinions legitimate.
I don't agree. I think EQ2 was an example of a good change, and they did actually experience a lot of positive reactions and a decent amount of renewed accounts. They gained more than they lost, really.
For anyone that's not in the know, EQ2's combat revamp basically went through and fixed a lot of broken/useless spell lines, toned down some overpowered abilities and rethought some underused ones. It made some substantial changes to a couple spell lines, but it did not alter the mechanics or basic theme of any of the classes (barring one or two, arguably, but they retained their original intent). It balanced them out a lot more, and at the same time made content less trivial.
SWG's combat upgrade screwed everything. It completely messed up the theme of the game by requiring class certifications for weapons and armor. It made a whole swathe of attacks completely different from their original intent and rearranged them between skill trees. It changed the basic mechanics of a lot of stats and made some templates pretty gimped. For a newbie starting out in the game, it basically made the space expansion a requirement, as newbie missions from the terminals had always been painful and now they became more difficult. It's an example of having no idea about the game you've created, and so hitting it with a sledgehammer instead of fine tuning it. They repeated this trend with the NGE.
Whoops, almost forgot: http://playlist.yahoo.com/makeplaylist.dll?id=1401 398&sdm=web&qtw=640&qth=400
Funny, this article came out right as I was watching the Silent Hill trailer and pondering if it was going to be the first good video game movie that actually held true to the video game.
The acting looks pretty terrible, but holy crap, actual recognizable settings, characters, and plot details. That's half of the reason I'd pay to see a video game movie -- to see it translated onto the big screen.
"It started perhaps with the Composite armour. This armour was so though that it made all other armour useless. But it carried a huge penalty, so they introduced doc buffs to counter them but made those so powerfull that people turned into one man armies able to solo almost everything. So high end dungeons added had enemies so though that had 100% resist on every attack except one, wich had a 90% resist. From there it just went to hell.
If only they had never added that super armour. We would possibly now have a game that was open ended and they could have spent all the time fixing the actuall bugs instead of constantly trying to balance a bad desicision.
Tips to anyother game developers. Do not introduce a piece of equipment that is so leet that it instantly makes everything else worthless."
This, my friends, is a concise summary of why SWG failed. Devs did not, never, ever, think about what would happen if someone managed to make top-end gear or a min-max template. Hell, they made it possible to make a max-max template. And they had absolutely no idea which nerfs were appropriate.
The poster above outlined the composite armor/doc buffs thing. Players were able to wear this 90% resistance armor and build a template to max out defensive mods, which meant that literally I could sit there firing at the player for an hour and not do any damage. This went on for untold amounts of time. And one week they accidentally bugged it so that one attack in two profession lines, called Scatter hits, ignored these defenses. They weren't overpowered, it just meant that with me, having maxed out accuracy and eating accuracy food, at optimal range, laying prone, I could eventually kill one of these stackers. What happened? Fix went in for *that* bug a week later. There are untold amounts of imbalances like this which went unfixed for untold amounts of time while the devs implemented (boring) race tracks and dungeons that were useless to anyone but the maxers.
Also, the effects of these buffs on the game. Since they buffed everything instead of nerfing players, it suddenly became that you couldn't do anything without doctor buffs, entertainer buffs, and food. This is a lengthy ass process. Imagine you enter PvP and five minutes later die, which is not unreasonable. You now face something like fifteen or thirty minutes of healing, rebuffing, waiting for your stomach to empty so you can eat more food, getting back your entertainer buffs, etc. Fighting without these became impossible in PvP.
And, finally, PvP. Supposedly one of the core focuses of the game, the Galactic Civil War. And PvP a year or two in was essentially what it was when it started -- you could build faction bases, but they served no purpose except for you to defend. So you spent a ton of time grinding and grinding to build up enough faction to buy a big faction base so that you could defend it. And people did it, because there was no other PvP content.
"I haven't played SWG but here is what springs to my mind.
Jabba's palace should be one of the high level bounty hunter spots. You should get missions there, they can try and make it a social and trading center too.
Have some cleanup missions on hoth maybe, or have the whole huge battle once every few weeks and just keep reseting it."
Trust me, these ideas and many more were proposed to the devs many times. I, myself, outlined your idea about making Jabba's into a BH/smuggler center in great detail, and I certainly wasn't the only one.
Just to explain how painful it was, you go to the palace and you get bland mission after bland mission to run 1km in a random direction in the desert and kill some thugs. The loot at the beginning was worse than the shittiest crafter could craft and gave out less credits than a lowbie mission terminal (which gave out amazingly small credit amounts). Your reward for beating everything was access to Jabba's bedroom (?), which was sorta neat, I guess. Then there was no reason to ever come back except to pick up Corvette missions, which were introduced later on and didn't exactly attract a big crowd.