"if you're not going to play with other people, why are you playing a MMORPG"
I'm very tired of this narrow-minded view of gaming. Not all forms of interaction is combat; there is trading and chatting, for example. You should spend an hour in the auction house in WoW, and you would see that you don't need to group to enjoy a social experience.
Furthermore performing rituals combats is not necessarily "social". I've been in groups in that do nothing but repeat the same pattern over and over again. I earned tons of experience, but it was hardly social.
Finally, like millions of people I work a weekly schedule and have a couple of days off. During the work-week I dabble a little and couldn't manage a group, but on my days off I am pleased to find a group to tackle the more challenging areas.
" Of course, 600 years ago a "peer review" would call you a crank for saying the world was round."
No. That would be "heretic", not crank and those with an education (or a ship) knew that the world was round, it was only a question of how large it was.
Clearances don't simply help, they're everything. I'm another one layed off in the post 2000 bust, and if I had a clearance there wouldn't have been a problem. I got lucky in that a friend knew someone who was looking (it's not what you know, it's who you know), because otherwise my pizza delivery skillz would have been tested.
"The two most likely ways that they banned people were checking for constant extreme latency (which could occur) in which case they may have banned people who were not cheating, or they tested for programs running on the user's machine, which is a slippery road towards privacy invasion."
Nobody said that blizzard can't use their brains and eyeballs too. If someone is always lagging when they're trying to escape, there's a problem.
If they had fixed combat and instituted real loot a year ago, I probably would have stuck with the game and played many more months.
As an old board wargamer, it strikes me that SOE's problems are the classic "nice design, poor development". They had lots of nifty ideas, a really well thought-out crafting system, but the game (not even talking about code right now) needed much more development time to flesh out the broken parts and to dump ideas that sounded great but didn't work well in practice.
Sure it does. I think too many people get caught up in the whole red team vs blue team nonsense, especially when both teams really stink right now.
Spam, otoh, is a real and tangible problem that affects me daily at work and at home. I haven't read the text yet, but I applaud people working over real issues rather than silly my team vs your team crap.
If you're expecting WoW to be radically new and different, don't bother. It's not.
WoW takes parts from many established games and incorporates them into this one. You can read other reviews for the details, but just two minor examples are FFXI's auction house and object links in chat like AO.
One more subtle item that distinguishes WoW. though, is more complete characters. Most games make it a point to cripple their classes so they almost have to group together to progress. In WoW, most classes fill a role yet somehow don't feel crippled. For example, you can play a warrior who's supposed to take damager, but he also can do damage, limited CC, and heal (with first-aid) so soloing isn't that bad.
-Jeff
P.S. Numerous reviews of EQ2 that I've read say that soloing becomes effectively impossible after 20 or so. I won't play a game where logging in for an hour and doing something useful is not an option.
...in my time playing the game I've seen countless blatant hulk, wolverine, and superman rippoffs, both in name and look. There's your Kal-els in blue & red, your bearded Logans, and your big, green, angry looking Bulks.
I don't like what marvel's doing, but if I can spot these things without trying, isn't there an argument that Cryptic isn't trying hard enough to prevent these?
I'm not much of an FPS guy; I bought this for the Star Wars aspect. I really was stinking up things single player until I got to play the droids vs the Jar-Jars; suddenly the kid gloves came off, the sniper rifle came out, and we won that battle by a mile.
You're not buying SWBF, you're buying "Kill Jar-Jars".
-Jeff
P.S. Storming through Mos Eisley with my buddies in white shooting chewbaccas is a close second.:-)
P.P.S. Anybody know what good Chewbacca is over the standard issue rebel guy?
"Too bad, you are level 30, they are just starting, you can't play together unless your friend plays by himself for a month."
I can always tell the powergamers from statements like this.
Except for SWG, all the major MMORPGs out there let you make more than one character. If your goal is to play with your friend, make a new one.
Btw, I do concede the general point. Recently in CoH we had lvl 26, 24, 20, 17, and 14 characters online in our supergroup. How do we hunt together? And that's a tight range compared to what can happen.
I played CoH - loved the game, but got bored. Decided to go back to SWG to see if it was fixed, and found bug after bug.
Then I heard this news, and de-installed. A lot of what we're talking about here are what I call "spreadsheet fixes"; things that are entirely evident when you lay the skills out in rows and columns and just eyeball them. More deeply, though, there's a real problem with class balance (and I won't give examples so I don't touch off a frenzy). In some cases, classes have no useful role; in others, some other class can do it all but more, and in still others, dabbling a bit in the class gives you what you need so there's no point in mastering it.
The bottom line is there are serious design issues with the combat system, and in a year of play they have not only failed to deal with many of the simple-to-see ones, but they've also failed to come up with an approach for the larger issues.
One interesting contrast is Asheron's Call 2 - they've wholely revamped many systems (e.g. crafting) and classes, and are attacking things like bots and PvP with a clear design. You may not agree with the decisions, but I give them credit for laying their decisions out, getting comments from the community, making modifications on some things, sticking to their guns on others, and then implementing.
"With the rise of political parties(which Washington warned against in his farewell speech), pretty much all the votes are predictable."
It's not the parties, it's the voters who vote down the party line, rather than evaluating each candidate on their own merits. No doubt many people registered democrat will vote against George Bush because of what some congressmen did.
-Jeff
P.S. Of course that's an example; republican voters do the exact same thing.
Also, if we can interact and change the world, then we can affect (e.g. ruin) other people's experiences. If we can't, then it's just a blob of text.
Last, the people who ruin stories aren't just the almost-apocryphal "l33ts"; it's the silly people who won't go along with the story as presented, and instead want their own. It sounds good in theory, but in practice a bunch of people making up their own stories further divides and diminishes the game world.
MMORPGs are just like horror movies: most are derivative of the first one to come out, and have gotten quite stale. Sure, each may bring a neat idea to the table or have a cool bit scene that we like, but the later ones grow stale more quickly.
Basically, game has been done before.
-Jeff
P.S. I do think there's hope: I once told someone if you took the character generation and gameplay of City of Heroes and combined it with the content, world, and economy of FFXI, you'd have a fantastic game. Most games out have some neat bits: hopefully someone (blizzard?) will combine them.
I'm not sure how you can categorize the washington times in the same way as newsmax. The latter is pretty rabid, I agree. The former runs the same ap stories that everyone else does, often in a different order, and with a very different editorial page. With newsmax, otoh, the editorial page and the news are all rolled together. Basically what Michel Moore does (though to his credit he's pretty up-front about that).
"...but frankly I hold precisely the opposite view. The thrill that most MMORPG players get from leveling, crafting, exploring, etc., I find a symptom of a socially debilitated person. PvPers, on the other hand, I feel largely have their heads on straight in reality and merely seek a greater challenge and greater exhilaration..."
I agree with this entirely. Competition with others is by definition a social activity. So we can choose between PvE'ers who try to constrain each other to fit certain molds and reduce the amount of interaction needed (you're the tank, you do this), or the PvP'ers who compete, take their lumps, and go back for more.
As for 'griefers', I ran into far more of them in PvE than PvP. It's the people who take train others, kill steal, ninja loot, and so on that are the worse of the lot.
"Society rewards the killer/PvPer mindset to a point, but it generally doesn't overtly encourage it."
For every winner in most elections there is one or more losers. The path to political power is built on the backs of those you defeat. As politics is an integral part or our society, and the rewards of power are great, I have to fundamentally disagree with this.
Marignon was my favorite so far, with the awesome inquisitors and the incredible cavalry. Pangaea was also a lot of fun: hard-hitting minos, tough cav to chase down bowmen, and Pans sitting in back providing strong magical support.
I should add that DII has a mac, linux, and solaris version. I use the mac version.
Of course you can compare forms of entertainment. I chose whether to watch TV, read, troll/., or play games often. If I can compare on the basis of "which one do I want to do", I certainly can compare how cost-effective they are and come up with something meaningful.
But all this is moot anyways, captalism rules here; if you don't want to play, don't. But your sense of 'value' certainly isn't mine; I have no problem whatsoever paying the monthly feel. Unless the game is a Diablo II or Half-Life, there's no way most games will compare to an MMORPG for me.
Slashdot Mirror
"if you're not going to play with other people, why are you playing a MMORPG"
I'm very tired of this narrow-minded view of gaming. Not all forms of interaction is combat; there is trading and chatting, for example. You should spend an hour in the auction house in WoW, and you would see that you don't need to group to enjoy a social experience.
Furthermore performing rituals combats is not necessarily "social". I've been in groups in that do nothing but repeat the same pattern over and over again. I earned tons of experience, but it was hardly social.
Finally, like millions of people I work a weekly schedule and have a couple of days off. During the work-week I dabble a little and couldn't manage a group, but on my days off I am pleased to find a group to tackle the more challenging areas.
-Jeff
not a charity. They live or die on their financial decisions.
-Jeff
" Of course, 600 years ago a "peer review" would call you a crank for saying the world was round."
No. That would be "heretic", not crank and those with an education (or a ship) knew that the world was round, it was only a question of how large it was.
-Jeff
Clearances don't simply help, they're everything. I'm another one layed off in the post 2000 bust, and if I had a clearance there wouldn't have been a problem. I got lucky in that a friend knew someone who was looking (it's not what you know, it's who you know), because otherwise my pizza delivery skillz would have been tested.
You need a clearance, and you can't get one.
-Jeff
Any idiot can make an allegation, so reporting allegations is not necessarily responsible journalism.
Signed affidavits are legal documents, though, and a step up from simple hot air.
A step.
-Jeff
"The two most likely ways that they banned people were checking for constant extreme latency (which could occur) in which case they may have banned people who were not cheating, or they tested for programs running on the user's machine, which is a slippery road towards privacy invasion."
Nobody said that blizzard can't use their brains and eyeballs too. If someone is always lagging when they're trying to escape, there's a problem.
-Jeff
If they had fixed combat and instituted real loot a year ago, I probably would have stuck with the game and played many more months.
:-)
As an old board wargamer, it strikes me that SOE's problems are the classic "nice design, poor development". They had lots of nifty ideas, a really well thought-out crafting system, but the game (not even talking about code right now) needed much more development time to flesh out the broken parts and to dump ideas that sounded great but didn't work well in practice.
Oh, and to nerf combat medics too.
-Jeff
Sure it does. I think too many people get caught up in the whole red team vs blue team nonsense, especially when both teams really stink right now.
Spam, otoh, is a real and tangible problem that affects me daily at work and at home. I haven't read the text yet, but I applaud people working over real issues rather than silly my team vs your team crap.
-Jeff
If you're expecting WoW to be radically new and different, don't bother. It's not.
WoW takes parts from many established games and incorporates them into this one. You can read other reviews for the details, but just two minor examples are FFXI's auction house and object links in chat like AO.
One more subtle item that distinguishes WoW. though, is more complete characters. Most games make it a point to cripple their classes so they almost have to group together to progress. In WoW, most classes fill a role yet somehow don't feel crippled. For example, you can play a warrior who's supposed to take damager, but he also can do damage, limited CC, and heal (with first-aid) so soloing isn't that bad.
-Jeff
P.S. Numerous reviews of EQ2 that I've read say that soloing becomes effectively impossible after 20 or so. I won't play a game where logging in for an hour and doing something useful is not an option.
...in my time playing the game I've seen countless blatant hulk, wolverine, and superman rippoffs, both in name and look. There's your Kal-els in blue & red, your bearded Logans, and your big, green, angry looking Bulks.
I don't like what marvel's doing, but if I can spot these things without trying, isn't there an argument that Cryptic isn't trying hard enough to prevent these?
-Jeff
Having familiar props doesn't make the game or story any better or worse; it's what the designers/writers do with those props that counts.
Oh, and please keep your incredibly imaginative evil insect blobs in outer space where they belong.
-Jeff
I'm not much of an FPS guy; I bought this for the Star Wars aspect. I really was stinking up things single player until I got to play the droids vs the Jar-Jars; suddenly the kid gloves came off, the sniper rifle came out, and we won that battle by a mile.
:-)
You're not buying SWBF, you're buying "Kill Jar-Jars".
-Jeff
P.S. Storming through Mos Eisley with my buddies in white shooting chewbaccas is a close second.
P.P.S. Anybody know what good Chewbacca is over the standard issue rebel guy?
"Too bad, you are level 30, they are just starting, you can't play together unless your friend plays by himself for a month."
I can always tell the powergamers from statements like this.
Except for SWG, all the major MMORPGs out there let you make more than one character. If your goal is to play with your friend, make a new one.
Btw, I do concede the general point. Recently in CoH we had lvl 26, 24, 20, 17, and 14 characters online in our supergroup. How do we hunt together? And that's a tight range compared to what can happen.
-Jeff
I played CoH - loved the game, but got bored. Decided to go back to SWG to see if it was fixed, and found bug after bug.
Then I heard this news, and de-installed. A lot of what we're talking about here are what I call "spreadsheet fixes"; things that are entirely evident when you lay the skills out in rows and columns and just eyeball them. More deeply, though, there's a real problem with class balance (and I won't give examples so I don't touch off a frenzy). In some cases, classes have no useful role; in others, some other class can do it all but more, and in still others, dabbling a bit in the class gives you what you need so there's no point in mastering it.
The bottom line is there are serious design issues with the combat system, and in a year of play they have not only failed to deal with many of the simple-to-see ones, but they've also failed to come up with an approach for the larger issues.
One interesting contrast is Asheron's Call 2 - they've wholely revamped many systems (e.g. crafting) and classes, and are attacking things like bots and PvP with a clear design. You may not agree with the decisions, but I give them credit for laying their decisions out, getting comments from the community, making modifications on some things, sticking to their guns on others, and then implementing.
-Jeff
"With the rise of political parties(which Washington warned against in his farewell speech), pretty much all the votes are predictable."
It's not the parties, it's the voters who vote down the party line, rather than evaluating each candidate on their own merits. No doubt many people registered democrat will vote against George Bush because of what some congressmen did.
-Jeff
P.S. Of course that's an example; republican voters do the exact same thing.
www.grognard.com
:-)
Hexagons, chits, and dice: the only *real* way to wargame.
-Jeff
How do you write a story for 1000 protagonists?
Also, if we can interact and change the world, then we can affect (e.g. ruin) other people's experiences. If we can't, then it's just a blob of text.
Last, the people who ruin stories aren't just the almost-apocryphal "l33ts"; it's the silly people who won't go along with the story as presented, and instead want their own. It sounds good in theory, but in practice a bunch of people making up their own stories further divides and diminishes the game world.
-Jeff
MMORPGs are just like horror movies: most are derivative of the first one to come out, and have gotten quite stale. Sure, each may bring a neat idea to the table or have a cool bit scene that we like, but the later ones grow stale more quickly.
Basically, game has been done before.
-Jeff
P.S. I do think there's hope: I once told someone if you took the character generation and gameplay of City of Heroes and combined it with the content, world, and economy of FFXI, you'd have a fantastic game. Most games out have some neat bits: hopefully someone (blizzard?) will combine them.
I'm not sure how you can categorize the washington times in the same way as newsmax. The latter is pretty rabid, I agree. The former runs the same ap stories that everyone else does, often in a different order, and with a very different editorial page. With newsmax, otoh, the editorial page and the news are all rolled together. Basically what Michel Moore does (though to his credit he's pretty up-front about that).
-Jeff
"...but frankly I hold precisely the opposite view. The thrill that most MMORPG players get from leveling, crafting, exploring, etc., I find a symptom of a socially debilitated person. PvPers, on the other hand, I feel largely have their heads on straight in reality and merely seek a greater challenge and greater exhilaration..."
I agree with this entirely. Competition with others is by definition a social activity. So we can choose between PvE'ers who try to constrain each other to fit certain molds and reduce the amount of interaction needed (you're the tank, you do this), or the PvP'ers who compete, take their lumps, and go back for more.
As for 'griefers', I ran into far more of them in PvE than PvP. It's the people who take train others, kill steal, ninja loot, and so on that are the worse of the lot.
-Jeff
"Society rewards the killer/PvPer mindset to a point, but it generally doesn't overtly encourage it."
For every winner in most elections there is one or more losers. The path to political power is built on the backs of those you defeat. As politics is an integral part or our society, and the rewards of power are great, I have to fundamentally disagree with this.
PK'ers rule our society.
-Jeff
Marignon was my favorite so far, with the awesome inquisitors and the incredible cavalry. Pangaea was also a lot of fun: hard-hitting minos, tough cav to chase down bowmen, and Pans sitting in back providing strong magical support.
I should add that DII has a mac, linux, and solaris version. I use the mac version.
-Jeff
Because City of Heroes doesn't run on *nix.
Until the games I play are both available on *nix and run as well, I'll always have a windows box.
-Jeff
" Holy shit, that was the most patronizing interview I've ever read in my life."
:-)
People who live such dull, stupid lives shouldn't be allowed to post alongside giants such as ourselves.
-Jeff
Of course you can compare forms of entertainment. I chose whether to watch TV, read, troll /., or play games often. If I can compare on the basis of "which one do I want to do", I certainly can compare how cost-effective they are and come up with something meaningful.
But all this is moot anyways, captalism rules here; if you don't want to play, don't. But your sense of 'value' certainly isn't mine; I have no problem whatsoever paying the monthly feel. Unless the game is a Diablo II or Half-Life, there's no way most games will compare to an MMORPG for me.
-Jeff