That was primarily a PvE balance problem. Paladins had abilies that Shaman didn't that made a real difference (Blessing of Salvation being #1). In BC Paladins also became more viable tanks, which Shaman simply couldn't do without a drastic overhaul. It was the best decision for game balance they could make.
"Flying is definately NOT just a gimmick. As you said, it becomes incredible in the Abyss. If you haven't yet had a mid-air battle and seen its complexities, including tracking your opponent on 3 axes and making sure your flight time doesn't run out so you fall to your death, you haven't played Aion."
Great. So how much grinding do I have to do before I get to the good part?
Flying is effectively the new and interesting thing in this game. So when they give it to you, have you use it to fight three stationary rocks that don't fight back, and then immediately take it away again... yeah. That's just silly. If they want to hook people, they should put some of the fun stuff early in. They didn't hold my attention through more then a couple of beta events because through as far as I got with those, it was just "WoW with more shiny".
The abyss *sounds* cool, but I got so bored on the way there that I cancelled my pre-order.
As for specs, we have people in my WoW guild running on 5 year old systems that weren't terribly good even then. They won't run Aion at all. That's the low end. On my system, performance was really good.
I've played in a couple of these beta events. Far as I've seen, no transition is required. It's the same game.
- Combat: You stand there pushing buttons to activate abilities, same as every other MMO on the planet. Some skills can chain into other skills, but the UI puts the next skill in the chain on the same button as the first skill, so you can really just mash that button and make it work. If you're playing the healing class (Cleric), the number of offensive skills you get is pretty small and they're boring as shit (primary nuke with a 2 second cooldown, yay autoattack?).
- Flight: Flying around is neat. But for some reason, you can't use it in Sanctum (one of the capital cities). You can't use it in the zone immediately after the one where you are first allowed to use it. Flying as a part of combat is mostly... floating stationary so you can cast spells. It probably becomes more important in the Abyss, but from as far as I got it was a gimmick.
- Quests: Kill 10 of these, go collect this, go talk to this guy and report back. Nothing you haven't done in every other game. In the beta there's no particular etiquette regarding gathering, people will run up and try to take nodes that you're already working on. Gathering itself actually uses some weird random system with two bars (pass/fail) dueling that takes far too long and is like watching paint dry. They could have added something interactive here to improve it considerably over WoW, but they didn't.
- Grouping: Remember "LF1M, need healer"? It's back. Only two classes can heal, and only one of those is "the primary healer". That class is incredibly boring if you're not healing, which is great since you can't heal mobs to death in the soloable areas. Is it some kind of design law that healing classes in MMOs must be designed to be mind numbing to play when grinding? There's no option for dual spec like WoW has to turn yourself into a DPSer and make the suck stop.
- Graphics: It looks really nice, if you have the hardware. High end performance is better then WoW, considerably. Low end performance is non existant on a lot of hardware that will play WoW. Which isn't surprising since WoW is optimized at the low end and totally CPU bound at the high end.
I cancelled my pre-order this week. May pick it up in a few months if I'm bored, but right now I'm not bored of WoW, and Aion pretty much plays like the same game.
According to another post in this thread, Aion stops giving you soloable quests by level 18. If that's true, then by definition levelling is not easier then it is in WoW. In WoW, you can get to 80 compeltely solo if you want to.
Wait. So you stop getting the ability to advance yourself without grouping?
Yeah, this game is screwed. That model was popular in the past, not anymore. Nobody wants to log in, then discover they can't do anything in game without first spending 45 minutes trying to find a tank and healer. The whole appeal of WoW is that you didn't need to team up with a bunch of random asshats and wait around all day before being able to play.
Different search engines produce different results. Footage at 11.
This story is pretty lame. Microsoft has been doing an ad campaign on how expensive Macs are. You can likely find lots of pages that mention it and Windows at the same time. The specific story mentioned also appears in a Google search for the same thing.
You remember back when "miserable failure" would return Whitehouse.gov as its first hit? I'm sure that was a conspiracy inside the search results too.
Yeah, it doesn't really seem unexpected. TPB talks big when doing interviews, but they don't do nearly so well in court. I suspect the end is nigh for them, and they know it.
It's always nice when companies go and make the case for why closed platforms suck with no effort required on anybody elses part. Apple is just another example. Having a gatekeeper say what you can and can't run on your phone like this was never a good idea, and now we're seeing why.
Apple fanboys will put up with anything, of course. I hope this type of nonsense gets through to the more sensible people out there though.
"Every time Free Realms crosses another million player milestone the same thing always gets implied.
The totals are always stated to be the unique number of players who have signed up for the game and actually played the game."
Yeah, because these numbers are meaningless. Sign up and play once, then quit? You still count as a "player" until the end of time. Comparing the numbers to anything other then another game with the same model is meaningless.
How many people spent money on it in the last month? That's the number that REALLY matters. You'll notice they don't release that one.
This bugs me less then the games that it looks like nobody even bothered to test in SD.
Dead Rising is the most famous example. The text is UNREADBLE in SD. It was pretty fun getting that demo and then not having any idea what the hell to do becuase they just threw a wall of blurriness at you. Lost Odyssey's character status icons were simlarly illegible (but the other parts of the game were okay), and I've seen the same lack of attention to it from lots of other games.
It's pretty silly. They didn't put on the box "does not function correctly without HD", so I expect the game to at least work on SD. Now since then we've upgraded to HD and things work fine, but it caused more then one game purchase to not happen.
Most people who aren't really involved in the issue at all don't understand the difference between RMS free, and "download a copy of MS Office from some website" free. Having them both lumped under "free" does hurt his side of it, due to being associated with people who really only want the ability to download whatever programs they want without paying for them.
Maybe he should rename it to "freedom software" or something, so there's a difference in the names. The alternative is to stop calling the other stuff "free", but that doesn't seem too likely so long as most people don't give a damn about copyright.
"so ISP was overbooking so badly it couldnt handle the traffic, that ISP should upgrade, shrink speeds it sells or just die"
Just to be clear, you really think any ISP is going to be able to afford to have dedicated speed so that every user can max out their connection, all the time?
Residental Internet is nowhere near expensive enough to pay for that.
Well, I would, and I've been on board with that for a while. Paying for actual usage is the best way to solve the problem. People don't like it because they have this idea of "unlimited" Internet from back in the dial up days. It's an outdated model when people have connections capable of such high speeds.
Now in order for that to actually get some support, you need net neturality to go along with it. The whole thing falls apart if its $1/GB unless you download from ISP approved companies.
Most of these things are pretty worthless. Last year the provincial government of New Brunswick put out a report about self-sufficiency. They then did a poll about it.
I got called as part of that poll. They asked me if I had heard of the report, with a bunch of answers (read it, read some of it, heard about it, know it exists, never heard of it). I answered "heard about it". The next question the pollster asked was "do you agree with the findings?"
"I haven't read it and thus have no idea what the findings are" would be a pretty rational response, considering I just said that I hadn't read it. Not an option. The options were agree/disagree. I argued with the person on the phone for quite a while over that. Unsurprisingly, the results came out and found that while almost nobody read the report, most people agreed with it. Of course they did, the title sounds like something they should agree to!
(There was a similar story about a question where they asked "do you support more health care spending even if it means running a deficit?" Most people said yes. Later in the poll they asked people what a deficit is. Most of the people who said yes to the earlier question couldn't answer. So, people are quite happy to agree with something when they have no idea what it is.)
This is the same type of nonsense polling. Most of the people asked have no idea what the issue is, but throw words like "reasonable" and "treated fairly" in there, and of course they'll agree with it. If you don't know what traffic shaping is, why would you ever disagree with being treated fairly?
Depends. If multiplayer works by having the server act as the coordination for all the clients, then they've got considerably more work to do. Warcraft 3 is effectively a P2P game, the server doesn't actually do much of anything outside of matchmaking.
Since Starcraft 2 has no multiplayer outside of battle.net, they can move work to the server and thwart things more effectively. Who knows if they will or not at this point, though.
"do keep spewing the party line though, i'm sure whichever lobbyping/pr firm which hired you for your low userid will give you a bonus."
Oh please. What I wouldn't give for an eyeroll emoticon right now.
Among the pirates are a group of crack addict gamer types who want to play, and will buy the game if the pirate option doesn't work. Those are lost sales. The number of them is > 0. The number isn't the same as the total number of downloads or something stupid like that, and I don't think anybody knows what it actually is.
So, you've got a copy of bnetd working with Starcraft 2?
Will you have one within the first couple weeks of the game being released?
Probably not, in which case everything I said is true. Eventually there will be one that can do that, and the game companies know it. Their goal is to block piracy in the early period where they can get the most sales and make the most money. The goal isn't to block piracy 3 months from release (that'd be a bonus if they actually did it).
The commentary added to the bottom of the summary is wrong. This has a good chance of success at thwarting piracy.
The goal of anti-piracy measures is never to eliminate 100% of piracy until the end of time. That's nearly impossible, and they know it. What they really want to do is make it so that either you can't pirate it for the frst little while, or that you don't want to. Having no functional online play whatsoever in the pirated version is a pretty effective way of making the pirated version worse then the retail version. (That's the opposite strategy of stuff like SecuROM, which generally makes the retail version worse then the pirated version.)
LAN functionality is a real problem in that department now, because it's used primarily for pirates to play on Hamachi (and the like) with each other. Remove it from the game entirely, and the pirates no longer have to simply bypass SecuROM or an offline disk check. They have to emulate Battle.net in order to get any multiplayer working.
Will they do that eventually? Absolutely. Will they do that within the first 2 week sales rush? Highly unlikely. If it takes them a couple months before the pirated versions have online play, then by the standard of what the companies are trying to do, it's a successful anti-piracy measure.
As usual, you crooks who rip off games because you want free stuff are just screwing it up for everybody else.
"Security" people who don't know anything about non-IT users like to make password rules that are so obtuse that normal users simply can't deal with them. The result is sticky noted passwords.
Users have to be able to remember their passwords in order for this security to be of any use. Push them beyond that ability, and you're actively making the situation worse.
Gamepads, or the "classic" controllers he's whining about, actually suck quite a lot. They have terrible precision when compared to a mouse, don't work that well for things like Flight Sims when compared to a flightstick, and don't offer accessability over motion controls.
I've never understood the appeal. Playing console shooters is like steering a drunk camel compared to on the PC. Good RTS with large numbers of units is pretty much a joke. Trying to explain to a non gamer how to play is an exercise in futility compared to the thirty seconds it takes to understand the Wiimote.
The only real upside to the things is that they're generic. You can shoehorn a lot of game types to work on the thing, no matter how badly it works for most of them.
I once got into the bubble around Dalaran in World of Warcraft, before it floated away. I was pretty disappointed, there wasn't anything in there except dirt.:\
It also used to be possible to get underneath Stormwind and into Old Ironforge, but they seem to have fixed the bugs that let that happen.
Slashdot Mirror
That was primarily a PvE balance problem. Paladins had abilies that Shaman didn't that made a real difference (Blessing of Salvation being #1). In BC Paladins also became more viable tanks, which Shaman simply couldn't do without a drastic overhaul. It was the best decision for game balance they could make.
"Flying is definately NOT just a gimmick. As you said, it becomes incredible in the Abyss. If you haven't yet had a mid-air battle and seen its complexities, including tracking your opponent on 3 axes and making sure your flight time doesn't run out so you fall to your death, you haven't played Aion."
Great. So how much grinding do I have to do before I get to the good part?
Flying is effectively the new and interesting thing in this game. So when they give it to you, have you use it to fight three stationary rocks that don't fight back, and then immediately take it away again... yeah. That's just silly. If they want to hook people, they should put some of the fun stuff early in. They didn't hold my attention through more then a couple of beta events because through as far as I got with those, it was just "WoW with more shiny".
The abyss *sounds* cool, but I got so bored on the way there that I cancelled my pre-order.
As for specs, we have people in my WoW guild running on 5 year old systems that weren't terribly good even then. They won't run Aion at all. That's the low end. On my system, performance was really good.
I've played in a couple of these beta events. Far as I've seen, no transition is required. It's the same game.
- Combat: You stand there pushing buttons to activate abilities, same as every other MMO on the planet. Some skills can chain into other skills, but the UI puts the next skill in the chain on the same button as the first skill, so you can really just mash that button and make it work. If you're playing the healing class (Cleric), the number of offensive skills you get is pretty small and they're boring as shit (primary nuke with a 2 second cooldown, yay autoattack?).
- Flight: Flying around is neat. But for some reason, you can't use it in Sanctum (one of the capital cities). You can't use it in the zone immediately after the one where you are first allowed to use it. Flying as a part of combat is mostly... floating stationary so you can cast spells. It probably becomes more important in the Abyss, but from as far as I got it was a gimmick.
- Quests: Kill 10 of these, go collect this, go talk to this guy and report back. Nothing you haven't done in every other game. In the beta there's no particular etiquette regarding gathering, people will run up and try to take nodes that you're already working on. Gathering itself actually uses some weird random system with two bars (pass/fail) dueling that takes far too long and is like watching paint dry. They could have added something interactive here to improve it considerably over WoW, but they didn't.
- Grouping: Remember "LF1M, need healer"? It's back. Only two classes can heal, and only one of those is "the primary healer". That class is incredibly boring if you're not healing, which is great since you can't heal mobs to death in the soloable areas. Is it some kind of design law that healing classes in MMOs must be designed to be mind numbing to play when grinding? There's no option for dual spec like WoW has to turn yourself into a DPSer and make the suck stop.
- Graphics: It looks really nice, if you have the hardware. High end performance is better then WoW, considerably. Low end performance is non existant on a lot of hardware that will play WoW. Which isn't surprising since WoW is optimized at the low end and totally CPU bound at the high end.
I cancelled my pre-order this week. May pick it up in a few months if I'm bored, but right now I'm not bored of WoW, and Aion pretty much plays like the same game.
According to another post in this thread, Aion stops giving you soloable quests by level 18. If that's true, then by definition levelling is not easier then it is in WoW. In WoW, you can get to 80 compeltely solo if you want to.
Wait. So you stop getting the ability to advance yourself without grouping?
Yeah, this game is screwed. That model was popular in the past, not anymore. Nobody wants to log in, then discover they can't do anything in game without first spending 45 minutes trying to find a tank and healer. The whole appeal of WoW is that you didn't need to team up with a bunch of random asshats and wait around all day before being able to play.
A new Wing Commander would be nice, that entire genre doesn't seem to exist anymore. I'm not sure what happened to cause that.
I could go for a new Populous too, depending on how it's done.
Different search engines produce different results. Footage at 11.
This story is pretty lame. Microsoft has been doing an ad campaign on how expensive Macs are. You can likely find lots of pages that mention it and Windows at the same time. The specific story mentioned also appears in a Google search for the same thing.
You remember back when "miserable failure" would return Whitehouse.gov as its first hit? I'm sure that was a conspiracy inside the search results too.
Actually, yes. On the main page, click the minus sign next to the title. You can then pick why you don't like it.
Theoretically if enough people do it, we could kick it back off the front page. That seems unlikely in this case though.
Yeah, it doesn't really seem unexpected. TPB talks big when doing interviews, but they don't do nearly so well in court. I suspect the end is nigh for them, and they know it.
It's always nice when companies go and make the case for why closed platforms suck with no effort required on anybody elses part. Apple is just another example. Having a gatekeeper say what you can and can't run on your phone like this was never a good idea, and now we're seeing why.
Apple fanboys will put up with anything, of course. I hope this type of nonsense gets through to the more sensible people out there though.
"Every time Free Realms crosses another million player milestone the same thing always gets implied.
The totals are always stated to be the unique number of players who have signed up for the game and actually played the game."
Yeah, because these numbers are meaningless. Sign up and play once, then quit? You still count as a "player" until the end of time. Comparing the numbers to anything other then another game with the same model is meaningless.
How many people spent money on it in the last month? That's the number that REALLY matters. You'll notice they don't release that one.
This bugs me less then the games that it looks like nobody even bothered to test in SD.
Dead Rising is the most famous example. The text is UNREADBLE in SD. It was pretty fun getting that demo and then not having any idea what the hell to do becuase they just threw a wall of blurriness at you. Lost Odyssey's character status icons were simlarly illegible (but the other parts of the game were okay), and I've seen the same lack of attention to it from lots of other games.
It's pretty silly. They didn't put on the box "does not function correctly without HD", so I expect the game to at least work on SD. Now since then we've upgraded to HD and things work fine, but it caused more then one game purchase to not happen.
Most people who aren't really involved in the issue at all don't understand the difference between RMS free, and "download a copy of MS Office from some website" free. Having them both lumped under "free" does hurt his side of it, due to being associated with people who really only want the ability to download whatever programs they want without paying for them.
Maybe he should rename it to "freedom software" or something, so there's a difference in the names. The alternative is to stop calling the other stuff "free", but that doesn't seem too likely so long as most people don't give a damn about copyright.
"so ISP was overbooking so badly it couldnt handle the traffic, that ISP should upgrade, shrink speeds it sells or just die"
Just to be clear, you really think any ISP is going to be able to afford to have dedicated speed so that every user can max out their connection, all the time?
Residental Internet is nowhere near expensive enough to pay for that.
Well, I would, and I've been on board with that for a while. Paying for actual usage is the best way to solve the problem. People don't like it because they have this idea of "unlimited" Internet from back in the dial up days. It's an outdated model when people have connections capable of such high speeds.
Now in order for that to actually get some support, you need net neturality to go along with it. The whole thing falls apart if its $1/GB unless you download from ISP approved companies.
Most of these things are pretty worthless. Last year the provincial government of New Brunswick put out a report about self-sufficiency. They then did a poll about it.
I got called as part of that poll. They asked me if I had heard of the report, with a bunch of answers (read it, read some of it, heard about it, know it exists, never heard of it). I answered "heard about it". The next question the pollster asked was "do you agree with the findings?"
"I haven't read it and thus have no idea what the findings are" would be a pretty rational response, considering I just said that I hadn't read it. Not an option. The options were agree/disagree. I argued with the person on the phone for quite a while over that. Unsurprisingly, the results came out and found that while almost nobody read the report, most people agreed with it. Of course they did, the title sounds like something they should agree to!
(There was a similar story about a question where they asked "do you support more health care spending even if it means running a deficit?" Most people said yes. Later in the poll they asked people what a deficit is. Most of the people who said yes to the earlier question couldn't answer. So, people are quite happy to agree with something when they have no idea what it is.)
This is the same type of nonsense polling. Most of the people asked have no idea what the issue is, but throw words like "reasonable" and "treated fairly" in there, and of course they'll agree with it. If you don't know what traffic shaping is, why would you ever disagree with being treated fairly?
The video doesn't do it justice. I play WoW on its maxed out settings and played the last beta Aion event. Aion looks a whole lot better.
I don't think it plays particularly better, but I didn't get that far into it.
Depends. If multiplayer works by having the server act as the coordination for all the clients, then they've got considerably more work to do. Warcraft 3 is effectively a P2P game, the server doesn't actually do much of anything outside of matchmaking.
Since Starcraft 2 has no multiplayer outside of battle.net, they can move work to the server and thwart things more effectively. Who knows if they will or not at this point, though.
"do keep spewing the party line though, i'm sure whichever lobbyping/pr firm which hired you for your low userid will give you a bonus."
Oh please. What I wouldn't give for an eyeroll emoticon right now.
Among the pirates are a group of crack addict gamer types who want to play, and will buy the game if the pirate option doesn't work. Those are lost sales. The number of them is > 0. The number isn't the same as the total number of downloads or something stupid like that, and I don't think anybody knows what it actually is.
Those people are the target.
So, you've got a copy of bnetd working with Starcraft 2?
Will you have one within the first couple weeks of the game being released?
Probably not, in which case everything I said is true. Eventually there will be one that can do that, and the game companies know it. Their goal is to block piracy in the early period where they can get the most sales and make the most money. The goal isn't to block piracy 3 months from release (that'd be a bonus if they actually did it).
"Yes, a lot of copies will be pirated, but a lot of times, pirated copies lead to bought copies."
And a lot of times, it doesn't. Pretty risky market to get into when you "might" be able to do better then a 90% piracy rate.
The commentary added to the bottom of the summary is wrong. This has a good chance of success at thwarting piracy.
The goal of anti-piracy measures is never to eliminate 100% of piracy until the end of time. That's nearly impossible, and they know it. What they really want to do is make it so that either you can't pirate it for the frst little while, or that you don't want to. Having no functional online play whatsoever in the pirated version is a pretty effective way of making the pirated version worse then the retail version. (That's the opposite strategy of stuff like SecuROM, which generally makes the retail version worse then the pirated version.)
LAN functionality is a real problem in that department now, because it's used primarily for pirates to play on Hamachi (and the like) with each other. Remove it from the game entirely, and the pirates no longer have to simply bypass SecuROM or an offline disk check. They have to emulate Battle.net in order to get any multiplayer working.
Will they do that eventually? Absolutely. Will they do that within the first 2 week sales rush? Highly unlikely. If it takes them a couple months before the pirated versions have online play, then by the standard of what the companies are trying to do, it's a successful anti-piracy measure.
As usual, you crooks who rip off games because you want free stuff are just screwing it up for everybody else.
Yeah, this.
"Security" people who don't know anything about non-IT users like to make password rules that are so obtuse that normal users simply can't deal with them. The result is sticky noted passwords.
Users have to be able to remember their passwords in order for this security to be of any use. Push them beyond that ability, and you're actively making the situation worse.
Gamepads, or the "classic" controllers he's whining about, actually suck quite a lot. They have terrible precision when compared to a mouse, don't work that well for things like Flight Sims when compared to a flightstick, and don't offer accessability over motion controls.
I've never understood the appeal. Playing console shooters is like steering a drunk camel compared to on the PC. Good RTS with large numbers of units is pretty much a joke. Trying to explain to a non gamer how to play is an exercise in futility compared to the thirty seconds it takes to understand the Wiimote.
The only real upside to the things is that they're generic. You can shoehorn a lot of game types to work on the thing, no matter how badly it works for most of them.
I once got into the bubble around Dalaran in World of Warcraft, before it floated away. I was pretty disappointed, there wasn't anything in there except dirt. :\
It also used to be possible to get underneath Stormwind and into Old Ironforge, but they seem to have fixed the bugs that let that happen.