My wife is by no means a hardcore player. She can't handle a ton of stuff at once, so she basically plays a healer and handles simple support stuff in MMOs.
Even she calls WoW "MMO for Dummies". When a player like her can say that, you know the game is simple.
The article is about gaming PCs, not PC gaming. You know, the rig itself? The one some folks used to constantly shell out major bucks for the newest fangled gear to get another FPS out of their games?
Oh, wait! This is/. Where folks can't even bother to read the freaking headline or summary, much less the links it goes to.
Seriously, I remember my old man giving me crap about playing computer games all the time, but then he sat down and looked at things. I was playing EQ at the time, and back then it was something like 12.99 a month if memory serves me right. Sure, I paid for 2 expansions a year (you hear that, Blizzard???) but the monthly fee was nothing compared to going out all the time.
I figure that playing MMOs actually saved me a couple hundred dollars every month, easy. I stopped seeing movies I really wasn't that interested in, but some friend/ or the wife wanted to see. I stopped renting movies I didn't really care about. We stopped going out to dinner once a week. Heck, the wife started playing about 6 months later, and she stopped wanting to do a lot of those things that just end up costing a lot of money. I also broke my buying a new game a month habit.
It's been 10 years since I started playing MMOs, back with UO, then EQ for over 5 yrs, through a short stint in CoH and then WoW for 9 months, DDO, then EQ2 for a solid 3 years, and now back to WoW. Little side experiments in stuff like AoC (a major mistake on my part, which I saw but ignored to play with friends that were frothing at the mouth) and CoV, plus a lot of betas thrown in, gave me insights into other games. And while we're playing WoW now and having a pretty good time, EQ2 is calling us back. We bought the expansions, and will sit on them until the new year, most likely. Then, give it the 30 days and see which is better.
It has really kept me from taking chances on games I am not really sure about, as well. Since I started playing MMOs, I don't think I've bought more than 10 really awful single player games. I'm just not so bored that I'm taking flyers on unknowns.
Demos are often extremely polished little snippets of the game, and they can really mislead you about the quality of the game, and the mid-end points of a game.
A prime example is Age of Conan (AoC). Just about everyone that played the open beta (read: demo) found the game to be pretty good, with a great little story line, and fun quests. Sadly, that was the highlight of the entire game.
I tried the demo of HellGate: London, and the game seemed pretty good. Sadly, the rest of the game was the same thing over and over and over again. There's a reason it went belly up after strong initial sales.
So, demos can be very misleading. If there is a game I am not sure about, I may try the demo, and see if that plays well. If I like it, but I'm not totally sold on it, I may try to download a copy and give it a real test. I buy some of them, but most of them turn out to be crap.
Your milage may vary, but I find demos to only tease with the absolute best part of a game, or the easiest/most fun part. Most of the time, it's a bait 'n switch when compared to the whole game.
Considering how much class balancing they had to do when WoW was first released, this should come as no surprise. If you've played since launch, how many times have your talents been refunded?
Most of my guildmates are levelling their DKs up as fast as possible, because they know the nerf bat is coming, and it's going to hit hard. So, they want to get as far as they can in "easy mode".
I've only played my DK through the intro levels, then got sent to SW. And it was obvious just after that time that it was too easy. And if you make a Draenei one, it has some healing ability added in. It's almost comical.
I played WoW from closed beta through the first 9 months of launch, and then the wife and I hit level cap, and promptly got bored out of our skulls with the game. After a 3yr hiatus from the game while we played EQ2 and had a lot more fun, we decided to give WoW another try. (We stalled out in EQ2 during the pregnancy and birth of our 2nd child, and lost the interest in playing for a while.) We've been playing for about 4 months now.
I have a 59 shaman, a 38 rogue that duos with the wife's druid of the same level, and a bunch of other toons floating around, plus the obligitory 58 DK. And while I am having fun, it's not all that.
You are spot on about grouping and trying to find like-minded players. There is no reason to group at all, and a high level toon can run you through the "really should run through for gear" instances of DM, Gnomer, and SM. And after those 3 instances done by one lvl 70 mage and whatever toons tagged along, it was solo-city. Sure, I tagged along with said mage through ZF when he was gathering cloth for his DK's turn-ins pre-launch, but that would have been the first instance I would have run with a group, otherwise.
The fact that toons can power-level so easily is absolutely destroying the fabric of the game. You don't need to form a guild relationship. Just pay some mage to run you through the instances, and you are geared through 60 for the most part. Hit Outlands, and you will have all new gear before you hit 62. There's a reason my wife always says "WoW is MMO For Dummies".
And with the new PvP zone, things are really going to deteriorate quickly. The surest way to create a l33t attitude is to allow PvP like this. Blizzard uses PvP as the dangling carrot to keep people playing while they churn out expansions at a horrifically slow rate. 27 hours for the first person to go fromj 70 to 80? Really? We had to wait over a year and a half for most people to hit the new level cap in a week?
I've said for a while that the only thing that will knock WoW from the top of the heap is Blizzard. It looks like they will succeed, unless they start to make progression mean something.
Yes, this game was a total Cluster-F, but don't get too wound up over some things.
Class balancing SHOULD happen before launch, but most PvP games fail to do that.
Look at WoW, the holy grail of what all these game developers hope to accomplish. They created the paladin talents 2 weeks prior to launch. There was no way the class could be properly test balanced when the game was basically gold already. Beta players complained about the talents, but nothing changed until a few months after launch.
Any game that features PvP at either its core or its end-game management is always going to suffer from class balancing problems. Blizzard has had its fair share. Its fanbois just overlook them once they are fixed.
And yes, I play WoW now, though I did take a 3yr leave of the game due to outright boredom after hitting lvl 60 9 months after launch.
It may be fun now, but when a public beta is one dimensional and boring, this is what happens. And that summed up Tabula Rasa in a nutshell. Considering that the last few Origin games weren't that great (it peaked at 3-5), Garriott had lost his fastball.
MMOs are really about how good a game is at launch. The more bugs and poor gameplay there is, the worse the game will do. And it's hard to recover for a lackluster launch and first few months. Let's look at some examples.
City of Heroes had one of the cleanest launches of an MMO that I've ever seen. Almost no bugs, and for the first 20-30 levels, you don't really pay too much attention to how monotonous the game really is. Then the monotony gets to you, and players pushed through it. Personally, I think it was the costumes that made this game playable beyond those first 20 levels or so, as the costume generator is second to none. But the number of players dropped quicly after launch, because of that monotony. You can only go through so many "caves" or similar looking "installations" before you're done.
EQ2 launched, and the game was specifically designed to be just as hard as EQ, but with better graphics. There were a lot of interesting aspects to the game, but the #1 drawback is that you didn't play your real class until you hit lvl 20! You started off as a generic fighter/mage/healer/thief, and at lvl 10, you refined it down a little more, and at lvl 20 you finally gained your ultimate class. Well, nobody liked that part. While it was launched a week or two before WoW, EQ2 suffered for that initial stupidty. In many ways, EQ2 now is a better game than WoW is today, with a lot less downtime, a heck of a lot better with new content, and a more mature player base. But it is doubtful that it will ever recover from the blah launch it had. Maybe if Blizzard destroys WoW with some stupid expansion, EQ2 will explode, minues the PvP crowd.
WoW launched after a pretty positive closed and open beta. And unless you were on one of the original "terrible 20" servers (I was on one), the game wasn't too bad. Sure, they took about 6 months to stop having the same exact problem after EACH update, but the game has a genuine "fun factor" to it that didn't wear off until you hit level cap, unless you enjoyed PvP. Blizzard made a LOT of mistakes, but what they didn't screw up was making the game flat out fun. There's a reason they have over 10 million subscribers world wide: it's fun to play. It will remain to be seen if Blizzard's continual push for more Arena style PvP starts to piss the player base off, but it's hard to get a large group of friends to switch games, and WoW has most of them hooked deep. The only things that will be a WoW-killer are Blizzard and time.
LotRO was a pretty poor beta experience. When one class is completely dominant over all others, the game has problems. The primary healer class was also the best offensive spellcaster in the game. A group of 4 of them could handle pretty much all content easily in the early stages, leaving a poor taste in the player's mouth. It's not surprising that with all the history and the success of the LotR movies, the game saw decent numbers at launch. They didn't last very long.
AoC was a disasterous beta, in the fact that the open beta only let you experience the first 20 levels, which happened to contain the only fun part of the game. Look at it now. It's going to be the next game to shut down their servers. I'd guestimate that over 75% of the players that bought the game for launch left within 2 months. That's a staggering number.
Warhammer Online might make a decent dent in the market. For all the delays and the removal of content prior to launch, the game was actually a hell of a lot of fun in beta. I hate PvP for the most part, and even I enjoyed my beta experience a lot. I believe the game is doing well so far, from what friends are saying. The game didn't get a lot of good hype based on it's name alone, so the hype was all about the gameplay itself. This one could have staying power.
We won't even get into SW:G and everything that went wrong with that game. We'll just cross that one off as a colossal mistake.
It may be the single dumbest yet hilarious movie you can see. It certainly is the cheesiest porno I've ever seen. (Yes, I'm a nerd, so I've seen lots of pornos. There, I just saved you a lame attempt at a joke.)
If Law Enforcement was really hell bent on shutting down child porn, it would happen. But they aren't.
It's been way too easy to find child porn on Usenet for decades. You could just read the underage non-nude groups, and sooner or later someone will post which newsgroup has the hardcore child porn. Eventually, providers would shut the group down, and it would respawn in another alt.bin group within a week.
I've reported which newsgroup is getting the stuff at least a dozen times in the past 5 years directly to the FBI via various websites they have for it, usually the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I was a semi-active member with a newsgroup that centered around women with smaller busts, and we reported any underage posts without a warning shot. The group FAQ warned about it, and enforcement was hard and fast. So, the FBI and other agencies know where to find it.
If they really wanted to get these folks, they could get a court order to make newsgroup providers pony up some IP addresses and then get the ISP's to give some names. They should be able to sweep up huge numbers in short order. And yet we get one major bust announcement every 6-12 months, and they barely skim the surface. They don't seem to nail the producers and distributors. They nail the folks viewing it.
As the old saying goes: "There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to the one who is striking at the root." That seems to sum up the war on child porn pretty well. It sums up the war on drugs, as well.
At least a few people get this very important fact. I hate that HG:L keeps getting lumped in with MMOs and pointed at as a story about how MMOs fail.
HG:L didn't allow LANs to prevent piracy. Diablo II was pirated out the ass, and all it took was making a few copies of an original disc and viola, LAN parties. It was great for college students. And since the HG:L crew came from the Diablo II world, they knew that.
They just picked a total cluster-frak way of trying to deal with it, and then making it a subscription service to get anything decent.
Yeah, I bought the game, but I had no intention of playing it via subscription. The wife and I duo'ed a bit as non-subscribers, but it was a fairly poor experience, and we quickly went back to a real MMO.
The whole missing ability to LAN was because they know full well that Diablo II was pirated out the ass by folks who used a crack and then set up LAN parties. I think Diablo II was one of the most pirated games I've ever seen.
It was never intended that HG:L would be a MMO model. It was simply their version of DRM, and it was a colossal failure. I think knowing you couldn't go LAN was one of the biggest negative selling points the game had.
I saw the lack of LAN support in beta, and I wasn't overly concerned, because most of my friends that were interested in the game were in other states. So, using their servers made it easier to meet up. But none of us were interested in paying a fee to use the guild and other functions, so we quickly all ended up soloing the game. Most of us quit before getting to the end of the game.
This is just another example of intrusive DRM hurting a game's sales.
Griefers don't want to have fair competition, and don't really want to fight other griefers. It's why UO died such an ugly death. They were hemmoraging subscribers at a pretty awful rate before they made the whole "light/dark shards". That just happened to get rid of the rest of the players. (And while the UO fanbois always recall how absolutely GREAT the game was prior to that change, I noticed that after the change, the PvP side of things was a barren wasteland with no players.)
Their whole game enjoyment comes from making others miserable. That's why they call it GRIEFing. It's all about them and how much they can annoy another player. These people are simply anti-social. They don't care about making friends, or enjoying the game with others. They want to see how much frustration they can cause, and what it takes to make other players log out and/or quit.
So, trying to get these knuckleheads to a server where they can exploit and grief each other to hell and back won't work, because they won't want to play there either. They'll be trying to get away with stuff on the regular servers, just so their e-penis will grow bigger and they can strut around talking about how awesome they are. And when they do get banned, they will go insane on the Blizzard forums for that game.
Re:Rootkit? WTF are you talking about?
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Review: Spore
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· Score: 1
While I wholeheartedly agree that the rootkit thing is blown out of proportion...
The initial planned release of both Spore and Mass Effect were going to have SecureROM phone home once every 10 days to verify that your game was still a liscensed copy. If you weren't connected after day 10, your game would not function. The publisher relented when they got a lot of complaints from military personel, who are often unable to connect once every 10 days. That was when the change was made to refuse to allow you to download updates without it phoning home; something many games do.
Now, having affirmed your viewpoint, I still highly disagree with the "3 installations and then a hassle laden phone call to the publisher" aspect of this.
My PCs have a tendency to go through HDs at a freakish rate, no matter which brand I buy. My old PC lost 3 HDs in 3.5yrs. My machine before that went through another 2. The same happened for my first Windows PC. I also like to uninstall a game if I'm not planning to play it for a long time, and I upgrade a PC once every 3-4yrs. If I had bought Spore with this DRM back when I got my last PC, I wouldn't have been able to install it on my current one, because I would have used up all 3 installs with HD deaths.
DRM only makes the paying customer go through any inconienence. Pirates don't even notice it.
This came about before electronic cash registers came about. You could easily figure out the dollar amount if everything was in whole dollars "back in the day", but bring in those price breaks of.99 or.97, and now it's hard to figure out.
I worked in a place that had manual cash registers and little charts to figure out the tax amount to be manually keyed in back when I was in high school. Even with an even 5% tax rate in MD, the odds of a sale of items coming up an even dollar amount were decidely slim.
There is a bit of a psychological factor there, as well, but making it so that the cashier couldn't quick-math the number in their head was the real source of it starting.
I was in the closed beta of WoW, and I was in the closed beta for AoC. There was a HUGE difference in the feelings both communities had.
In WoW, everyone was stoked about the upcomming release. There were very few bugs, and the only major outstanding issue was that Paladins didn't get a fix to their ability tree until 2 weeks before launch, so it wasn't tested properly. They really needed help at launch. Otherwise, everyone in the CB was glowing with enthusiasm.
In AoC, the fanbois were excited for launch, but everyone else that was able to take a hard look at the game saw that it was deeply flawed. No tradeskilling until level 40? Too much travel with few speedy travel options? Monotonous encouters? Yep, got them covered.
AoC wasn't ready to be launched, as just about every MMO since WoW has come out has suffered through. The big-wigs upstairs know that players will pay for the continuing development of games, so why not get revenue to offset the fixing of bugs and design flaws? So, the rush a game to retail, knowing that a large group of lemmings will pay the initial cost plus a fee to play a beta product.
It's become the norm, not the exception.
As someone else pointed out, most of WoW's flaws were hardware and network infrastructure, not the actual game itself. The game was pretty, functioned on a low level system, and was damn fun to play.
AoC was never that fun to play, bugged out the ass, and required a more powerful system to run, without ever getting DX10 supported. (Even though the box touts it.)
I believe I live in one of those areas you've mentioned. My cell drops the 3G network frequently, and sometimes will drop the call because the switch to EDGE didn't happen fast enough.
More bars in more places is all fine and dandy, but if your area's bar level fluctuates in a huge way like mine does, it doesn't help you. I've been seriously considering a switch to Verizon, since I don't use a iPhone.
Personally, the only time I pirate a game is to see if it's worth buying. Demos produced by the developer are usually not very representative of the full game.
Most demos are extremely polished, and damn short. A half hour to an hour of gameplay, and very rarely will you encounter a bug. It's akin to the games published in the 80's, that didn't have bugs very often, because they didn't have the internet to patch a shoddy product. So, you have this pristine, nearly utopian product to test.
Then, you buy the game, and find out that the demo was only representative of a tiny snippet of the game, and the rest of the game is completely different. Or worse yet, the demo was not just representative of the whole game, it effectively WAS the whole game.
When I've pirated games, I've done it to sample what the *real* game is like. Good games I buy afterwards. Bad games I don't.
Besides, even with Usenet, I can often download the whole game in a few hours, and the demo may take an hour or more to get, even with Fileplanet. So, I get the game with crack, load it, and test drive it for a few hours. And it's the same as being in a beta for other games, like MMOs.
Games that have impressed me enough to buy, that I would have never bought without the pirate run?
Sacred, Galactic Civilizations, Dungeon Siege/Dungeon Siege II, Might & Magic series, Half Life, The Witcher, and Pools of Radiance.
And the funny thing is, I bought Atari's "Temple of Elemental Evil" based on my love of AD&D. Well, the original play CD won't validate the SecureRom crap, and even the NO-CD crack won't let it play on my system. I had to pirate the game and use the pirated copy to install and update my game to make it work.
I agree that a good manual and a jewel case definitely make a game more attractive to buy. I still remember when NWN came out with the extra CD jacket sleeve so you could put all of the expansions CDs plus the original in one sleeve. That was a nice touch. I also remember the HUGE boxes all those games came in during the 90's. I still have some of them on my shelves.
Here's the reason they aren't doing it as much. Weight = additional shipping costs. Bigger size = less retail space.
Even before the economy tanked and fuel prices went crazy, all manufacturers and distributors are looking to cut costs. So, they try to cut down on the product weight. "Put the manual on a.pdf on the CD/DVD, and it will cost you $0.25 less to ship per unit!" Well, that quarter starts to add up pretty damn quick. (I'm sure it's less, but the numbers will still add up.) All companies are looking to cut every penny they can so they can maximize profits.
With the often heavier pages, most good game manuals (NWN/NWN2 comes to mind) weigh about the same as a paperback these days. That's a lot of extra weight, not to mention the cost of printing said manuals.
But the biggest problem these days is that most games suck, and have lousy post-release support. I think that's why MMOs generate such subscription numbers when they are good. They have to be constantly patched. Even when the "nerf bat" starts swinging at their favorite class and that classes diehards threaten to quit the game, they almost never do.
For some games, that's true. And for others, the supposedly "adult parts" are to cover up a lack of gameplay through titilation.
Look at Age of Conan. The game itself really isn't that good, but just the fact that you could have topless female toons was a much-hyped point. I remember guildmates of a very large guild looking hard to find topless NPCs, and found one before I quit playing and reading their forums.
So, don't let the supposed adult parts override common sense and a critical eye towards gameplay. If you really think that some of the adult stuff makes the game, then either the whole game is adult, or it's a gimmick
Yes, MMOs tend to get repetitive at the end game. In EQ1, it was constant grinding for better gear or new zone access. In WoW, it's either gear grinding or PvP-for-gear grinding. In EQ2, it was gear grinding.
But the part that you left out is the people you play with. If you play MMOs with a really great group of people that is close-knitted, you find that the grind doesn't FEEL like a grind, or at least substationly less so. It's why I was able to play EQ2 for 5 years. It wasn't because the game itself was so brilliant. It was the people I played with that kept me there for so long. My first stint in WoW only lasted 9 months, mostly because I made the mistake of choosing the wrong group of friends to play with. When things went as I should have known they would, a lot of the joy went out of the game for my wife and I, and as soon as we hit lvl 60 (cap at the time), we were done. EQ2 lasted 3 years, but again, the friends eventually didn't work out.
We're back to playing WoW just this past week, with friends we played EQ1 with originally, and always got along with. And even though they don't have any toons our level, just bantering with them in guild chat has that magic feeling coursing through our veins again. That feeling of being home with those that matter.
Our lives are much different now, with 2 small children in the house as opposed to our first stint in WoW, so it will take a lot longer to hit level cap. And that's fine, because we'll have friends to chat with, adventure with (eventually), and just feel closer to once again.
So, sure, power levelling up toons can be counter-productive to a person's skill at the game. But bringing a close friend to the game for the first time, and helping them enjoy it will probably get Blizzard a few thousand extra subscriptions. With WoW's low system requirements, it doesn't take the newest PC to handle the game. So, as long as they have a PC, they can play.
The fact that there are plenty that will abuse it for power levelling or multi-boxing isn't Blizzard's fault. It's the players' fault when they choose to do just that.
I said a general rule, not a hard and fast rule, so that leaves room for some games like FFXI. There aren't a lot that don't follow the model I described.
And Dungeon Siege was not an MMO, so that doesn't count.
This will be the most interesting thing to see if they can overcome.
Eastern/Asian MMOs are, as a general rule, all similar. It's all about how many potions you can carry, what kind of timers they have, and how much range damage you can produce. Melee combat is a major afterthought, as they tend to serve no purpose in groups. And they often are the "free to play, with an item mall!" model. Ugh! The graphics are often very well done, though the female models all start to look the same after a while. Everyone and their brother has a merchant booth set up in the middle of town or in the pathways in/out of town. Dungeons tend to be few, so grouping is not necessary, except to power level through a zone.
Western MMOs tend to focus more on grouping, though solo play is supported. Potions are more of an afterthought, though some games like WoW have healing potions, just with much longer timers to keep it from being a potion-based healing system. Classes are more varied, and there are generally accepted rolls to fulfil. (Healer, tank, DPS, crowd control, etc.)
Personally, I can't stand most Eastern/Asian MMOs. There seems to be so little skill involved in most of them. It's all about carrying a lot of potions, and attacking the mob from range. I've never needed to group in any of the ones I've played, and I find item malls insulting. I'd rather see players earn stuff, and not just buy it. Ebay toons are bad enough, but at least they generally cost a lot more than buying some great weapon/armor piece with cash for a lot less. They all just feel like they are the same game, with slighly different land masses to run over until your bags are full or you run out of potions, then sell, and repeat.
NCSoft is not having the greatest of luck with its Eastern model MMOs, with Lineage II being the only possible exception here in North America. (CoH/V was done seperately, I believe.)
It has more to do with Blizzard realizing that having a game that has lower GPU requirements means a greater possibility of getting a sale.
Not everyone out there wants to get a new machine to play a particular game. Heck, when WoW came out, I was running a P4 1.8GHz machine with about 1GB RAM and a pretty darn old graphics card, and the game ran great everywhere but IF. And that was a huge thing, considering that same system could barely run EQ2.
A decent number of folks will leave WoW to try the newest MMO thrown out there, and those are the hardcore players that will buy/build a new system to play a particular game. And then they will find out the new game is mostly crap (Hello, AoC is calling! Is that you, Warhammer?) and come back to WoW. But the majority of folks are liking the fact that WoW runs great on their older system with no extra cash spent on upgrades. That fact, as much as gameplay, is why WoW has 10 million plus subscribers.
So, why would they ruin that model by making some really crazy effort to have uber-graphics to satisfy the less than 5% of gamers that are going to spank their monkey over the newest GPU to come out?
Make the game attractive and fun to play, and people will play it. Lord knows, most games I end up cranking up the gamma right off the bat, since I don't live in a cave.
My favorite part is that the admins claimed they were protecting the user's free speech rights.
While there is a general rule that says that webmasters/admins aren't responsible for offensive material written, there are very few forums you can post what was posted about these women and not have it deleted. Usenet is one place, and/. is another, but most forums have rules.
These admins had no reason to protect free speech, other that to feel like they were being cool. And you're 100% right. This Ciolli person found out what it was like to have his 15 minutes of infamy, and how those 15 minutes can unfairly taint the rest of your life. All to protect trolls that weren't contributing anything constructive.
Law students should know better than to think they are anonymous. About the only people that manage to hide for any length of time on the internet are spammers, child porn collectors, and hackers/virus writers. Everyone else is pretty much easy pickings.
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My wife is by no means a hardcore player. She can't handle a ton of stuff at once, so she basically plays a healer and handles simple support stuff in MMOs.
Even she calls WoW "MMO for Dummies". When a player like her can say that, you know the game is simple.
But you know what? It's also a lot of fun
The article is about gaming PCs, not PC gaming. You know, the rig itself? The one some folks used to constantly shell out major bucks for the newest fangled gear to get another FPS out of their games?
Oh, wait! This is /. Where folks can't even bother to read the freaking headline or summary, much less the links it goes to.
Reading comprehension is a wonderful thing.
This comment goes to 11.
Seriously, I remember my old man giving me crap about playing computer games all the time, but then he sat down and looked at things. I was playing EQ at the time, and back then it was something like 12.99 a month if memory serves me right. Sure, I paid for 2 expansions a year (you hear that, Blizzard???) but the monthly fee was nothing compared to going out all the time.
I figure that playing MMOs actually saved me a couple hundred dollars every month, easy. I stopped seeing movies I really wasn't that interested in, but some friend/ or the wife wanted to see. I stopped renting movies I didn't really care about. We stopped going out to dinner once a week. Heck, the wife started playing about 6 months later, and she stopped wanting to do a lot of those things that just end up costing a lot of money. I also broke my buying a new game a month habit.
It's been 10 years since I started playing MMOs, back with UO, then EQ for over 5 yrs, through a short stint in CoH and then WoW for 9 months, DDO, then EQ2 for a solid 3 years, and now back to WoW. Little side experiments in stuff like AoC (a major mistake on my part, which I saw but ignored to play with friends that were frothing at the mouth) and CoV, plus a lot of betas thrown in, gave me insights into other games. And while we're playing WoW now and having a pretty good time, EQ2 is calling us back. We bought the expansions, and will sit on them until the new year, most likely. Then, give it the 30 days and see which is better.
It has really kept me from taking chances on games I am not really sure about, as well. Since I started playing MMOs, I don't think I've bought more than 10 really awful single player games. I'm just not so bored that I'm taking flyers on unknowns.
I disagree with your comments on demos.
Demos are often extremely polished little snippets of the game, and they can really mislead you about the quality of the game, and the mid-end points of a game.
A prime example is Age of Conan (AoC). Just about everyone that played the open beta (read: demo) found the game to be pretty good, with a great little story line, and fun quests. Sadly, that was the highlight of the entire game.
I tried the demo of HellGate: London, and the game seemed pretty good. Sadly, the rest of the game was the same thing over and over and over again. There's a reason it went belly up after strong initial sales.
So, demos can be very misleading. If there is a game I am not sure about, I may try the demo, and see if that plays well. If I like it, but I'm not totally sold on it, I may try to download a copy and give it a real test. I buy some of them, but most of them turn out to be crap.
Your milage may vary, but I find demos to only tease with the absolute best part of a game, or the easiest/most fun part. Most of the time, it's a bait 'n switch when compared to the whole game.
Considering how much class balancing they had to do when WoW was first released, this should come as no surprise. If you've played since launch, how many times have your talents been refunded?
Most of my guildmates are levelling their DKs up as fast as possible, because they know the nerf bat is coming, and it's going to hit hard. So, they want to get as far as they can in "easy mode".
I've only played my DK through the intro levels, then got sent to SW. And it was obvious just after that time that it was too easy. And if you make a Draenei one, it has some healing ability added in. It's almost comical.
I played WoW from closed beta through the first 9 months of launch, and then the wife and I hit level cap, and promptly got bored out of our skulls with the game. After a 3yr hiatus from the game while we played EQ2 and had a lot more fun, we decided to give WoW another try. (We stalled out in EQ2 during the pregnancy and birth of our 2nd child, and lost the interest in playing for a while.) We've been playing for about 4 months now.
I have a 59 shaman, a 38 rogue that duos with the wife's druid of the same level, and a bunch of other toons floating around, plus the obligitory 58 DK. And while I am having fun, it's not all that.
You are spot on about grouping and trying to find like-minded players. There is no reason to group at all, and a high level toon can run you through the "really should run through for gear" instances of DM, Gnomer, and SM. And after those 3 instances done by one lvl 70 mage and whatever toons tagged along, it was solo-city. Sure, I tagged along with said mage through ZF when he was gathering cloth for his DK's turn-ins pre-launch, but that would have been the first instance I would have run with a group, otherwise.
The fact that toons can power-level so easily is absolutely destroying the fabric of the game. You don't need to form a guild relationship. Just pay some mage to run you through the instances, and you are geared through 60 for the most part. Hit Outlands, and you will have all new gear before you hit 62. There's a reason my wife always says "WoW is MMO For Dummies".
And with the new PvP zone, things are really going to deteriorate quickly. The surest way to create a l33t attitude is to allow PvP like this. Blizzard uses PvP as the dangling carrot to keep people playing while they churn out expansions at a horrifically slow rate. 27 hours for the first person to go fromj 70 to 80? Really? We had to wait over a year and a half for most people to hit the new level cap in a week?
I've said for a while that the only thing that will knock WoW from the top of the heap is Blizzard. It looks like they will succeed, unless they start to make progression mean something.
Yes, this game was a total Cluster-F, but don't get too wound up over some things.
Class balancing SHOULD happen before launch, but most PvP games fail to do that.
Look at WoW, the holy grail of what all these game developers hope to accomplish. They created the paladin talents 2 weeks prior to launch. There was no way the class could be properly test balanced when the game was basically gold already. Beta players complained about the talents, but nothing changed until a few months after launch.
Any game that features PvP at either its core or its end-game management is always going to suffer from class balancing problems. Blizzard has had its fair share. Its fanbois just overlook them once they are fixed.
And yes, I play WoW now, though I did take a 3yr leave of the game due to outright boredom after hitting lvl 60 9 months after launch.
It may be fun now, but when a public beta is one dimensional and boring, this is what happens. And that summed up Tabula Rasa in a nutshell. Considering that the last few Origin games weren't that great (it peaked at 3-5), Garriott had lost his fastball.
MMOs are really about how good a game is at launch. The more bugs and poor gameplay there is, the worse the game will do. And it's hard to recover for a lackluster launch and first few months. Let's look at some examples.
City of Heroes had one of the cleanest launches of an MMO that I've ever seen. Almost no bugs, and for the first 20-30 levels, you don't really pay too much attention to how monotonous the game really is. Then the monotony gets to you, and players pushed through it. Personally, I think it was the costumes that made this game playable beyond those first 20 levels or so, as the costume generator is second to none. But the number of players dropped quicly after launch, because of that monotony. You can only go through so many "caves" or similar looking "installations" before you're done.
EQ2 launched, and the game was specifically designed to be just as hard as EQ, but with better graphics. There were a lot of interesting aspects to the game, but the #1 drawback is that you didn't play your real class until you hit lvl 20! You started off as a generic fighter/mage/healer/thief, and at lvl 10, you refined it down a little more, and at lvl 20 you finally gained your ultimate class. Well, nobody liked that part. While it was launched a week or two before WoW, EQ2 suffered for that initial stupidty. In many ways, EQ2 now is a better game than WoW is today, with a lot less downtime, a heck of a lot better with new content, and a more mature player base. But it is doubtful that it will ever recover from the blah launch it had. Maybe if Blizzard destroys WoW with some stupid expansion, EQ2 will explode, minues the PvP crowd.
WoW launched after a pretty positive closed and open beta. And unless you were on one of the original "terrible 20" servers (I was on one), the game wasn't too bad. Sure, they took about 6 months to stop having the same exact problem after EACH update, but the game has a genuine "fun factor" to it that didn't wear off until you hit level cap, unless you enjoyed PvP. Blizzard made a LOT of mistakes, but what they didn't screw up was making the game flat out fun. There's a reason they have over 10 million subscribers world wide: it's fun to play. It will remain to be seen if Blizzard's continual push for more Arena style PvP starts to piss the player base off, but it's hard to get a large group of friends to switch games, and WoW has most of them hooked deep. The only things that will be a WoW-killer are Blizzard and time.
LotRO was a pretty poor beta experience. When one class is completely dominant over all others, the game has problems. The primary healer class was also the best offensive spellcaster in the game. A group of 4 of them could handle pretty much all content easily in the early stages, leaving a poor taste in the player's mouth. It's not surprising that with all the history and the success of the LotR movies, the game saw decent numbers at launch. They didn't last very long.
AoC was a disasterous beta, in the fact that the open beta only let you experience the first 20 levels, which happened to contain the only fun part of the game. Look at it now. It's going to be the next game to shut down their servers. I'd guestimate that over 75% of the players that bought the game for launch left within 2 months. That's a staggering number.
Warhammer Online might make a decent dent in the market. For all the delays and the removal of content prior to launch, the game was actually a hell of a lot of fun in beta. I hate PvP for the most part, and even I enjoyed my beta experience a lot. I believe the game is doing well so far, from what friends are saying. The game didn't get a lot of good hype based on it's name alone, so the hype was all about the gameplay itself. This one could have staying power.
We won't even get into SW:G and everything that went wrong with that game. We'll just cross that one off as a colossal mistake.
You obviously never saw Flesh Gordon.
It may be the single dumbest yet hilarious movie you can see. It certainly is the cheesiest porno I've ever seen. (Yes, I'm a nerd, so I've seen lots of pornos. There, I just saved you a lame attempt at a joke.)
If Law Enforcement was really hell bent on shutting down child porn, it would happen. But they aren't.
It's been way too easy to find child porn on Usenet for decades. You could just read the underage non-nude groups, and sooner or later someone will post which newsgroup has the hardcore child porn. Eventually, providers would shut the group down, and it would respawn in another alt.bin group within a week.
I've reported which newsgroup is getting the stuff at least a dozen times in the past 5 years directly to the FBI via various websites they have for it, usually the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I was a semi-active member with a newsgroup that centered around women with smaller busts, and we reported any underage posts without a warning shot. The group FAQ warned about it, and enforcement was hard and fast. So, the FBI and other agencies know where to find it.
If they really wanted to get these folks, they could get a court order to make newsgroup providers pony up some IP addresses and then get the ISP's to give some names. They should be able to sweep up huge numbers in short order. And yet we get one major bust announcement every 6-12 months, and they barely skim the surface. They don't seem to nail the producers and distributors. They nail the folks viewing it.
As the old saying goes: "There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to the one who is striking at the root." That seems to sum up the war on child porn pretty well. It sums up the war on drugs, as well.
At least a few people get this very important fact. I hate that HG:L keeps getting lumped in with MMOs and pointed at as a story about how MMOs fail.
HG:L didn't allow LANs to prevent piracy. Diablo II was pirated out the ass, and all it took was making a few copies of an original disc and viola, LAN parties. It was great for college students. And since the HG:L crew came from the Diablo II world, they knew that.
They just picked a total cluster-frak way of trying to deal with it, and then making it a subscription service to get anything decent.
Yeah, I bought the game, but I had no intention of playing it via subscription. The wife and I duo'ed a bit as non-subscribers, but it was a fairly poor experience, and we quickly went back to a real MMO.
The whole missing ability to LAN was because they know full well that Diablo II was pirated out the ass by folks who used a crack and then set up LAN parties. I think Diablo II was one of the most pirated games I've ever seen.
It was never intended that HG:L would be a MMO model. It was simply their version of DRM, and it was a colossal failure. I think knowing you couldn't go LAN was one of the biggest negative selling points the game had.
I saw the lack of LAN support in beta, and I wasn't overly concerned, because most of my friends that were interested in the game were in other states. So, using their servers made it easier to meet up. But none of us were interested in paying a fee to use the guild and other functions, so we quickly all ended up soloing the game. Most of us quit before getting to the end of the game.
This is just another example of intrusive DRM hurting a game's sales.
There is only one problem with your suggestion.
Griefers don't want to have fair competition, and don't really want to fight other griefers. It's why UO died such an ugly death. They were hemmoraging subscribers at a pretty awful rate before they made the whole "light/dark shards". That just happened to get rid of the rest of the players. (And while the UO fanbois always recall how absolutely GREAT the game was prior to that change, I noticed that after the change, the PvP side of things was a barren wasteland with no players.)
Their whole game enjoyment comes from making others miserable. That's why they call it GRIEFing. It's all about them and how much they can annoy another player. These people are simply anti-social. They don't care about making friends, or enjoying the game with others. They want to see how much frustration they can cause, and what it takes to make other players log out and/or quit.
So, trying to get these knuckleheads to a server where they can exploit and grief each other to hell and back won't work, because they won't want to play there either. They'll be trying to get away with stuff on the regular servers, just so their e-penis will grow bigger and they can strut around talking about how awesome they are. And when they do get banned, they will go insane on the Blizzard forums for that game.
While I wholeheartedly agree that the rootkit thing is blown out of proportion...
The initial planned release of both Spore and Mass Effect were going to have SecureROM phone home once every 10 days to verify that your game was still a liscensed copy. If you weren't connected after day 10, your game would not function. The publisher relented when they got a lot of complaints from military personel, who are often unable to connect once every 10 days. That was when the change was made to refuse to allow you to download updates without it phoning home; something many games do.
http://masseffect.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=629059&forum=125&sp=0
Now, having affirmed your viewpoint, I still highly disagree with the "3 installations and then a hassle laden phone call to the publisher" aspect of this.
My PCs have a tendency to go through HDs at a freakish rate, no matter which brand I buy. My old PC lost 3 HDs in 3.5yrs. My machine before that went through another 2. The same happened for my first Windows PC. I also like to uninstall a game if I'm not planning to play it for a long time, and I upgrade a PC once every 3-4yrs. If I had bought Spore with this DRM back when I got my last PC, I wouldn't have been able to install it on my current one, because I would have used up all 3 installs with HD deaths.
DRM only makes the paying customer go through any inconienence. Pirates don't even notice it.
This came about before electronic cash registers came about. You could easily figure out the dollar amount if everything was in whole dollars "back in the day", but bring in those price breaks of .99 or .97, and now it's hard to figure out.
I worked in a place that had manual cash registers and little charts to figure out the tax amount to be manually keyed in back when I was in high school. Even with an even 5% tax rate in MD, the odds of a sale of items coming up an even dollar amount were decidely slim.
There is a bit of a psychological factor there, as well, but making it so that the cashier couldn't quick-math the number in their head was the real source of it starting.
Holy smokes! You have GOT to be kidding me.
I was in the closed beta of WoW, and I was in the closed beta for AoC. There was a HUGE difference in the feelings both communities had.
In WoW, everyone was stoked about the upcomming release. There were very few bugs, and the only major outstanding issue was that Paladins didn't get a fix to their ability tree until 2 weeks before launch, so it wasn't tested properly. They really needed help at launch. Otherwise, everyone in the CB was glowing with enthusiasm.
In AoC, the fanbois were excited for launch, but everyone else that was able to take a hard look at the game saw that it was deeply flawed. No tradeskilling until level 40? Too much travel with few speedy travel options? Monotonous encouters? Yep, got them covered.
AoC wasn't ready to be launched, as just about every MMO since WoW has come out has suffered through. The big-wigs upstairs know that players will pay for the continuing development of games, so why not get revenue to offset the fixing of bugs and design flaws? So, the rush a game to retail, knowing that a large group of lemmings will pay the initial cost plus a fee to play a beta product.
It's become the norm, not the exception.
As someone else pointed out, most of WoW's flaws were hardware and network infrastructure, not the actual game itself. The game was pretty, functioned on a low level system, and was damn fun to play.
AoC was never that fun to play, bugged out the ass, and required a more powerful system to run, without ever getting DX10 supported. (Even though the box touts it.)
I believe I live in one of those areas you've mentioned. My cell drops the 3G network frequently, and sometimes will drop the call because the switch to EDGE didn't happen fast enough.
More bars in more places is all fine and dandy, but if your area's bar level fluctuates in a huge way like mine does, it doesn't help you. I've been seriously considering a switch to Verizon, since I don't use a iPhone.
Personally, the only time I pirate a game is to see if it's worth buying. Demos produced by the developer are usually not very representative of the full game.
Most demos are extremely polished, and damn short. A half hour to an hour of gameplay, and very rarely will you encounter a bug. It's akin to the games published in the 80's, that didn't have bugs very often, because they didn't have the internet to patch a shoddy product. So, you have this pristine, nearly utopian product to test.
Then, you buy the game, and find out that the demo was only representative of a tiny snippet of the game, and the rest of the game is completely different. Or worse yet, the demo was not just representative of the whole game, it effectively WAS the whole game.
When I've pirated games, I've done it to sample what the *real* game is like. Good games I buy afterwards. Bad games I don't.
Besides, even with Usenet, I can often download the whole game in a few hours, and the demo may take an hour or more to get, even with Fileplanet. So, I get the game with crack, load it, and test drive it for a few hours. And it's the same as being in a beta for other games, like MMOs.
Games that have impressed me enough to buy, that I would have never bought without the pirate run?
Sacred, Galactic Civilizations, Dungeon Siege/Dungeon Siege II, Might & Magic series, Half Life, The Witcher, and Pools of Radiance.
And the funny thing is, I bought Atari's "Temple of Elemental Evil" based on my love of AD&D. Well, the original play CD won't validate the SecureRom crap, and even the NO-CD crack won't let it play on my system. I had to pirate the game and use the pirated copy to install and update my game to make it work.
I agree that a good manual and a jewel case definitely make a game more attractive to buy. I still remember when NWN came out with the extra CD jacket sleeve so you could put all of the expansions CDs plus the original in one sleeve. That was a nice touch. I also remember the HUGE boxes all those games came in during the 90's. I still have some of them on my shelves.
Here's the reason they aren't doing it as much. Weight = additional shipping costs. Bigger size = less retail space.
Even before the economy tanked and fuel prices went crazy, all manufacturers and distributors are looking to cut costs. So, they try to cut down on the product weight. "Put the manual on a .pdf on the CD/DVD, and it will cost you $0.25 less to ship per unit!" Well, that quarter starts to add up pretty damn quick. (I'm sure it's less, but the numbers will still add up.) All companies are looking to cut every penny they can so they can maximize profits.
With the often heavier pages, most good game manuals (NWN/NWN2 comes to mind) weigh about the same as a paperback these days. That's a lot of extra weight, not to mention the cost of printing said manuals.
But the biggest problem these days is that most games suck, and have lousy post-release support. I think that's why MMOs generate such subscription numbers when they are good. They have to be constantly patched. Even when the "nerf bat" starts swinging at their favorite class and that classes diehards threaten to quit the game, they almost never do.
For some games, that's true. And for others, the supposedly "adult parts" are to cover up a lack of gameplay through titilation.
Look at Age of Conan. The game itself really isn't that good, but just the fact that you could have topless female toons was a much-hyped point. I remember guildmates of a very large guild looking hard to find topless NPCs, and found one before I quit playing and reading their forums.
So, don't let the supposed adult parts override common sense and a critical eye towards gameplay. If you really think that some of the adult stuff makes the game, then either the whole game is adult, or it's a gimmick
You, good sir, get half of it extremely well.
Yes, MMOs tend to get repetitive at the end game. In EQ1, it was constant grinding for better gear or new zone access. In WoW, it's either gear grinding or PvP-for-gear grinding. In EQ2, it was gear grinding.
But the part that you left out is the people you play with. If you play MMOs with a really great group of people that is close-knitted, you find that the grind doesn't FEEL like a grind, or at least substationly less so. It's why I was able to play EQ2 for 5 years. It wasn't because the game itself was so brilliant. It was the people I played with that kept me there for so long. My first stint in WoW only lasted 9 months, mostly because I made the mistake of choosing the wrong group of friends to play with. When things went as I should have known they would, a lot of the joy went out of the game for my wife and I, and as soon as we hit lvl 60 (cap at the time), we were done. EQ2 lasted 3 years, but again, the friends eventually didn't work out.
We're back to playing WoW just this past week, with friends we played EQ1 with originally, and always got along with. And even though they don't have any toons our level, just bantering with them in guild chat has that magic feeling coursing through our veins again. That feeling of being home with those that matter.
Our lives are much different now, with 2 small children in the house as opposed to our first stint in WoW, so it will take a lot longer to hit level cap. And that's fine, because we'll have friends to chat with, adventure with (eventually), and just feel closer to once again.
So, sure, power levelling up toons can be counter-productive to a person's skill at the game. But bringing a close friend to the game for the first time, and helping them enjoy it will probably get Blizzard a few thousand extra subscriptions. With WoW's low system requirements, it doesn't take the newest PC to handle the game. So, as long as they have a PC, they can play.
The fact that there are plenty that will abuse it for power levelling or multi-boxing isn't Blizzard's fault. It's the players' fault when they choose to do just that.
I said a general rule, not a hard and fast rule, so that leaves room for some games like FFXI. There aren't a lot that don't follow the model I described.
And Dungeon Siege was not an MMO, so that doesn't count.
This will be the most interesting thing to see if they can overcome.
Eastern/Asian MMOs are, as a general rule, all similar. It's all about how many potions you can carry, what kind of timers they have, and how much range damage you can produce. Melee combat is a major afterthought, as they tend to serve no purpose in groups. And they often are the "free to play, with an item mall!" model. Ugh! The graphics are often very well done, though the female models all start to look the same after a while. Everyone and their brother has a merchant booth set up in the middle of town or in the pathways in/out of town. Dungeons tend to be few, so grouping is not necessary, except to power level through a zone.
Western MMOs tend to focus more on grouping, though solo play is supported. Potions are more of an afterthought, though some games like WoW have healing potions, just with much longer timers to keep it from being a potion-based healing system. Classes are more varied, and there are generally accepted rolls to fulfil. (Healer, tank, DPS, crowd control, etc.)
Personally, I can't stand most Eastern/Asian MMOs. There seems to be so little skill involved in most of them. It's all about carrying a lot of potions, and attacking the mob from range. I've never needed to group in any of the ones I've played, and I find item malls insulting. I'd rather see players earn stuff, and not just buy it. Ebay toons are bad enough, but at least they generally cost a lot more than buying some great weapon/armor piece with cash for a lot less. They all just feel like they are the same game, with slighly different land masses to run over until your bags are full or you run out of potions, then sell, and repeat.
NCSoft is not having the greatest of luck with its Eastern model MMOs, with Lineage II being the only possible exception here in North America. (CoH/V was done seperately, I believe.)
It has more to do with Blizzard realizing that having a game that has lower GPU requirements means a greater possibility of getting a sale.
Not everyone out there wants to get a new machine to play a particular game. Heck, when WoW came out, I was running a P4 1.8GHz machine with about 1GB RAM and a pretty darn old graphics card, and the game ran great everywhere but IF. And that was a huge thing, considering that same system could barely run EQ2.
A decent number of folks will leave WoW to try the newest MMO thrown out there, and those are the hardcore players that will buy/build a new system to play a particular game. And then they will find out the new game is mostly crap (Hello, AoC is calling! Is that you, Warhammer?) and come back to WoW. But the majority of folks are liking the fact that WoW runs great on their older system with no extra cash spent on upgrades. That fact, as much as gameplay, is why WoW has 10 million plus subscribers.
So, why would they ruin that model by making some really crazy effort to have uber-graphics to satisfy the less than 5% of gamers that are going to spank their monkey over the newest GPU to come out?
Make the game attractive and fun to play, and people will play it. Lord knows, most games I end up cranking up the gamma right off the bat, since I don't live in a cave.
My favorite part is that the admins claimed they were protecting the user's free speech rights.
While there is a general rule that says that webmasters/admins aren't responsible for offensive material written, there are very few forums you can post what was posted about these women and not have it deleted. Usenet is one place, and /. is another, but most forums have rules.
These admins had no reason to protect free speech, other that to feel like they were being cool. And you're 100% right. This Ciolli person found out what it was like to have his 15 minutes of infamy, and how those 15 minutes can unfairly taint the rest of your life. All to protect trolls that weren't contributing anything constructive.
Law students should know better than to think they are anonymous. About the only people that manage to hide for any length of time on the internet are spammers, child porn collectors, and hackers/virus writers. Everyone else is pretty much easy pickings.