They did that at launch, but one of the Live Updates scrapped it, for several reasons.
The most prominent reason was that it was really a pain in the butt to create a mage class, play it to level 10 and then say "you know, I want to be a nuker" and select said subclass. Then, you work your way to level 20, and say "I think I'll be a warlock" only to find out you don't really like the warlock. Now you've just spent 20 levels to find out the basics of how your class will behave. It hurt.
There was a whole lot of characters being dumped and re-rolled. I barely held on to my warlock, but I really look back and knew I should have gone wizard, instead. The difference between the two? Warlocks deal more mob-group damage via group-AoE spells. Wizards do more damage against a single target, grouped or not.
Soloing, the warlock often had a harder time against powerful single mobs that the wizard would smoke. I was trying to solo to catch up to guildies, and once I hit 20, I suddenly had a character that couldn't do that. Boy, what a disappointment.
In reality, this isn't really what the article is talking about. They are talking more about the way UO did it. You could basically have like 675 points allocated to various skills, with 100 being the maximum. With about 40-50 skills (I don't remember how many) you could really have diverse characters. But you didn't. The best players had 6 skills at 100, with the other 75 points scattered. And most of the players had those 100 points in the same things, with the only variations often being weapon type.
In a way, many games try to hybrid the thing. AA points are one example from EQ and EQ2. Talent trees from WoW is another example. You have levels, but you also can add skills to it.
gamefaqs is pretty nice. What I like a whole lot better is Universal Hint System (UHS). They only have PC games on the list of supported games.
I like it because it allows you to pick how far along through the hint path you want to go. Sometimes it is just knowing WHERE to go, and not how to solve the puzzle, that I want. Other times, I don't feel like bending my head around some absurd game logic to solve it.
I've found it to be a great help. I have the Prima guide for Morrowind, but I got better answers from UHS at times.
Because there are hundreds of people that don't want to enjoy the trip. They want to have that lvl xx toon right now, so they can brag about what they have.
Why do you think people buy accounts on eBay?
Heck, folks call anyone that can't seen to play their class worth eBayers. We just assume they either bought the account, or their friends played the toon to top level.
While I agree with you 100% on the fact that parents will think twice about dropping $600+ on a PS3...
Look at how many 16yr olds get a brand spanking new car when they turn 16. Look how many of them get a Lexus or Acura.
Sure, it doesn't happen everywhere, but there are a lot of places where kids are growing up in smaller families and having parents willing to dump bigtime $$$ on their kids. And there are even more parents that would be willing to dump $600+ on a PS3, plus $50 or so on a game, as an electronic babysitter.
My dauther is 3.5 months old, and I have already had to stop turning on SportsCenter in the morning when I feed her before taking her to daycare. Because she keeps trying to look at the TV. I have seen other parents drop $100-200 a year on DVDs/Tapes for kids just to keep them occupied so they can cook dinner and the like, when kids videos became so popular years ago. Those same parents will probably drop the $$$ on a PS3.
Yeah, the grocery companies have been doing this for years. Folks grab their tinfoil hats and run around screaming about privacy invasions, and then go to the local grocery store and use a shopping card. Every single item you just bought is being tracked.
It wouldn't surprise me if they start doing the same with credit card purchases; getting access to everything you bought, instead of just the bottom line. MasterCard and Visa have to make more money than just the 19% they collect on people that don't pay their balance each month.
But how many individual things does each toon have that aren't soulbound? Most of the best items in the game get soulbound to the player. So, the chop-shop thought doesn't work. Unless you are talking about a guild bank type player.
Seriously, if you really wanted to, you can hit 60 in WoW in a few weeks without killing yourself.
This all comes down to the e-penis factor. People will pay that kind of cash to have the biggest e-penis there is. And for WoW players, that means having a completely tricked out toon or two, with all epic gear.
The problem is, there are so many people buying toons/stuff/gold that it becomes a vicious cycle. FFXI had that problem with its gil farmers running amok. Once it starts, it's a slippery slope, as regular players have to think about keeping up with the Jones'.
UO had an ok PvP system, but it was all or nothing, and it really discouraged new players.
I played UO for over a year. I got gang-raped while out "harvesting" rocks or wood by 10 or more PKs more times than you could shake a stick at. I'd have no equipment on me but my axe/pick, so there wasn't anything but what I had cut down to steal, but they still PK'ed me. Then stood around like 13yr-olds and taunted me that I wasn't a great player.
That, or the PK'ers that stood just inside the starter dungeon inside the town waiting for new players to wander in.
Yeah, that was a great system. Most of the PvP'ers that I saw in my year+ of UO ran around in large bands and looked for single or paired toons to kill. They had zero "skills", as you call it. It was a simple zerg-fest of PK attempts. Only those select few that went the Chaos/Law route usually tried to use skill. And that wasn't most of the folks on the server (Chessie) I played on.
Considering the fact that you could get a toon up to 100 ability in 6 different skills in 3 freakin' days by botting, skill played almost no part in UO.
As for casual gamers and WoW, I know quite a few that raid MC once a week, and hit the other 40-man locations. They also PvP some in battlegrounds and the like, or have alts on the PvP servers. The fact that WoW's Honor system sucks usually gets them to not play that style much, though.
That pretty much summed up the game for me, as well.
I tend to duo MMOs a great deal with the wife, and when she isn't available to play, I either solo or work with guildmates that I know in RL.
WoW was perfect for duoing, as a rogue and a druid made an impressive pair, that could pretty much do all but the dungeon content by themselves. We had a blast for the 7 months it took us to hit 60, playing it casual style. We had no problems with PvP, because we went PvE. There were a few instanes where we got PK'ed by folks hanging around a mob that you had to kill for a quest, and once you engaged, you were flagged as PvP. Horrible design that had a lot of peeps pissed off.
There is nothing wrong with PvP, or with those that wish to play that style. Zippo. But, for those that don't want to play it, there is nothing wrong with sticking to PvE.
Large raids are a pita to set up, especially for the casual gamer or the family type guild of close friends. Most folks don't have 40+ close friends that play a MMO.
Blizzard is working on their core players. Just like every other MMO attempts to do. (Except UO and its ill-fated attempt to lure back the non-PvP crowd.)
Actually, considering that most players that play MMOs tend to pick PvE servers as opposed to PvP servers when both are offered, that we can easily poke holes in your assumption that "MMO gamers want balanced skill-based pvp".
WoW has been successful because the casual gamer can play it easily. It isn't for the die-hard PvP'er.
Since Shadowbane has been a major flop as a primarily PvP game, I would hardly call it a great model. And V:SoH is going to be mostly PvE, with PvP servers offered in limited amounts.
Yes, WoW offered little but grind at lvl 60. So did EQ at lvl 50 initially, and at lvl 60, too. It wasn't until there were AAs and the ability to customize some gear with stats/resists that things got better.
And if gameplay in UO was so great, how come they were losing so much marketshare that they had to go to a model that allowed people to not be PK'ed? Sure, that killed the remaining population off, but they were losing the subscription battle to EQ already, and numbers were dropping.
So, in MY opinion, most MMO players don't want PvP at all, or limited PvP. Which is what WoW offered them. You might not like how it turned out, but a whole lot of others did, to the tune of the best subscription numbers for a North American MMO ever.
For now, they have been trustworthy. But sooner or later, we are going to find that the U.S. government wants those records bad enough, and the Supreme Court may decide they can have them. Now what?
Most of us want to keep the goverment out of our bedrooms. I'd like to see them kept out of my searches, too. Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot that is effective that we can do about it. Aren't Yahoo! searches actually done through google? I thought I read that somewhere, and I don't care enough to look it up again!
But, we get "shopper cards" from grocery companies and other places. What do you think they do with those? They track our purchases. Heck, every month or two, Kroger sends me coupons based on products I actually buy. I kinda like that, but in the meantime, they know what brand of soda I drink, what kind of diapers I put on my child, and what brand of condoms I buy (when I have to!)
We are in the information age, and pretty much nothing is sacred. Privacy is a thing of the past, HIPAA not withstanding. The only people that have ironclad privacy rights are HIV infected people. Ryan White's law gives them privacy the rest of us can only dream of.
Back when the graphics were cheesy 3D lines (Wizardry) and 2D pictures (Bard's Tale), the top down looks (Ultima), or the top down look of Might & Magic, the the companies couldn't rely on "wickedly cool graphics" or "scantily clad heroine" to make a game work. They had to rely on the story in the game to keep you coming back.
The original Wizardry made it feel like you were playing a bit of DnD on your computer, right down to the dungeon crawl. The story wasn't that great, but the gameplay was different from a lot of other games.
Ultima gave us a fantastic story, coupled with 2D first person (and later, 4 person group) graphics to give you a sense of size to the world. You felt like you were going somewhere as the story plot carried you along.
The Bard's Tale was just flat out brilliant. The graphics were cheesy, but the story was strong, and you felt yourself moving around the city advancing the story.
And Might & Magic truly had a lengthy story line, filled with interesting puzzles that kept you going for months.
All of these games went beyond graphics to make you feel immersed. They had original thoughts and ideas, and were successful because of it. Then, the sequels started, and many of them stunk. But the name recogniztion alone made sales happen, and the bottom line is always the almight dollar.
Nowadays, with as much time as people have to put into the graphics, for a one time shot type game with limited extra revenue potential, they skimp on the story, and try to wow you with graphics. Even some MMOs are falling into this model, and don't last long.
Nobody ships clean retail software nowadays. They ship it with various critical bugs still in the program, to help kill the clone-CD/DVD pirates.
What they are really shipping are demos. You purchase the CD/DVD, play for a few hours, and encounter a hideous bug that either makes gameplay really poor, or outright crashes the application. Then, you patch it, and voila, fixed!
Game manufacturers have been doing this for years, I am convinced. There is no way many of these games had NOBODY encounter some of the bugs that games get shipped with. Some of them have been so blatant it isn't even funny.
MicroSoft is just one in a long string of companies that are figuring this out. It is also one of the reasons that MMOs are so popular for developers. A long string of continual revenue from montly fees, and customers HAVE to buy the game to get the CD code.
I think the model of "giving away free stuff to predominately female toons" has died down quite a bit in MMOs.
First of all, it's no big secret that a lot of female toons are played by guys. And it's not just because the guys are looking for free loot. As a guy, I get tired of looking at a guy's butt on my screen all the time. For some games, it is just more fun to look at a chick's butt. Sorry! That, and the fact that almost all games have the male/female have the same stats, and it makes no difference. Add in the fact that the newer graphic models for female toons in most games come in super skimpy clothing (NE from Lineage II, anyone?) and that 75% of PCs are that female model, you know they are all guys.
Second, with the advent of the bazaar/auction house/broker, many of the items in games are no longer considered "give aways". You have a much easier way of generating much needed cash by selling items anon and offline than you do running around looking for some supposed chick to give an item away to.
Back in the early days of EQ, one female toon could outfit an entire guild by just batting her eyes at various male toons. Today, it just doesn't happen that much.
Now please excuse me. I have this hot looking chick's butt in spandex waiting for me to look at as I beat up bad guys in CoH/V! lol
The Republican party is in deep shit right now, and they are scrambling to pull out every single bell and whistle they can to survive the mid-term elections. It just goes right along with a bunch of other things they have done.
Not that the Democrats are all that and a bunch of candy.
We need a third political party that can gain a real foothold and make sense to the normal American. One that stops bowing the the radical right AND left.
Hey, if the Pirate Bay can spawn its own political party, why can't/. ?????
In the meantime, encourage people to go out and vote. Congress and the White House are enfused with the stink of stupidity. It's time to clean house(s).
Seriously, have you ever tried to use the self checkout in a Wal-Mart? There are several problems bound to happen.
#1, some fat housewife in a housedress just brought 2 grocery carts full of stuff to each self checkout before you got there.
#2, those that actually observe the "20 items or less" that most self checkouts have, can't dial a telephone, much less figure out how to use a self checkout.
#3, the store employees that are there to assist those people using the self checkouts are as dumb if not dumber than most of the customers trying to use it.
#4, there is always some problem with "you failed to place that item in a bag" that keeps cropping up when you buy items that don't weigh very much.
#5, produce and other items that don't come with barcodes throws customers for a loop.
Wal-Marts are by and away the worst for this. And it isn't just the retards that have trouble operating it, but they do seem to come out of the woodwork to use the self checkouts. Folks that look like they actually have a few operating brain cells tend to get flumoxed by them. (Can you tell I live in an area that has a lot of folks living under the poverty level????)
Self checkouts will never replace good cashiers that know how to scan items. I worked at a grocery store for 11 years, and the company I worked for had a goal of 100 scanned items per minute. It sounds hard as hell to beat, but the good cashiers could accomplish that easily if they had someone bagging for them, and many could do it even if they were bagging for themselves. It comes from repetition and the eventual autmoatic knowledge of where the barcode is on each product, and how to move it across the scanner to pick it up. They also know all the codes for produce by memory, so they don't have to look anything up.
As a customer, I'd rather have a good cashier ring me up than spend the time fighting with those stupid self checkouts. I'm so sick of a bag of potatoe chips and other light weight objects making me press extra buttons to say "ignore bagging" and the like.
Albertsons has been playing with a "scan the item(s) as you put them in your cart" method, and has hand-held scanners at the front of the store for customers to use. Where I live, nobody ever touches them.
I don't know about you, but I power-shop when it comes to groceries, and my wife loves to follow that model. I don't want to be spending an eternity waiting to check out. And that's what I see in the self checkout lines.
It is hardly endless. Plenty of players gets bored and quit all the time. Personally, I found the max level game to be about as entertaining as braiding my navel lint, but that's just me.
MMOs tend to have a long play cycle, it is true. I played EQ for 5 years, and finally made the max level of 65 (with only about 12 AA's) just before they raised the roof to 70, and quit before it did to play WoW.
I was out of WoW after hitting max level in about 8 months of not really trying all that hard. My wife and I duoed just about everything but instances. She had 5 alts, I had 7. And we were out of the game at 9 months, because the PvP/Honor system was (imo) crappy, and I really didn't feel like farming boss mobs for set pieces and rares.
I thoroughly enjoyed those 8 months it took to hit 60. That was probably the most satisfying playing time a MMO has ever provided me. However, I felt empty when I was 60. Some people love that grind for items game, but I hate grind of any kind, so the wife and I bailed.
It will be intersting to see how well WoW holds up over the years. It's taking forever to get the expansion out, and if they keep it to a rate of one expansion every 2 years, I expect them to implode under their own weight.
As a new first time father, I wholeheartedly agree. It's time for parents to start acting like parents.
I don't want the government telling me how to raise my child, any more than I want them telling me whether I can watch porn, drink alcohol, or do anything else that narrow-minded people like to consider "vices".
I plan on reading with my little girl, and playing games with her, and helping her enjoy life. I want to be as involved in her life as I can be without hampering her social development with her peers. And keep those peers with defective parents from overly influencing my child!
Parenting *is* a job AND an adventure. Having a child means a ton of responsibilities. Our government can't manage a budget (which most housewives can...) and isn't concerned with your rights. It is currently driven by special interest groups that want to control how you think, how you act, and who you are allowed to love/marry.
Do you really want them to be raising your child?
Besides which, just because you don't let your child buy/play some game, doesn't mean the parent 2 doors down didn't let their kid get it, and your child is over there playing it on their system.
Next up, Jack Thompson's Law that makes parents liable to the tune of $10,000/hr of a violent game that your child let some other kid play without that other kids parent's consent! (Oh, wait... Did I say that out loud? Shit, I just gave him a new law idea!)
For most people that are allergic to cats, there are some breeds that just don't give off as much allergens in their saliva.
Siberians are anecdotally referred to as hypoallergenic cats. There is a study being done by a university to test that out.
I know I have a Himalayan. Most people that have cat allergies suffer only mild symptons around my cat, where they suffer really badly when around other breeds.
But $4,000 for a pet? No thanks. It's cheaper to get allergy shots, or even more successful for some, accupuncture. I know my mother when from getting max dose allergy shots for 30 years to getting none, simply by having accupuncture.
What's the point of getting alts to lvl 60 in 5 days? Besides not sleeping and having zero social life, you haven't really enjoyed a single moment of the game.
I don't play MMOs to hit max level uber-fast. I play them to enjoy them. I liked the fact that it took me about 6 months to hit 60, because WoW was exceedingly boring for a lvl 60 toon. You had a choice of griding for crap drop rates of gear, or doing PvP for a honorless Honor System. Aren't you glad you got your toon to that point in 5 days????
Needless to say, the wife and I were out of the game 2 weeks after hitting 60, with sporadic attempts over the next 2 months of trying to find interest in playing an alt on the other faction. Didn't work, accounts cancelled, never looked back.
They did ask me if if I had an alarm system, but since I never activated it, no biggie. However, they WILL try to grab that connection if it is present in your house. I know the guy tried to on my house, but it wouldn't work.
I agree that linear is more fun than the non-linear or open ended games.
I loved NWN, and am eagerly looking forward to NWN2. I loved the origina Ultimas, I-III, and the original Wizardry. The original Bards Tale (and Bards Tale II) were simply fantastic stories. Even the original Might & Magic games were brilliant in scope.
FF7? Maybe one of the best console RPGs, but it can't compare to those early PC games.
And as far as bugs went, they didn't really have any. You couldn't really patch back in those days, where as with today's game, they use buggy code as a method of copy protection. Leave a horrible bug in, and the player can't play the game until they patch, which fixes the copy protection that came with the game. Pretty simple and effective. Makes pirating games into spending a lot of time to download a broken demo.
Yeah, when I want to play a solo game, I play Oblivion, or Half-Life 2, or some other game that is designed for that purpose. When I play a MMO, I expect to group.
I am not sure how this soloable content is going to work. Are they going to elimiate all traps and stat-required doors? I mean, traps make it so a rogue is a necessity for just about every dungeon, or you are eating some serious damage. There are lots of "stat of XX or greater is needed to unlock this area" locks. There are few if any healing options, and you can't simply "rest" wherever you want.
Dungeons & Dragons, the PnP version, is meant for more than one PC to do stuff. The whole concept is for a group of adventurers to handle some difficult task using teamwork and mixing the various class talents together.
DDO was set up to use a base 4 person group of a fighter type, a healer type, a thief, and one other, with 2 extra slots for kicks and giggles. Now you are adding solo content, and people aren't going to properly learn how to work with a team.
I've never understood playing a MMO to solo the game. Sure, I've solo played just about every MMO I've participated in, often because there are too many morons that plague you when you are stuck looking for a pickup group. The Battle.net type players come to mind as particularly annoying. All chest thumping and annoying.
But to have solo content beyond a certain level or area just doesn't work that well. You eventually will need help to conquer many places in the game, so why not start finding people that match your playing style, and work with them?
Besides, solo content isn't going to make DDO better. More content for players is what may help. We beta testers told them from the early stages that they didn't have enough content, and that repetition was killing the game. Now they are scrambling to fix that. Another 6 months to a year would have really given DDO a chance, especially since they would have time to add the druid and monk character types. As it stands, I bought the game after the beta and got my wife a copy, but neither of us have bothered to activate our accounts. Between having a baby and knowing the game as we did, we just didn't to start. And we were members of the nicest guild in DDO, "The Old Timer's Guild".
I just got Verizon's FIOS service earlier this year, after Charter cable was having so much down time it wasn't funny. Of course, Charter's downtime seemed to increase as Verizon started to dig in the area. Mostly DNS problems or so.
Now that I have FIOS, I really like it, and their FIOS TV prices seem to be better than Charter's digital cable offerings. However, I still see some DNS problems, so it feels like the backbone of the internet in this area (North Texas) is having some issues, since many of my neighbors experience the same thing.
But their 15/2 service is worth it. Now, if they would just pull the throttle off the VPN for work, I'd be a happy camper. Thing is as slow as a 56K modem at times.
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They did that at launch, but one of the Live Updates scrapped it, for several reasons.
The most prominent reason was that it was really a pain in the butt to create a mage class, play it to level 10 and then say "you know, I want to be a nuker" and select said subclass. Then, you work your way to level 20, and say "I think I'll be a warlock" only to find out you don't really like the warlock. Now you've just spent 20 levels to find out the basics of how your class will behave. It hurt.
There was a whole lot of characters being dumped and re-rolled. I barely held on to my warlock, but I really look back and knew I should have gone wizard, instead. The difference between the two? Warlocks deal more mob-group damage via group-AoE spells. Wizards do more damage against a single target, grouped or not.
Soloing, the warlock often had a harder time against powerful single mobs that the wizard would smoke. I was trying to solo to catch up to guildies, and once I hit 20, I suddenly had a character that couldn't do that. Boy, what a disappointment.
In reality, this isn't really what the article is talking about. They are talking more about the way UO did it. You could basically have like 675 points allocated to various skills, with 100 being the maximum. With about 40-50 skills (I don't remember how many) you could really have diverse characters. But you didn't. The best players had 6 skills at 100, with the other 75 points scattered. And most of the players had those 100 points in the same things, with the only variations often being weapon type.
In a way, many games try to hybrid the thing. AA points are one example from EQ and EQ2. Talent trees from WoW is another example. You have levels, but you also can add skills to it.
gamefaqs is pretty nice. What I like a whole lot better is Universal Hint System (UHS). They only have PC games on the list of supported games.
I like it because it allows you to pick how far along through the hint path you want to go. Sometimes it is just knowing WHERE to go, and not how to solve the puzzle, that I want. Other times, I don't feel like bending my head around some absurd game logic to solve it.
I've found it to be a great help. I have the Prima guide for Morrowind, but I got better answers from UHS at times.
Because there are hundreds of people that don't want to enjoy the trip. They want to have that lvl xx toon right now, so they can brag about what they have.
Why do you think people buy accounts on eBay?
Heck, folks call anyone that can't seen to play their class worth eBayers. We just assume they either bought the account, or their friends played the toon to top level.
You see them in every game. In other words...
Keep moving, people. Nothing to see here!
That was nothing short of scary.
The worst part was, he was happy trading for a while, and those that wanted to PK gimped the ability to get away, so he out-pirated the pirates.
While I agree with you 100% on the fact that parents will think twice about dropping $600+ on a PS3...
Look at how many 16yr olds get a brand spanking new car when they turn 16. Look how many of them get a Lexus or Acura.
Sure, it doesn't happen everywhere, but there are a lot of places where kids are growing up in smaller families and having parents willing to dump bigtime $$$ on their kids. And there are even more parents that would be willing to dump $600+ on a PS3, plus $50 or so on a game, as an electronic babysitter.
My dauther is 3.5 months old, and I have already had to stop turning on SportsCenter in the morning when I feed her before taking her to daycare. Because she keeps trying to look at the TV. I have seen other parents drop $100-200 a year on DVDs/Tapes for kids just to keep them occupied so they can cook dinner and the like, when kids videos became so popular years ago. Those same parents will probably drop the $$$ on a PS3.
It's sad, but true.
Yeah, the grocery companies have been doing this for years. Folks grab their tinfoil hats and run around screaming about privacy invasions, and then go to the local grocery store and use a shopping card. Every single item you just bought is being tracked.
It wouldn't surprise me if they start doing the same with credit card purchases; getting access to everything you bought, instead of just the bottom line. MasterCard and Visa have to make more money than just the 19% they collect on people that don't pay their balance each month.
But how many individual things does each toon have that aren't soulbound? Most of the best items in the game get soulbound to the player. So, the chop-shop thought doesn't work. Unless you are talking about a guild bank type player.
Seriously, if you really wanted to, you can hit 60 in WoW in a few weeks without killing yourself.
This all comes down to the e-penis factor. People will pay that kind of cash to have the biggest e-penis there is. And for WoW players, that means having a completely tricked out toon or two, with all epic gear.
The problem is, there are so many people buying toons/stuff/gold that it becomes a vicious cycle. FFXI had that problem with its gil farmers running amok. Once it starts, it's a slippery slope, as regular players have to think about keeping up with the Jones'.
UO had an ok PvP system, but it was all or nothing, and it really discouraged new players.
I played UO for over a year. I got gang-raped while out "harvesting" rocks or wood by 10 or more PKs more times than you could shake a stick at. I'd have no equipment on me but my axe/pick, so there wasn't anything but what I had cut down to steal, but they still PK'ed me. Then stood around like 13yr-olds and taunted me that I wasn't a great player.
That, or the PK'ers that stood just inside the starter dungeon inside the town waiting for new players to wander in.
Yeah, that was a great system. Most of the PvP'ers that I saw in my year+ of UO ran around in large bands and looked for single or paired toons to kill. They had zero "skills", as you call it. It was a simple zerg-fest of PK attempts. Only those select few that went the Chaos/Law route usually tried to use skill. And that wasn't most of the folks on the server (Chessie) I played on.
Considering the fact that you could get a toon up to 100 ability in 6 different skills in 3 freakin' days by botting, skill played almost no part in UO.
As for casual gamers and WoW, I know quite a few that raid MC once a week, and hit the other 40-man locations. They also PvP some in battlegrounds and the like, or have alts on the PvP servers. The fact that WoW's Honor system sucks usually gets them to not play that style much, though.
That pretty much summed up the game for me, as well.
I tend to duo MMOs a great deal with the wife, and when she isn't available to play, I either solo or work with guildmates that I know in RL.
WoW was perfect for duoing, as a rogue and a druid made an impressive pair, that could pretty much do all but the dungeon content by themselves. We had a blast for the 7 months it took us to hit 60, playing it casual style. We had no problems with PvP, because we went PvE. There were a few instanes where we got PK'ed by folks hanging around a mob that you had to kill for a quest, and once you engaged, you were flagged as PvP. Horrible design that had a lot of peeps pissed off.
There is nothing wrong with PvP, or with those that wish to play that style. Zippo. But, for those that don't want to play it, there is nothing wrong with sticking to PvE.
Large raids are a pita to set up, especially for the casual gamer or the family type guild of close friends. Most folks don't have 40+ close friends that play a MMO.
Blizzard is working on their core players. Just like every other MMO attempts to do. (Except UO and its ill-fated attempt to lure back the non-PvP crowd.)
Actually, considering that most players that play MMOs tend to pick PvE servers as opposed to PvP servers when both are offered, that we can easily poke holes in your assumption that "MMO gamers want balanced skill-based pvp".
WoW has been successful because the casual gamer can play it easily. It isn't for the die-hard PvP'er.
Since Shadowbane has been a major flop as a primarily PvP game, I would hardly call it a great model. And V:SoH is going to be mostly PvE, with PvP servers offered in limited amounts.
Yes, WoW offered little but grind at lvl 60. So did EQ at lvl 50 initially, and at lvl 60, too. It wasn't until there were AAs and the ability to customize some gear with stats/resists that things got better.
And if gameplay in UO was so great, how come they were losing so much marketshare that they had to go to a model that allowed people to not be PK'ed? Sure, that killed the remaining population off, but they were losing the subscription battle to EQ already, and numbers were dropping.
So, in MY opinion, most MMO players don't want PvP at all, or limited PvP. Which is what WoW offered them. You might not like how it turned out, but a whole lot of others did, to the tune of the best subscription numbers for a North American MMO ever.
For now, they have been trustworthy. But sooner or later, we are going to find that the U.S. government wants those records bad enough, and the Supreme Court may decide they can have them. Now what?
Most of us want to keep the goverment out of our bedrooms. I'd like to see them kept out of my searches, too. Unfortunately, there isn't a whole lot that is effective that we can do about it. Aren't Yahoo! searches actually done through google? I thought I read that somewhere, and I don't care enough to look it up again!
But, we get "shopper cards" from grocery companies and other places. What do you think they do with those? They track our purchases. Heck, every month or two, Kroger sends me coupons based on products I actually buy. I kinda like that, but in the meantime, they know what brand of soda I drink, what kind of diapers I put on my child, and what brand of condoms I buy (when I have to!)
We are in the information age, and pretty much nothing is sacred. Privacy is a thing of the past, HIPAA not withstanding. The only people that have ironclad privacy rights are HIV infected people. Ryan White's law gives them privacy the rest of us can only dream of.
Back when the graphics were cheesy 3D lines (Wizardry) and 2D pictures (Bard's Tale), the top down looks (Ultima), or the top down look of Might & Magic, the the companies couldn't rely on "wickedly cool graphics" or "scantily clad heroine" to make a game work. They had to rely on the story in the game to keep you coming back.
The original Wizardry made it feel like you were playing a bit of DnD on your computer, right down to the dungeon crawl. The story wasn't that great, but the gameplay was different from a lot of other games.
Ultima gave us a fantastic story, coupled with 2D first person (and later, 4 person group) graphics to give you a sense of size to the world. You felt like you were going somewhere as the story plot carried you along.
The Bard's Tale was just flat out brilliant. The graphics were cheesy, but the story was strong, and you felt yourself moving around the city advancing the story.
And Might & Magic truly had a lengthy story line, filled with interesting puzzles that kept you going for months.
All of these games went beyond graphics to make you feel immersed. They had original thoughts and ideas, and were successful because of it. Then, the sequels started, and many of them stunk. But the name recogniztion alone made sales happen, and the bottom line is always the almight dollar.
Nowadays, with as much time as people have to put into the graphics, for a one time shot type game with limited extra revenue potential, they skimp on the story, and try to wow you with graphics. Even some MMOs are falling into this model, and don't last long.
It's called "Software Anti-Piracy Protection".
Nobody ships clean retail software nowadays. They ship it with various critical bugs still in the program, to help kill the clone-CD/DVD pirates.
What they are really shipping are demos. You purchase the CD/DVD, play for a few hours, and encounter a hideous bug that either makes gameplay really poor, or outright crashes the application. Then, you patch it, and voila, fixed!
Game manufacturers have been doing this for years, I am convinced. There is no way many of these games had NOBODY encounter some of the bugs that games get shipped with. Some of them have been so blatant it isn't even funny.
MicroSoft is just one in a long string of companies that are figuring this out. It is also one of the reasons that MMOs are so popular for developers. A long string of continual revenue from montly fees, and customers HAVE to buy the game to get the CD code.
I think the model of "giving away free stuff to predominately female toons" has died down quite a bit in MMOs.
First of all, it's no big secret that a lot of female toons are played by guys. And it's not just because the guys are looking for free loot. As a guy, I get tired of looking at a guy's butt on my screen all the time. For some games, it is just more fun to look at a chick's butt. Sorry! That, and the fact that almost all games have the male/female have the same stats, and it makes no difference. Add in the fact that the newer graphic models for female toons in most games come in super skimpy clothing (NE from Lineage II, anyone?) and that 75% of PCs are that female model, you know they are all guys.
Second, with the advent of the bazaar/auction house/broker, many of the items in games are no longer considered "give aways". You have a much easier way of generating much needed cash by selling items anon and offline than you do running around looking for some supposed chick to give an item away to.
Back in the early days of EQ, one female toon could outfit an entire guild by just batting her eyes at various male toons. Today, it just doesn't happen that much.
Now please excuse me. I have this hot looking chick's butt in spandex waiting for me to look at as I beat up bad guys in CoH/V! lol
Well, what did you expect?
/. ?????
The Republican party is in deep shit right now, and they are scrambling to pull out every single bell and whistle they can to survive the mid-term elections. It just goes right along with a bunch of other things they have done.
Not that the Democrats are all that and a bunch of candy.
We need a third political party that can gain a real foothold and make sense to the normal American. One that stops bowing the the radical right AND left.
Hey, if the Pirate Bay can spawn its own political party, why can't
In the meantime, encourage people to go out and vote. Congress and the White House are enfused with the stink of stupidity. It's time to clean house(s).
Seriously, have you ever tried to use the self checkout in a Wal-Mart? There are several problems bound to happen.
#1, some fat housewife in a housedress just brought 2 grocery carts full of stuff to each self checkout before you got there.
#2, those that actually observe the "20 items or less" that most self checkouts have, can't dial a telephone, much less figure out how to use a self checkout.
#3, the store employees that are there to assist those people using the self checkouts are as dumb if not dumber than most of the customers trying to use it.
#4, there is always some problem with "you failed to place that item in a bag" that keeps cropping up when you buy items that don't weigh very much.
#5, produce and other items that don't come with barcodes throws customers for a loop.
Wal-Marts are by and away the worst for this. And it isn't just the retards that have trouble operating it, but they do seem to come out of the woodwork to use the self checkouts. Folks that look like they actually have a few operating brain cells tend to get flumoxed by them. (Can you tell I live in an area that has a lot of folks living under the poverty level????)
Self checkouts will never replace good cashiers that know how to scan items. I worked at a grocery store for 11 years, and the company I worked for had a goal of 100 scanned items per minute. It sounds hard as hell to beat, but the good cashiers could accomplish that easily if they had someone bagging for them, and many could do it even if they were bagging for themselves. It comes from repetition and the eventual autmoatic knowledge of where the barcode is on each product, and how to move it across the scanner to pick it up. They also know all the codes for produce by memory, so they don't have to look anything up.
As a customer, I'd rather have a good cashier ring me up than spend the time fighting with those stupid self checkouts. I'm so sick of a bag of potatoe chips and other light weight objects making me press extra buttons to say "ignore bagging" and the like.
Albertsons has been playing with a "scan the item(s) as you put them in your cart" method, and has hand-held scanners at the front of the store for customers to use. Where I live, nobody ever touches them.
I don't know about you, but I power-shop when it comes to groceries, and my wife loves to follow that model. I don't want to be spending an eternity waiting to check out. And that's what I see in the self checkout lines.
It is hardly endless. Plenty of players gets bored and quit all the time. Personally, I found the max level game to be about as entertaining as braiding my navel lint, but that's just me.
MMOs tend to have a long play cycle, it is true. I played EQ for 5 years, and finally made the max level of 65 (with only about 12 AA's) just before they raised the roof to 70, and quit before it did to play WoW.
I was out of WoW after hitting max level in about 8 months of not really trying all that hard. My wife and I duoed just about everything but instances. She had 5 alts, I had 7. And we were out of the game at 9 months, because the PvP/Honor system was (imo) crappy, and I really didn't feel like farming boss mobs for set pieces and rares.
I thoroughly enjoyed those 8 months it took to hit 60. That was probably the most satisfying playing time a MMO has ever provided me. However, I felt empty when I was 60. Some people love that grind for items game, but I hate grind of any kind, so the wife and I bailed.
It will be intersting to see how well WoW holds up over the years. It's taking forever to get the expansion out, and if they keep it to a rate of one expansion every 2 years, I expect them to implode under their own weight.
As a new first time father, I wholeheartedly agree. It's time for parents to start acting like parents.
I don't want the government telling me how to raise my child, any more than I want them telling me whether I can watch porn, drink alcohol, or do anything else that narrow-minded people like to consider "vices".
I plan on reading with my little girl, and playing games with her, and helping her enjoy life. I want to be as involved in her life as I can be without hampering her social development with her peers. And keep those peers with defective parents from overly influencing my child!
Parenting *is* a job AND an adventure. Having a child means a ton of responsibilities. Our government can't manage a budget (which most housewives can...) and isn't concerned with your rights. It is currently driven by special interest groups that want to control how you think, how you act, and who you are allowed to love/marry.
Do you really want them to be raising your child?
Besides which, just because you don't let your child buy/play some game, doesn't mean the parent 2 doors down didn't let their kid get it, and your child is over there playing it on their system.
Next up, Jack Thompson's Law that makes parents liable to the tune of $10,000/hr of a violent game that your child let some other kid play without that other kids parent's consent! (Oh, wait... Did I say that out loud? Shit, I just gave him a new law idea!)
I gotta wonder if the person who submitted this article worked as a translator for Zero Wing...
"All your base are belong to us."
"India has grown at a much rapid rate."
Yeah, seems like the same guy...
For most people that are allergic to cats, there are some breeds that just don't give off as much allergens in their saliva.
Siberians are anecdotally referred to as hypoallergenic cats. There is a study being done by a university to test that out.
I know I have a Himalayan. Most people that have cat allergies suffer only mild symptons around my cat, where they suffer really badly when around other breeds.
But $4,000 for a pet? No thanks. It's cheaper to get allergy shots, or even more successful for some, accupuncture. I know my mother when from getting max dose allergy shots for 30 years to getting none, simply by having accupuncture.
What's the point of getting alts to lvl 60 in 5 days? Besides not sleeping and having zero social life, you haven't really enjoyed a single moment of the game.
I don't play MMOs to hit max level uber-fast. I play them to enjoy them. I liked the fact that it took me about 6 months to hit 60, because WoW was exceedingly boring for a lvl 60 toon. You had a choice of griding for crap drop rates of gear, or doing PvP for a honorless Honor System. Aren't you glad you got your toon to that point in 5 days????
Needless to say, the wife and I were out of the game 2 weeks after hitting 60, with sporadic attempts over the next 2 months of trying to find interest in playing an alt on the other faction. Didn't work, accounts cancelled, never looked back.
They did ask me if if I had an alarm system, but since I never activated it, no biggie. However, they WILL try to grab that connection if it is present in your house. I know the guy tried to on my house, but it wouldn't work.
I agree that linear is more fun than the non-linear or open ended games.
I loved NWN, and am eagerly looking forward to NWN2. I loved the origina Ultimas, I-III, and the original Wizardry. The original Bards Tale (and Bards Tale II) were simply fantastic stories. Even the original Might & Magic games were brilliant in scope.
FF7? Maybe one of the best console RPGs, but it can't compare to those early PC games.
And as far as bugs went, they didn't really have any. You couldn't really patch back in those days, where as with today's game, they use buggy code as a method of copy protection. Leave a horrible bug in, and the player can't play the game until they patch, which fixes the copy protection that came with the game. Pretty simple and effective. Makes pirating games into spending a lot of time to download a broken demo.
Yeah, when I want to play a solo game, I play Oblivion, or Half-Life 2, or some other game that is designed for that purpose. When I play a MMO, I expect to group.
I am not sure how this soloable content is going to work. Are they going to elimiate all traps and stat-required doors? I mean, traps make it so a rogue is a necessity for just about every dungeon, or you are eating some serious damage. There are lots of "stat of XX or greater is needed to unlock this area" locks. There are few if any healing options, and you can't simply "rest" wherever you want.
Dungeons & Dragons, the PnP version, is meant for more than one PC to do stuff. The whole concept is for a group of adventurers to handle some difficult task using teamwork and mixing the various class talents together.
DDO was set up to use a base 4 person group of a fighter type, a healer type, a thief, and one other, with 2 extra slots for kicks and giggles. Now you are adding solo content, and people aren't going to properly learn how to work with a team.
I've never understood playing a MMO to solo the game. Sure, I've solo played just about every MMO I've participated in, often because there are too many morons that plague you when you are stuck looking for a pickup group. The Battle.net type players come to mind as particularly annoying. All chest thumping and annoying.
But to have solo content beyond a certain level or area just doesn't work that well. You eventually will need help to conquer many places in the game, so why not start finding people that match your playing style, and work with them?
Besides, solo content isn't going to make DDO better. More content for players is what may help. We beta testers told them from the early stages that they didn't have enough content, and that repetition was killing the game. Now they are scrambling to fix that. Another 6 months to a year would have really given DDO a chance, especially since they would have time to add the druid and monk character types. As it stands, I bought the game after the beta and got my wife a copy, but neither of us have bothered to activate our accounts. Between having a baby and knowing the game as we did, we just didn't to start. And we were members of the nicest guild in DDO, "The Old Timer's Guild".
Yes, that 30/15 is horrifically expensive.
I just got Verizon's FIOS service earlier this year, after Charter cable was having so much down time it wasn't funny. Of course, Charter's downtime seemed to increase as Verizon started to dig in the area. Mostly DNS problems or so.
Now that I have FIOS, I really like it, and their FIOS TV prices seem to be better than Charter's digital cable offerings. However, I still see some DNS problems, so it feels like the backbone of the internet in this area (North Texas) is having some issues, since many of my neighbors experience the same thing.
But their 15/2 service is worth it. Now, if they would just pull the throttle off the VPN for work, I'd be a happy camper. Thing is as slow as a 56K modem at times.