But the game developers aren't going to say "Well, you can now pay $300 to buy a copy of Windows to run on your Mac, so were going to stop making Mac games."
Actually, that's exactly what they'll do. They won't put it that way, but I can't imagine any major studios bothering to go through the trouble of porting games to the MacOS platform.
I'm already in this boycott. I like, for instance, GTR and GTL (racing sims) but I won't touch them due to the Starforce issue (the GTR demo slowed and eventually disabled a CD/RW for me).
So, it's rFactor and not GTR for me. I'm sure ISI doesn't mind the business.
"Add Universal to the list of studios that won't downsample content for owners of non-HDMI HD sets. The company follows Sony and several others in announcing its decision not to use the Image Constraint Token to force owners of older HD sets to watch their films at 540p instead of the discs' native resolution."
The rest of the article is opinion, so I've elected not to quote it.
The odd thing is that MMOG players are so successfully conditioned to the press-button, get-reward, repeat mentality that they execute it frenetically even when the game design specifically provides for varied challenges!
Take WoW for example. Yes, people 'farm' rep and 'farm' that but the whole design is set up so that you can enjoy yourself doing different and new things all the time. Nonetheless, vast numbers of people 'grind' instead of play.
Or, consider DDO, since this article is about DDO. The game is set up to mark an adventure completed when you finish it, so that players experience everything that's been created for them in a variety of adventures.
What do I read on the DDO boards? A vast number of players are doing one mission ("Water Works") over and over and over. Why? Is it fun, challenging? No. These players have mastered it, it's just a matter of rote. They do it because it's very efficient, they can repeat it over and over again and get their XP reward.
To what end? DDO is specifically set up *not* to give you the "you're at the top, now you're ready for the 'real' game (of PvP or raiding or just lording it over others)" as in most MMOGs. You get to the top and there's nothing there, by design.
It's perfectly possible to have a good challenging experience in DDO, or WoW, or any of the other MMOGs, but you have to get away from the well-conditioned rats first.
My kid's starting to play a 3.5e D&D session through IRC. That should pretty much weed out the graphical nonsense you don't care for and preserve as much of the PnP experience as possible (without actually having to get everyone in the same room).
This review makes the repeated assumption that "casual" players are those who want to play alone, and that the alternative to this is "hardcore" players who grind content and look for the end-game.
The assumption colors the review, particularly the conclusion, where the reader is urged to ignore DDO because 'hardcore' people will be bored and 'casual' people will be stuck.
I think this assumption is a huge mistake. Time-in-game and group-willingness are separate axes, not polar opposites on a single scale.
There are people with lots of time, but who prefer to solo in MMOs. IMO these will be unhappy in DDO; they can't solo, and after grinding fast in groups they don't like they'll be bored.
There are people with lots of time who prefer to group. They may or may not be happy. Some who are accustomed to the 'grind' strategy will be bored; after zooming to the end they will find nothing. Others may decide to try every possible adventure; they may not be bored. As the review noted, Turbine appears to be offering new content at a refreshing pace.
People who have little time and prefer to solo will be particularly frustrated. Although not every adventure requires a huge time committment, DDO does require grouping, and nobody can guarantee an instant party.
People with little to moderate time who prefer to group will be very very happy with DDO if they like its style. They won't feel shafted as in games where the top-end is the 'real' game and those who don't grind are left behind, and they'll be assured that their fellow players know how to work as a team, because nobody will have gotten to level X by soloing.
Why do/. mods even bother to post anything SOE related? Regardless of content, all that happens is that the flamethrowers come out. Oh they ruined SWG! Oh SOE is collapsing! This from people who, presumably, don't *play* SOE games any more, so how do they know that SWG or EQ has a dwindling population? Oh, rumors on the net and speculation. That's productive.
As I posted (pointlessly, to a thread from last Wednesday, where nobody will ever see it) this is the same forum where another game which makes you sit for half an hour or longer before you can start playing has people bending themselves into logical pretzels to defend this 'feature'. If SOE put a queue on any of its games it would have been flamed here and people would be screaming about class-action lawsuits because they were deprived of their game time.
Now, nobody should imagine that SOE is a paragon of virtue in MMOGing, but it takes a terminal case of bias to flame a company for asking its customers what they want (and paying them ~$80/hour for the experience).
Heh, I see/. hasn't changed much. Just mention "SOE" and the flamethrowers turn on. Of course, this is the same userbase that bent over backwards convincing itself that waiting 30 minutes to start playing a competing game is a feature. If the queue were found in an SOE game the complaining thread here would top the 1000 post mark.
Not saying SOE is pure as driven snow, but hey, try and see past your bias, guys.
Check six, wolf! Breaking left. You're clear. He's on you now! Dragging two seven zero. I'm in... drag right a bit, I can't close. Copy..... WTG! Whew, good thing he didn't have a wingman... @#$%^@! I'm hit.
Gray Ninja: the article's talking about serious sim racing, not smash-em-up games.
The question isn't one of classes, but one of roles. Roles are things like: - healing damage - preventing damage to others - preventing damage to self - doing damage (melee, magical, single or multi-target) - enhancing others' abilities to do something - overcoming obstacles (utility) (and more)
The problem with early MMOGs is that they assigned classes directly tied to the most important roles, so that *one* class fulfilled each primary role. Thus, other classes were secondary.
The archetype system amends this somewhat by allowing multiple classes to fulfil a primary role; but it runs the danger (which can be overcome through smart design) of making the multiple classes mere clones of each other.
IMO the best way to approach classes, assuming one wishes a class-based system, is to make sure not that *several* classes can assume primary roles, but that *no* class can fully assume a primary role by themselves.
In short, no 'tank' class, but some classes will be able to avoid damage better than others. Some classes will have healing... but no one class can be 'the healer' by themselves. Everyone's a 'hybrid.'
This could be a tricky balancing act for designers trying to ensure that no one class ends up with the 'uber' or 'gimped' combination of roles, but it does avoid the issue of cookie-cutter classes.
There is no one right answer, whether it's class-based or open; it all depends on how thoroughly designed the whole system is. As long as players have interesting roles and can fulfill them, the system will work.
Woody of gucomics.com has some bright things to say about the EQ1 expansion, namely that once again the whole nature of the game is being changed. (EQ1 will now feature "Spheres of Influence" within which game rules will change).
As such, as with some recent EQ1 expansions, this isn't really an optional expansion but required if one wishes to participate with others.
I don't mind when MMOGs expand, but theoretically an expansion is something you ought to want when you've finished up with what you've already bought, not a required purchase in addition to the monthly subscription.
The EQ2 expansion, on the other hand, is much more along those lines. New places and features, but anyone who's still happily plugging along in the original content won't be FUBAR.
This certainly has provoked some opinions; charges of racism and 'counter-racism' abound, and some posters bringing George Bush into the discussion (what, did Rove send mind-control rays into the Blizzard designers' heads?) or blaming all of Western civilization.
'Farming' is a scourge to people who want to play the game. The majority of people farming happen to be overseas because the profit/time ratio for farming is not viable in the U.S., unless you're managing a whole operation.
If, for instance, I were an unemployed 15-year-old American (I'm not), I'd make much better money flipping burgers than farming gold, and there are labor laws. On the other hand in China the average manufacturing wage was $0.57/hr in 2002 (largely due to fixed currency pegs) and it might be a step up to spend 12 hours a day in a chair farming gold rather than 15 hours a day standing up in a factory.
The second layer is of course those who purchase the gold for real money. I happen to earn a decent wage and in terms of time/progress it would certainly be more efficient to work an hour of overtime and buy in-game stuff rather than to spend that hour actually in the game playing to earn it. Who cares? The point of the game IS the hour I spend playing it, not whether I end up with 10k gold. That's why it's a game. Nonetheless, people pay because the game prices are inflated, and items are inflated because they're being farmed.
That brings up the third layer, which is the game design. MMOGs are designed to control the rate of influx of resources, whether it's XP or gold or items. Why? Because if everything is trivially obtained, players reach 'the end' quickly and become bored, and unsubscribe. So, something that allows players to obtain the Magic Whatsit only appears every so many hours.
This passes for challenge, because honestly the game mechanics of MMOGs are not terribly complex. They *can't* be since they're server-bound, and they're server-bound since you cannot trust the client; people can and will hack their FEs if it'll help them. Furthermore even the most puzzling content is published to the Web moments after being first solved.
OK, so the challenge is not skill-based but time-based; be there at the right time and get the prize, or play long enough and earn the game money to trade for the prize. Playing the game as a game is far less efficient than botting or ruthlessly farming. And THAT is why farmers exist.
Game companies do what they can to find and delete botting accounts but with the size of the 'secondary market' reaching $1B annually banning a few thousand accounts is like stopping a truck full of pot coming across the border; looks good on the news but the cartel hardly registers a blip.
When a MMOG is designed where it's too hard or complex to simply farm, or where it's more productive to play "as intended" instead of farming, then farming will stop. Of course, complex games like that don't sell as well.
Well, some people really like the mass raid experience in MMOGs. There's certainly camaradarie, teamwork, and a sense of accomplishment when things go right.
Some people are just as easily repulsed by the need to collect 20-40 or more people, coordinate timing, commit to being online daily for extended periods of time, and manage clique politics just to progress past a certain point.
For my part, it strikes me as odd that several games (certainly not just WoW) have this transition where up to a certain point one can play solo or with a small group, but afterwards the game requires a large organized force.
Well, it's hard to do any research when Sony locks and removes every thread criticizing their consolification/total conversion of the game, now isn't it?
They seem to be done with posts whose content consists of flamebait inserted into every thread that has anything to do with SWG. Imagine that.
The game system has been vastly dumbed down (a multi-path skill-based system ejoyed by quite a few, replaced with distinct classes with levels
As I wrote in a previous article, it's nearly impossible to balance 37 classes with multiple paths. While this variance of choices seems complex, it's actually quite limiting, because only a few choices are taken once everyone min/maxxes.
Like chess; there are 20 opening moves for White, but who uses the other 15?
the interface reworked into some third-person shooter - again well-suited for a conversion to console
This non-rumor keeps being stirred up, despite having been vehemently denied. I can always tell the most angry posters because they throw this gem out there.
Oh, and making Jedi available from the start, thus nullifying the "hard work" of players who had endured the grinds previously needed to unlock Jedi powers? Brilliant.
Yea, brilliant! My apologies for the players who thought that a game was supposed to be hard work, but nobody (myself included) was attracted to SWG knowing there were Jedi characters, and they were better than other characters, but if your heart was set on Jedi you had to spend months (if you 'ground' consistently instead of enjoying the game) playing some other character so that you could start doing what you really wanted. That's nuts.
I for one am dam tired of games that require so much committment of time just to stay up with the level grind that they make work look like fun.
What I find good about the NGE is almost exactly what ticks you off, likely. I can start a new character as a newbie Jedi instead of playing classes I don't want. The classes have some relation to SW instead of being obscure creations I've rarely or never seen on film (Fencer? Who had a sword in a SW movie? Creature Handler? I want to be the orc creature tamer from RotJ?) The gameplay is fast, not same-as-every-other-mmog. Basically instead of being a badly balanced horrible xp-grind exercise in boredom and macro creation that's otherwise like a poor knockoff of 1st-generation fantasy MMOGs, it's fun.
Pity about the disabled guy though. Maybe someone can get him a programmable keyboard like the ones from Saitek and Logitech so a single keypress could suffice.
"If the global market operated consistently with appropriate price controls"
I assume, given your other comments, that you mean "with appropriate free-market pricing."
My point is merely that even if a company erroneously misprices something, the market as a whole is free and robust enough to absorb the ripple; and even if companies are always making such ripples by misjudging demand, it all works out as long as the mis-pricing comes from internal sources (MS's choice) and not from external sources (a government trying to tell MS what it may or may not charge).
Only in a system stagnated with forced mis-pricings, or in the case of a price ripple large enough to disrupt the whole economy, do deleterious effects arise.
And again, an Xbox, unlike an egg, is not a one-time revenue stream. You sell an egg, you've made all the money you're going to make from the egg. You sell an Xbox, and you've got a potential revenue stream from games and Xbox Live subscriptions that continues for years. Those residuals aren't considered in the article, but they are a part of MS's decisions.
Your logic is OK, but the numbers are off for your theory to fly.
That might be true if a) there wasn't a secondary market in the form of EBay to restore market pricing; and b) if the financial impact of the underpricing was significant enough to have a ripple effect.
The U.S. has an $11,750,000,000,000 economy. At a theoretical underprice of $400 each (probably less, I'm sure the demand for the bare-bones 360s is lower than for the full kit), 500k Xbox360s free $200M into the economy, which is the financial equivalent of trying to cause a tsunami in Tokyo by tossing small rocks off the Golden Gate Bridge.
It's absolutely true that if you want a shortage of something, price it below its market worth.
Doesn't matter if it's gas (Carter), grain (18th c. France), or Xboxes, if the market thinks X and the price is set at X-something, there will be a shortage.
OK, so there's a shortage. So what? Xboxes are not energy or food. There's no particular harm done, other than to MS's immediate profit, by underpricing the 360.
Maybe MS has decided that the revenue from higher-priced XBoxes is more than offset by the cost in bad publicity when the market price drops by half by spring. Maybe they realize the value of being the hot item instead of Cabbage Patch dolls this year.
There are other forces at work besides the next quarter's earning report. A console system isn't a one-time revenue stream like a loaf of bread or a gallon of gas. The Slate writer is right in his assessment, but also short-sighted.
One of the great things about PnP RPGing is that it is truly a sandbox. The DM/GM of course prepares much but the players might up and decide that they are going to go into castlebuilding instead of delving another dungeon, and because the group are friends and are cooperatively playing (even when their characters are adversaries), it all works out.
In an ideal world this concept just carries over to online play and scales indefinitely, and hundreds of thousands of players all get along even if one is a Sith and the other a rebel leader. Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world.
EQ et al. have their roots in MUDding. I wasn't involved with that; while MUDs were on the rise I was engaged in online air combat; but the experiences are similar.
While the bond of physical proximity was cut in these early games, the community was still small, which meant it was self-policing. If your online game regularly has 100 people on, you get to know those guys quite well. If Lord Doofus shows up and disrupts the game, everyone else does something about it; and if Doofus disappears but re-emerges as Dink, nobody is fooled. So it was still safe to have a sandbox. In air combat games occasionally a bug would crop up which could be exploited; but since the community was small it was agreed not to use 'cheap' tactics and any player who did was generally hounded until they stopped.
When the idea was scaled up to the MMOG level, with many thousands playing at once, both the safeguards of proximity and community were lost, replaced by anonymity and indifference. When that happened the thinking "because I should" is lost on many and in its place "because I can" comes in.
Now it becomes problematic to be open-ended, because for every player who wants to do something unique in a good way, there are several whose thoughts revolve around finding ways to abuse the game system. Here's an Uncle Owen, who wants to be a moisture farmer, but right behind him is Uncle Pwn, who is busy pharming instead and selling money on the 'secondary market.' Now the good player is ruined, because the market is pooched.
Likewise SWG may have had 37(?) classes but really if you wanted to win you found a min/max combination, of which I'm quite certain there were far fewer than 37. Same thing happened in EQ; there are 10 expansions and I-don't-know-how-many zones but in practice all new characters go to zone A then B then C then D and 40 other alternative places to adventure sit empty. Similarly, in DAOC, theoretically you have the choice to specialize in several different areas but forget that, you'd better be specced exactly the same as everyone else or you're done for when you reach the top levels.
What looks like open-ended, when subjected to exploiters and abusers and not tamed by community, becomes only an exercise in min/max and is in fact far more restrictive than an apparently closed-ended class system.
In short, any game system open-ended enough to allow free-form roleplay is also open-ended enough to abuse, because the number of permutations becomes too high to test. Further, any game large enough to qualify as a MMOG doesn't have a self-policing nature.
That was one of SWG's design problems, and the only way out was to tear up the old system or make a SWG2. I don't know why they didn't make a SWG2 and let the people who liked the game as is remain. Maybe they looked at the EQ2 vs. EQ1 numbers and decided it was a poor investment. Maybe Lucas leaned on them and said that there will be only one Star Wars MMOG, not two. Who knows?
What I do know is that I had no interest in joining the old SWG, either in its original incarnation or in the 'CU' phase, because of this.
A few comments over the last couple days have been to the effect that few people own HDTVs.
While that's true now, the things are at the commodity level ($299 for cheapo 27" HDTV) and I can't see why anyone wanting a new TV would buy SDTV any more.
So, by the end of '06 people are going to be eager to get some sort of player that plays their DVDs and some sort of HD DVD. The guys at avsforum.com can argue ad nauseam about the technical merits of blue versus red ray but the consumer doesn't give a rat's 6, as long as it plays.
Now: The 360 is still not going to adopt a HD player in its box. I think MS wants to sell everyone "Media Player" PCs for that purpose, which can be equipped with blue or red players at will. This is an OK business decision for them. They can sell XBox 360 now and not be accused later of screwing their initial customers. MS was on the HD-DVD train but they weren't going to lose the 2005 buying season for it.
Sony wants to win the VHS/Beta wars this time around; a victory on this front is much bigger cash than some share of the game console market. So, for them, a PS3 which leverages the existing PS2 owners (backwards compatible) and gets people into Blu-Ray is a good business decision. So, they want to sell a gameplayer that is also a media box.
Even though Sony and MS are competitors in the console arena, both of them have larger agendas which are best served by their different decisions here.
What's happening now is, IMO, a convergence of the original bad design and the community.
The original SWG design was innovative, experimental, and horribly mangled. As a previous poster noted, once you'd figured out the action system, you could stand amongst a crowd of Rancors and laugh. This may be amusing if you like god-mode but it makes developing challenging encounters impossible.
So, as another poster noted, MOBs with complete invulnerability except for one weakness were released; this is also horribly broken.
Then, add the Jedi system, which involved horrific mind-numbing grinding BUT still resulted in a massive surplus of Jedi (particularly for galactic civil war era). More horrible brokenness.
Now kick over the system once (CE) and what sort of playerbase do you have left? You have the sort of players who are fanatically attached to their characters, particularly to their several accounts worth of characters since SWG had the rare (for a reason) feature of only allowing one character per server (plus jedi slot for those who did the grind). People who have 'invested' uncounted hours in their personas.
Now during the original era, and during the CU era, does anyone honestly remember anyone recommending SWG? Not I. There were people logging into MxO (!) who proclaimed themselves refugees from SWG. On any gaming board and particularly on the official board you could hear people complaining daily and bitterly about how broken SWG was.
Now what are you, if you're the designer, going to do with this? Let it be, to slowly dwindle to unprofitability? Maybe. You could milk it until it's dry. But maybe Lucas doesn't care for that. He's just released a SW film that actually stirred interest instead of disgust from the SW fans. So, you take the other option: fix it.
Unfortunately fixing it means completely kicking over the applecart on the existing players, but since they complain daily and bitterly about how broken things are you'd suspect they'd go for the change.
Nope. The one thing gamers can't stand is change. Whether bad or good, and I've seen both in many MMOGs, *any* change is only guaranteed to produce one thing from the playerbase: howling outrage.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that's exactly what they'll do. They won't put it that way, but I can't imagine any major studios bothering to go through the trouble of porting games to the MacOS platform.
Apparently you don't own a scanner. If you own the book, and a scanner, transferring it for your own use to an alternate media is fair use.
I'm already in this boycott. I like, for instance, GTR and GTL (racing sims) but I won't touch them due to the Starforce issue (the GTR demo slowed and eventually disabled a CD/RW for me).
So, it's rFactor and not GTR for me. I'm sure ISI doesn't mind the business.
including Sony.
o nt-downsample-hd-dvd-content/
http://robots.engadget.com/2006/03/27/universal-w
"Add Universal to the list of studios that won't downsample content for owners of non-HDMI HD sets. The company follows Sony and several others in announcing its decision not to use the Image Constraint Token to force owners of older HD sets to watch their films at 540p instead of the discs' native resolution."
The rest of the article is opinion, so I've elected not to quote it.
The odd thing is that MMOG players are so successfully conditioned to the press-button, get-reward, repeat mentality that they execute it frenetically even when the game design specifically provides for varied challenges!
Take WoW for example. Yes, people 'farm' rep and 'farm' that but the whole design is set up so that you can enjoy yourself doing different and new things all the time. Nonetheless, vast numbers of people 'grind' instead of play.
Or, consider DDO, since this article is about DDO. The game is set up to mark an adventure completed when you finish it, so that players experience everything that's been created for them in a variety of adventures.
What do I read on the DDO boards? A vast number of players are doing one mission ("Water Works") over and over and over. Why? Is it fun, challenging? No. These players have mastered it, it's just a matter of rote. They do it because it's very efficient, they can repeat it over and over again and get their XP reward.
To what end? DDO is specifically set up *not* to give you the "you're at the top, now you're ready for the 'real' game (of PvP or raiding or just lording it over others)" as in most MMOGs. You get to the top and there's nothing there, by design.
Doesn't matter. click click click, grind grind grind.
It's perfectly possible to have a good challenging experience in DDO, or WoW, or any of the other MMOGs, but you have to get away from the well-conditioned rats first.
My kid's starting to play a 3.5e D&D session through IRC. That should pretty much weed out the graphical nonsense you don't care for and preserve as much of the PnP experience as possible (without actually having to get everyone in the same room).
This review makes the repeated assumption that "casual" players are those who want to play alone, and that the alternative to this is "hardcore" players who grind content and look for the end-game.
The assumption colors the review, particularly the conclusion, where the reader is urged to ignore DDO because 'hardcore' people will be bored and 'casual' people will be stuck.
I think this assumption is a huge mistake. Time-in-game and group-willingness are separate axes, not polar opposites on a single scale.
There are people with lots of time, but who prefer to solo in MMOs. IMO these will be unhappy in DDO; they can't solo, and after grinding fast in groups they don't like they'll be bored.
There are people with lots of time who prefer to group. They may or may not be happy. Some who are accustomed to the 'grind' strategy will be bored; after zooming to the end they will find nothing. Others may decide to try every possible adventure; they may not be bored. As the review noted, Turbine appears to be offering new content at a refreshing pace.
People who have little time and prefer to solo will be particularly frustrated. Although not every adventure requires a huge time committment, DDO does require grouping, and nobody can guarantee an instant party.
People with little to moderate time who prefer to group will be very very happy with DDO if they like its style. They won't feel shafted as in games where the top-end is the 'real' game and those who don't grind are left behind, and they'll be assured that their fellow players know how to work as a team, because nobody will have gotten to level X by soloing.
Oh FFS, is it even vaguely possible *one* thread with "MMOG" title could exist without the SWG dweeb gracing us with their rants?
If you have something new to say, fine. The same thing that's already been posted 10^6 times here is already well-known.
Why do /. mods even bother to post anything SOE related? Regardless of content, all that happens is that the flamethrowers come out. Oh they ruined SWG! Oh SOE is collapsing! This from people who, presumably, don't *play* SOE games any more, so how do they know that SWG or EQ has a dwindling population? Oh, rumors on the net and speculation. That's productive.
As I posted (pointlessly, to a thread from last Wednesday, where nobody will ever see it) this is the same forum where another game which makes you sit for half an hour or longer before you can start playing has people bending themselves into logical pretzels to defend this 'feature'. If SOE put a queue on any of its games it would have been flamed here and people would be screaming about class-action lawsuits because they were deprived of their game time.
Now, nobody should imagine that SOE is a paragon of virtue in MMOGing, but it takes a terminal case of bias to flame a company for asking its customers what they want (and paying them ~$80/hour for the experience).
Heh, I see /. hasn't changed much. Just mention "SOE" and the flamethrowers turn on. Of course, this is the same userbase that bent over backwards convincing itself that waiting 30 minutes to start playing a competing game is a feature. If the queue were found in an SOE game the complaining thread here would top the 1000 post mark.
Not saying SOE is pure as driven snow, but hey, try and see past your bias, guys.
Flight-simmers:
... drag right a bit, I can't close. Copy. .... WTG! Whew, good thing he didn't have a wingman... @#$%^@! I'm hit.
Check six, wolf! Breaking left. You're clear. He's on you now! Dragging two seven zero. I'm in
Gray Ninja: the article's talking about serious sim racing, not smash-em-up games.
Isn't this already done in Anarchy Online?
The question isn't one of classes, but one of roles. Roles are things like:
... but no one class can be 'the healer' by themselves. Everyone's a 'hybrid.'
- healing damage
- preventing damage to others
- preventing damage to self
- doing damage (melee, magical, single or multi-target)
- enhancing others' abilities to do something
- overcoming obstacles (utility)
(and more)
The problem with early MMOGs is that they assigned classes directly tied to the most important roles, so that *one* class fulfilled each primary role. Thus, other classes were secondary.
The archetype system amends this somewhat by allowing multiple classes to fulfil a primary role; but it runs the danger (which can be overcome through smart design) of making the multiple classes mere clones of each other.
IMO the best way to approach classes, assuming one wishes a class-based system, is to make sure not that *several* classes can assume primary roles, but that *no* class can fully assume a primary role by themselves.
In short, no 'tank' class, but some classes will be able to avoid damage better than others. Some classes will have healing
This could be a tricky balancing act for designers trying to ensure that no one class ends up with the 'uber' or 'gimped' combination of roles, but it does avoid the issue of cookie-cutter classes.
There is no one right answer, whether it's class-based or open; it all depends on how thoroughly designed the whole system is. As long as players have interesting roles and can fulfill them, the system will work.
Woody of gucomics.com has some bright things to say about the EQ1 expansion, namely that once again the whole nature of the game is being changed. (EQ1 will now feature "Spheres of Influence" within which game rules will change).
As such, as with some recent EQ1 expansions, this isn't really an optional expansion but required if one wishes to participate with others.
I don't mind when MMOGs expand, but theoretically an expansion is something you ought to want when you've finished up with what you've already bought, not a required purchase in addition to the monthly subscription.
The EQ2 expansion, on the other hand, is much more along those lines. New places and features, but anyone who's still happily plugging along in the original content won't be FUBAR.
This certainly has provoked some opinions; charges of racism and 'counter-racism' abound, and some posters bringing George Bush into the discussion (what, did Rove send mind-control rays into the Blizzard designers' heads?) or blaming all of Western civilization.
'Farming' is a scourge to people who want to play the game. The majority of people farming happen to be overseas because the profit/time ratio for farming is not viable in the U.S., unless you're managing a whole operation.
If, for instance, I were an unemployed 15-year-old American (I'm not), I'd make much better money flipping burgers than farming gold, and there are labor laws. On the other hand in China the average manufacturing wage was $0.57/hr in 2002 (largely due to fixed currency pegs) and it might be a step up to spend 12 hours a day in a chair farming gold rather than 15 hours a day standing up in a factory.
The second layer is of course those who purchase the gold for real money. I happen to earn a decent wage and in terms of time/progress it would certainly be more efficient to work an hour of overtime and buy in-game stuff rather than to spend that hour actually in the game playing to earn it. Who cares? The point of the game IS the hour I spend playing it, not whether I end up with 10k gold. That's why it's a game. Nonetheless, people pay because the game prices are inflated, and items are inflated because they're being farmed.
That brings up the third layer, which is the game design. MMOGs are designed to control the rate of influx of resources, whether it's XP or gold or items. Why? Because if everything is trivially obtained, players reach 'the end' quickly and become bored, and unsubscribe. So, something that allows players to obtain the Magic Whatsit only appears every so many hours.
This passes for challenge, because honestly the game mechanics of MMOGs are not terribly complex. They *can't* be since they're server-bound, and they're server-bound since you cannot trust the client; people can and will hack their FEs if it'll help them. Furthermore even the most puzzling content is published to the Web moments after being first solved.
OK, so the challenge is not skill-based but time-based; be there at the right time and get the prize, or play long enough and earn the game money to trade for the prize. Playing the game as a game is far less efficient than botting or ruthlessly farming. And THAT is why farmers exist.
Game companies do what they can to find and delete botting accounts but with the size of the 'secondary market' reaching $1B annually banning a few thousand accounts is like stopping a truck full of pot coming across the border; looks good on the news but the cartel hardly registers a blip.
When a MMOG is designed where it's too hard or complex to simply farm, or where it's more productive to play "as intended" instead of farming, then farming will stop. Of course, complex games like that don't sell as well.
Well, some people really like the mass raid experience in MMOGs. There's certainly camaradarie, teamwork, and a sense of accomplishment when things go right.
Some people are just as easily repulsed by the need to collect 20-40 or more people, coordinate timing, commit to being online daily for extended periods of time, and manage clique politics just to progress past a certain point.
For my part, it strikes me as odd that several games (certainly not just WoW) have this transition where up to a certain point one can play solo or with a small group, but afterwards the game requires a large organized force.
Ding! 5,000,000. :)
I'd love to see a breakdown by country.
They seem to be done with posts whose content consists of flamebait inserted into every thread that has anything to do with SWG. Imagine that.
The game system has been vastly dumbed down (a multi-path skill-based system ejoyed by quite a few, replaced with distinct classes with levels
As I wrote in a previous article, it's nearly impossible to balance 37 classes with multiple paths. While this variance of choices seems complex, it's actually quite limiting, because only a few choices are taken once everyone min/maxxes.
Like chess; there are 20 opening moves for White, but who uses the other 15?
the interface reworked into some third-person shooter - again well-suited for a conversion to console
This non-rumor keeps being stirred up, despite having been vehemently denied. I can always tell the most angry posters because they throw this gem out there.
Oh, and making Jedi available from the start, thus nullifying the "hard work" of players who had endured the grinds previously needed to unlock Jedi powers? Brilliant.
Yea, brilliant! My apologies for the players who thought that a game was supposed to be hard work, but nobody (myself included) was attracted to SWG knowing there were Jedi characters, and they were better than other characters, but if your heart was set on Jedi you had to spend months (if you 'ground' consistently instead of enjoying the game) playing some other character so that you could start doing what you really wanted. That's nuts.
I for one am dam tired of games that require so much committment of time just to stay up with the level grind that they make work look like fun.
What I find good about the NGE is almost exactly what ticks you off, likely. I can start a new character as a newbie Jedi instead of playing classes I don't want. The classes have some relation to SW instead of being obscure creations I've rarely or never seen on film (Fencer? Who had a sword in a SW movie? Creature Handler? I want to be the orc creature tamer from RotJ?) The gameplay is fast, not same-as-every-other-mmog. Basically instead of being a badly balanced horrible xp-grind exercise in boredom and macro creation that's otherwise like a poor knockoff of 1st-generation fantasy MMOGs, it's fun.
Pity about the disabled guy though. Maybe someone can get him a programmable keyboard like the ones from Saitek and Logitech so a single keypress could suffice.
"If the global market operated consistently with appropriate price controls"
I assume, given your other comments, that you mean "with appropriate free-market pricing."
My point is merely that even if a company erroneously misprices something, the market as a whole is free and robust enough to absorb the ripple; and even if companies are always making such ripples by misjudging demand, it all works out as long as the mis-pricing comes from internal sources (MS's choice) and not from external sources (a government trying to tell MS what it may or may not charge).
Only in a system stagnated with forced mis-pricings, or in the case of a price ripple large enough to disrupt the whole economy, do deleterious effects arise.
And again, an Xbox, unlike an egg, is not a one-time revenue stream. You sell an egg, you've made all the money you're going to make from the egg. You sell an Xbox, and you've got a potential revenue stream from games and Xbox Live subscriptions that continues for years. Those residuals aren't considered in the article, but they are a part of MS's decisions.
Your logic is OK, but the numbers are off for your theory to fly.
That might be true if a) there wasn't a secondary market in the form of EBay to restore market pricing; and b) if the financial impact of the underpricing was significant enough to have a ripple effect.
The U.S. has an $11,750,000,000,000 economy. At a theoretical underprice of $400 each (probably less, I'm sure the demand for the bare-bones 360s is lower than for the full kit), 500k Xbox360s free $200M into the economy, which is the financial equivalent of trying to cause a tsunami in Tokyo by tossing small rocks off the Golden Gate Bridge.
It's absolutely true that if you want a shortage of something, price it below its market worth.
Doesn't matter if it's gas (Carter), grain (18th c. France), or Xboxes, if the market thinks X and the price is set at X-something, there will be a shortage.
OK, so there's a shortage. So what? Xboxes are not energy or food. There's no particular harm done, other than to MS's immediate profit, by underpricing the 360.
Maybe MS has decided that the revenue from higher-priced XBoxes is more than offset by the cost in bad publicity when the market price drops by half by spring. Maybe they realize the value of being the hot item instead of Cabbage Patch dolls this year.
There are other forces at work besides the next quarter's earning report. A console system isn't a one-time revenue stream like a loaf of bread or a gallon of gas. The Slate writer is right in his assessment, but also short-sighted.
One of the great things about PnP RPGing is that it is truly a sandbox. The DM/GM of course prepares much but the players might up and decide that they are going to go into castlebuilding instead of delving another dungeon, and because the group are friends and are cooperatively playing (even when their characters are adversaries), it all works out.
In an ideal world this concept just carries over to online play and scales indefinitely, and hundreds of thousands of players all get along even if one is a Sith and the other a rebel leader. Unfortunately we don't live in an ideal world.
EQ et al. have their roots in MUDding. I wasn't involved with that; while MUDs were on the rise I was engaged in online air combat; but the experiences are similar.
While the bond of physical proximity was cut in these early games, the community was still small, which meant it was self-policing. If your online game regularly has 100 people on, you get to know those guys quite well. If Lord Doofus shows up and disrupts the game, everyone else does something about it; and if Doofus disappears but re-emerges as Dink, nobody is fooled. So it was still safe to have a sandbox. In air combat games occasionally a bug would crop up which could be exploited; but since the community was small it was agreed not to use 'cheap' tactics and any player who did was generally hounded until they stopped.
When the idea was scaled up to the MMOG level, with many thousands playing at once, both the safeguards of proximity and community were lost, replaced by anonymity and indifference. When that happened the thinking "because I should" is lost on many and in its place "because I can" comes in.
Now it becomes problematic to be open-ended, because for every player who wants to do something unique in a good way, there are several whose thoughts revolve around finding ways to abuse the game system. Here's an Uncle Owen, who wants to be a moisture farmer, but right behind him is Uncle Pwn, who is busy pharming instead and selling money on the 'secondary market.' Now the good player is ruined, because the market is pooched.
Likewise SWG may have had 37(?) classes but really if you wanted to win you found a min/max combination, of which I'm quite certain there were far fewer than 37. Same thing happened in EQ; there are 10 expansions and I-don't-know-how-many zones but in practice all new characters go to zone A then B then C then D and 40 other alternative places to adventure sit empty. Similarly, in DAOC, theoretically you have the choice to specialize in several different areas but forget that, you'd better be specced exactly the same as everyone else or you're done for when you reach the top levels.
What looks like open-ended, when subjected to exploiters and abusers and not tamed by community, becomes only an exercise in min/max and is in fact far more restrictive than an apparently closed-ended class system.
In short, any game system open-ended enough to allow free-form roleplay is also open-ended enough to abuse, because the number of permutations becomes too high to test. Further, any game large enough to qualify as a MMOG doesn't have a self-policing nature.
That was one of SWG's design problems, and the only way out was to tear up the old system or make a SWG2. I don't know why they didn't make a SWG2 and let the people who liked the game as is remain. Maybe they looked at the EQ2 vs. EQ1 numbers and decided it was a poor investment. Maybe Lucas leaned on them and said that there will be only one Star Wars MMOG, not two. Who knows?
What I do know is that I had no interest in joining the old SWG, either in its original incarnation or in the 'CU' phase, because of this.
A few comments over the last couple days have been to the effect that few people own HDTVs.
While that's true now, the things are at the commodity level ($299 for cheapo 27" HDTV) and I can't see why anyone wanting a new TV would buy SDTV any more.
So, by the end of '06 people are going to be eager to get some sort of player that plays their DVDs and some sort of HD DVD. The guys at avsforum.com can argue ad nauseam about the technical merits of blue versus red ray but the consumer doesn't give a rat's 6, as long as it plays.
Now: The 360 is still not going to adopt a HD player in its box. I think MS wants to sell everyone "Media Player" PCs for that purpose, which can be equipped with blue or red players at will. This is an OK business decision for them. They can sell XBox 360 now and not be accused later of screwing their initial customers. MS was on the HD-DVD train but they weren't going to lose the 2005 buying season for it.
Sony wants to win the VHS/Beta wars this time around; a victory on this front is much bigger cash than some share of the game console market. So, for them, a PS3 which leverages the existing PS2 owners (backwards compatible) and gets people into Blu-Ray is a good business decision. So, they want to sell a gameplayer that is also a media box.
Even though Sony and MS are competitors in the console arena, both of them have larger agendas which are best served by their different decisions here.
What's happening now is, IMO, a convergence of the original bad design and the community.
The original SWG design was innovative, experimental, and horribly mangled. As a previous poster noted, once you'd figured out the action system, you could stand amongst a crowd of Rancors and laugh. This may be amusing if you like god-mode but it makes developing challenging encounters impossible.
So, as another poster noted, MOBs with complete invulnerability except for one weakness were released; this is also horribly broken.
Then, add the Jedi system, which involved horrific mind-numbing grinding BUT still resulted in a massive surplus of Jedi (particularly for galactic civil war era). More horrible brokenness.
Now kick over the system once (CE) and what sort of playerbase do you have left? You have the sort of players who are fanatically attached to their characters, particularly to their several accounts worth of characters since SWG had the rare (for a reason) feature of only allowing one character per server (plus jedi slot for those who did the grind). People who have 'invested' uncounted hours in their personas.
Now during the original era, and during the CU era, does anyone honestly remember anyone recommending SWG? Not I. There were people logging into MxO (!) who proclaimed themselves refugees from SWG. On any gaming board and particularly on the official board you could hear people complaining daily and bitterly about how broken SWG was.
Now what are you, if you're the designer, going to do with this? Let it be, to slowly dwindle to unprofitability? Maybe. You could milk it until it's dry. But maybe Lucas doesn't care for that. He's just released a SW film that actually stirred interest instead of disgust from the SW fans. So, you take the other option: fix it.
Unfortunately fixing it means completely kicking over the applecart on the existing players, but since they complain daily and bitterly about how broken things are you'd suspect they'd go for the change.
Nope. The one thing gamers can't stand is change. Whether bad or good, and I've seen both in many MMOGs, *any* change is only guaranteed to produce one thing from the playerbase: howling outrage.
Scott is Lum, yes.