Originally posted by ShakyMo
Yaka. Tsws biggest problem is that it is "commercial" once you hit end game.

If we take commercial to mean "wow clone".

Tsw has fun leveling,o.ce you done that though its either grind dungeons over and over for gear, or go and "pvp" for almost as good gear.

Unfortunately funcom bottled it and didn't see the vision the entire way through. You only have to look at the things that got cut.

1 agartha as an end game pvp area and source of crafting materials, with facilities for Cabals to own and maintain their own anima mines
2 crafted goods as the top goods
3 dungeons supplying crafting mats not "phatlewt"
4 no raids
5 no levels, instead play anywhere, go straight to transylvania after Tokyo if you like. (weapon and talisman skill points were a recent addition making the game more linear and having sort of levels)
6 cabal housing and cabal progression system
7 limited to single character uo style

Basicly it had a bit more lean towards sandbox and pvp.

But they bottled it and went for a more wow style endgame. Tsw would have benefited greatly from a different style of endgame (much as gw2 has), mmo devs overestimate the hardcore pve progression playerbase, and members of that base already have 2 games that do that very well,wow & rift plus hundreds of also rand.

Several of the issues you raise have also been mentioned in the interviews with Ragnar and John Bylos - it seems that the dev teams are looking at expanding into these areas in some form or fashion.  

I think the relevant question to you ShakyMo is this - assuming that the devs begin working on the areas you listed, would that be enough to entice you to return to TSW?

Note - this isn't meant to be snarky in any way - I'm legitimately curious.

Originally posted by Zylaxx

Originally posted by ShakyMo
I disagree with the "not commercial enough", which is basicly code speak for "not wow clone enough"

The leveling aspect of tsw was good, and that was different.

Where tsw goes wrong is the endgame, where it really is a "world of cthulhucraft"

The other question that needs to be asked is what did funcom get out of their deal with ea, weren't ea Involved to help market the game?

Exactly 100% right.  If TSW had a non WoW endgame we would be singing its priases from here till the cow comes home.  Going from its amazing leveling up journey and doing a 180 at endgame and becoming a stale/bland/boring/generic/atrocious/horrible vertical gear progression MMO without the raiding.

I agree.

TSW's biggest problem is that it was simply "more of the same."

It is the "N"th example of "WoW with a twist" and people are sick of that, as the collapse of TOR has shown.

That and the "soak the consumer" payment model didn't help either, but it was secondary to the fact that TSW was fundamentally the "same old thing."

No worries tho: FC came out and said they wont be making any more MMOs (not in so many words) so it will be their last "non-success" in this genre.

Game devs need to stop listening to the fans who tell them their crap is "great" during beta and listen to the detractors. No it would not turn everything into WoW, but fans always jump all over everyone who says anything negative which kills any sort of perspective that could actually help the game.

Here was a my short rundown from beta - http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/350847/page/1

it really is brief, but honestly TSW was/is not fun, hence the reality that occurred. Just because a few of you found it enjoyable doesn't dectract from the mess that funcom made. The setting was great, tons of potential in terms of creating memorable characters; but no, you had limited character customization along with horribly animated models.

And combat is typically the main aspect that most games are built around. If the combat is atrocious, then what do you expect? Not talking about the skill system, I'm talking about the actual function of pressing buttons and seeing your character do stuff. Just terrible. And no matter how much you love this game, the numbers don't lie, it sucks.

Originally posted by ShakyMo
Yaka. Tsws biggest problem is that it is "commercial" once you hit end game.

If we take commercial to mean "wow clone".

Tsw has fun leveling,o.ce you done that though its either grind dungeons over and over for gear, or go and "pvp" for almost as good gear.

Unfortunately funcom bottled it and didn't see the vision the entire way through. You only have to look at the things that got cut.

1 agartha as an end game pvp area and source of crafting materials, with facilities for Cabals to own and maintain their own anima mines
2 crafted goods as the top goods
3 dungeons supplying crafting mats not "phatlewt"
4 no raids
5 no levels, instead play anywhere, go straight to transylvania after Tokyo if you like. (weapon and talisman skill points were a recent addition making the game more linear and having sort of levels)
6 cabal housing and cabal progression system
7 limited to single character uo style

Basicly it had a bit more lean towards sandbox and pvp.

But they bottled it and went for a more wow style endgame. Tsw would have benefited greatly from a different style of endgame (much as gw2 has), mmo devs overestimate the hardcore pve progression playerbase, and members of that base already have 2 games that do that very well,wow & rift plus hundreds of also rand.

I disagree.  Crafting centric gameplay and rewards have been tried many times before with very, very limited success.  The only one to have any decent numbers was DAoC and even it eventually decided to allow loot drops to compete with crafted items.  Others like SWG, Horizons, Eve, Dark and Light and Ryzom all suffered very much due to gameplay being too focused on crafting and crafting rewards at the expense of the adventure game and tangible rewards.  Hell, even GW2 is starting to feel the pinch as people are getting fed up with incremental reward systems for incredible amounts of effort.

Originally posted by ShakyMo
Yaka. Tsws biggest problem is that it is "commercial" once you hit end game.

If we take commercial to mean "wow clone".

Tsw has fun leveling,o.ce you done that though its either grind dungeons over and over for gear, or go and "pvp" for almost as good gear.

Unfortunately funcom bottled it and didn't see the vision the entire way through. You only have to look at the things that got cut.

1 agartha as an end game pvp area and source of crafting materials, with facilities for Cabals to own and maintain their own anima mines
2 crafted goods as the top goods
3 dungeons supplying crafting mats not "phatlewt"
4 no raids
5 no levels, instead play anywhere, go straight to transylvania after Tokyo if you like. (weapon and talisman skill points were a recent addition making the game more linear and having sort of levels)
6 cabal housing and cabal progression system
7 limited to single character uo style

Basicly it had a bit more lean towards sandbox and pvp.

But they bottled it and went for a more wow style endgame. Tsw would have benefited greatly from a different style of endgame (much as gw2 has), mmo devs overestimate the hardcore pve progression playerbase, and members of that base already have 2 games that do that very well,wow & rift plus hundreds of also rand.

Cabal housing/housing is coming, confirmed that they want to do it. Raids are coming too (NY next month).

For the rest I don´t quite get it, too commercial at endgame, not commercial enough at leveling or what?

TSW has loads of innovation and monthly new missions and new features on top of that, I don´t mind the more traditional endgame, in fact every month there are new things to do, so you can either chose to do the dungeon grind or skip it. It is all optional.

I am also in for everything sandbox, they already stated they are looking into features for player driven content too, so I think there is a lot of exciting stuff coming.

Tokyio and NY raid, Halloween event and Christmas, the Gridstream live radio shows (they did an awesome, awesome event btw) new auxiliary weapons, Albion theatre for player performances will make the RPers uberhappy.. then there is the new combat feature to be revealed in 3 days.. how much more can I expect?  They are doing a great job already, imho

Originally posted by GR3NDEL

Originally posted by ShakyMo
Yaka. Tsws biggest problem is that it is "commercial" once you hit end game.

If we take commercial to mean "wow clone".

Tsw has fun leveling,o.ce you done that though its either grind dungeons over and over for gear, or go and "pvp" for almost as good gear.

Unfortunately funcom bottled it and didn't see the vision the entire way through. You only have to look at the things that got cut.

1 agartha as an end game pvp area and source of crafting materials, with facilities for Cabals to own and maintain their own anima mines
2 crafted goods as the top goods
3 dungeons supplying crafting mats not "phatlewt"
4 no raids
5 no levels, instead play anywhere, go straight to transylvania after Tokyo if you like. (weapon and talisman skill points were a recent addition making the game more linear and having sort of levels)
6 cabal housing and cabal progression system
7 limited to single character uo style

Basicly it had a bit more lean towards sandbox and pvp.

But they bottled it and went for a more wow style endgame. Tsw would have benefited greatly from a different style of endgame (much as gw2 has), mmo devs overestimate the hardcore pve progression playerbase, and members of that base already have 2 games that do that very well,wow & rift plus hundreds of also rand.

Several of the issues you raise have also been mentioned in the interviews with Ragnar and John Bylos - it seems that the dev teams are looking at expanding into these areas in some form or fashion.  

I think the relevant question to you ShakyMo is this - assuming that the devs begin working on the areas you listed, would that be enough to entice you to return to TSW?

Note - this isn't meant to be snarky in any way - I'm legitimately curious.

I think if it had more endgame variety, much better pvp and was less gear grind driven i would have stayed.  But would i go back, probably not as I took up GW2  a week after its launch, and thats pretty much good enough in all aspects for me.. TSW excells in quests, the way you only have 1 quest but it lasts say 20 mins with multiple stages (like gW2 getting away from hub system), I actually like the combat and dont get the complaints, dungeons (but im not really a dungeoneer, i run them a couple of times then thats it), but its PVP is typical sucky wow clone PVP (like wow / rift / swtor), and theres no "Fluff" content like cabal housing or whatever, the endgame just replaces "raid or die" with "hardmode dungeon or die"

Originally posted by Vorthanion

Originally posted by ShakyMo
Yaka. Tsws biggest problem is that it is "commercial" once you hit end game.

If we take commercial to mean "wow clone".

Tsw has fun leveling,o.ce you done that though its either grind dungeons over and over for gear, or go and "pvp" for almost as good gear.

Unfortunately funcom bottled it and didn't see the vision the entire way through. You only have to look at the things that got cut.

1 agartha as an end game pvp area and source of crafting materials, with facilities for Cabals to own and maintain their own anima mines
2 crafted goods as the top goods
3 dungeons supplying crafting mats not "phatlewt"
4 no raids
5 no levels, instead play anywhere, go straight to transylvania after Tokyo if you like. (weapon and talisman skill points were a recent addition making the game more linear and having sort of levels)
6 cabal housing and cabal progression system
7 limited to single character uo style

Basicly it had a bit more lean towards sandbox and pvp.

But they bottled it and went for a more wow style endgame. Tsw would have benefited greatly from a different style of endgame (much as gw2 has), mmo devs overestimate the hardcore pve progression playerbase, and members of that base already have 2 games that do that very well,wow & rift plus hundreds of also rand.

I disagree.  Crafting centric gameplay and rewards have been tried many times before with very, very limited success.  The only one to have any decent numbers was DAoC and even it eventually decided to allow loot drops to compete with crafted items.  Others like SWG, Horizons, Eve, Dark and Light and Ryzom all suffered very much due to gameplay being too focused on crafting and crafting rewards at the expense of the adventure game and tangible rewards.  Hell, even GW2 is starting to feel the pinch as people are getting fed up with incremental reward systems for incredible amounts of effort.

I would argue that the crafting centric gameplay of original SWG was just fine: it was once they started screwing around with that, and the world that the crafted items went into that problems started to happen. As well as not fixing the broken stuff and finishing the unfinshed bits. The crafting in original SWG was one of the strengths of the game. SOE needed to bring the rest of the game up to that level, not dumb the rest of it (and crafting) down.

And I would have to say that EvE's long term growth and longevity speak for themselves. Once you accept the given that WoW is/was a never to be repeated phenomenon, EvE has done just fine for CCP: kept them in the black, funded several expansions and the development of another game.

It's not about the crafting, it is about "what to do when you are not out killing stuff". Some games have down that well, most, not so much.

Originally posted by Yakamomoto

Originally posted by ShakyMo
Yaka. Tsws biggest problem is that it is "commercial" once you hit end game.

If we take commercial to mean "wow clone".

Tsw has fun leveling,o.ce you done that though its either grind dungeons over and over for gear, or go and "pvp" for almost as good gear.

Unfortunately funcom bottled it and didn't see the vision the entire way through. You only have to look at the things that got cut.

1 agartha as an end game pvp area and source of crafting materials, with facilities for Cabals to own and maintain their own anima mines
2 crafted goods as the top goods
3 dungeons supplying crafting mats not "phatlewt"
4 no raids
5 no levels, instead play anywhere, go straight to transylvania after Tokyo if you like. (weapon and talisman skill points were a recent addition making the game more linear and having sort of levels)
6 cabal housing and cabal progression system
7 limited to single character uo style

Basicly it had a bit more lean towards sandbox and pvp.

But they bottled it and went for a more wow style endgame. Tsw would have benefited greatly from a different style of endgame (much as gw2 has), mmo devs overestimate the hardcore pve progression playerbase, and members of that base already have 2 games that do that very well,wow & rift plus hundreds of also rand.

Cabal housing/housing is coming, confirmed that they want to do it. Raids are coming too (NY next month).

For the rest I don´t quite get it, too commercial at endgame, not commercial enough at leveling or what?

TSW has loads of innovation and monthly new missions and new features on top of that, I don´t mind the more traditional endgame, in fact every month there are new things to do, so you can either chose to do the dungeon grind or skip it. It is all optional.

I am also in for everything sandbox, they already stated they are looking into features for player driven content too, so I think there is a lot of exciting stuff coming.

Tokyio and NY raid, Halloween event and Christmas, the Gridstream live radio shows (they did an awesome, awesome event btw) new auxiliary weapons, Albion theatre for player performances will make the RPers uberhappy.. then there is the new combat feature to be revealed in 3 days.. how much more can I expect?  They are doing a great job already, imho

yeah tokyo and NY raid just tell me theyre falling into the "need to be more like wow to succeed" trap.  Glad they are adding stuff for RPers though,  i think TSW could be a good home for all the COH refugees.

Originally posted by Burntvet

Originally posted by Vorthanion

Originally posted by ShakyMo
Yaka. Tsws biggest problem is that it is "commercial" once you hit end game.

If we take commercial to mean "wow clone".

Tsw has fun leveling,o.ce you done that though its either grind dungeons over and over for gear, or go and "pvp" for almost as good gear.

Unfortunately funcom bottled it and didn't see the vision the entire way through. You only have to look at the things that got cut.

1 agartha as an end game pvp area and source of crafting materials, with facilities for Cabals to own and maintain their own anima mines
2 crafted goods as the top goods
3 dungeons supplying crafting mats not "phatlewt"
4 no raids
5 no levels, instead play anywhere, go straight to transylvania after Tokyo if you like. (weapon and talisman skill points were a recent addition making the game more linear and having sort of levels)
6 cabal housing and cabal progression system
7 limited to single character uo style

Basicly it had a bit more lean towards sandbox and pvp.

But they bottled it and went for a more wow style endgame. Tsw would have benefited greatly from a different style of endgame (much as gw2 has), mmo devs overestimate the hardcore pve progression playerbase, and members of that base already have 2 games that do that very well,wow & rift plus hundreds of also rand.

I disagree.  Crafting centric gameplay and rewards have been tried many times before with very, very limited success.  The only one to have any decent numbers was DAoC and even it eventually decided to allow loot drops to compete with crafted items.  Others like SWG, Horizons, Eve, Dark and Light and Ryzom all suffered very much due to gameplay being too focused on crafting and crafting rewards at the expense of the adventure game and tangible rewards.  Hell, even GW2 is starting to feel the pinch as people are getting fed up with incremental reward systems for incredible amounts of effort.

I would argue that the crafting centric gameplay of original SWG was just fine: it was once they started screwing around with that, and the world that the crafted items went into that problems started to happen. As well as not fixing the broken stuff and finishing the unfinshed bits. The crafting in original SWG was one of the strengths of the game. SOE needed to bring the rest of the game up to that level, not dumb the rest of it (and crafting) down.

As I would have to say that EvE's long term growth and longevity speak for themselves. Once you accept the given that WoW is/was a never to be repeated phenomenon, EvE has just fine for CCP, keep them in the black, funded several expansions, and the development of another game.

 

It's not about the crafting, it is about "what to do when you are not out killing stuff". Some games have down that well, most, not so much.

 

That's strange, because the numbers say that after the game (SWG) was overhauled and loot drops started competing with crafted items, the player base actually increased beyond the numbers of players during  pre-NGE.  One of the biggest complaints on the forums was the lack of adventuring rewards.  People were not content with getting crafting components as rewards, except for the crafters themselves, of course.  Eve is still a niche game and as far as I'm concerned, it will never go beyond that niche status.

Originally posted by ShakyMo

yeah tokyo and NY raid just tell me theyre falling into the "need to be more like wow to succeed" trap.  Glad they are adding stuff for RPers though,  i think TSW could be a good home for all the COH refugees.

Tokyo is a new story/exploration world area and they said they will wrap up story act 1, that has nothing at all to do with "WoW".

Also the NYraid looks and plays nothing like WoW, check the video. This game is not WoW, there are no pandas and it isn´t set in medieval fantasy disneyland, that is enough "different" for me.

This game is different in every possible area that counts for me.

the wowclones are the medieval ones like Rift or Gw2 or Tera, even SWTOR is ten times more like WoW heck they even copied the combat and classes and levels system 1:1 from WoW.

Comparing TSW to WoW is basically an insult and completly ridiculous imho

Originally posted by Vorthanion

Originally posted by Burntvet

I would argue that the crafting centric gameplay of original SWG was just fine: it was once they started screwing around with that, and the world that the crafted items went into that problems started to happen. As well as not fixing the broken stuff and finishing the unfinshed bits. The crafting in original SWG was one of the strengths of the game. SOE needed to bring the rest of the game up to that level, not dumb the rest of it (and crafting) down.

As I would have to say that EvE's long term growth and longevity speak for themselves. Once you accept the given that WoW is/was a never to be repeated phenomenon, EvE has just fine for CCP, keep them in the black, funded several expansions, and the development of another game.

 

It's not about the crafting, it is about "what to do when you are not out killing stuff". Some games have down that well, most, not so much.

 

That's strange, because the numbers say that after the game (SWG) was overhauled and loot drops started competing with crafted items, the player base actually increased beyond the numbers of players during  pre-NGE.  One of the biggest complaints on the forums was the lack of adventuring rewards.  People were not content with getting crafting components as rewards, except for the crafters themselves, of course.  Eve is still a niche game and as far as I'm concerned, it will never go beyond that niche status.

For one, SWG hit its "high water mark" about 5 months after launch at 350k paying accts or so. So it never had any more people than that.

There was a slight increase during the later CU period before the NGE, during which time (ironically) SOE had people fixing a lot of the little broken bits in the game and making other small changes that people wanted to make the game more playable (increase the base inv from 50 to 80 items, increased the size of some factory crates, increased the size of resource stacks, etc.) But after the CU and the " conversion" to a loot based economy?

No way.

And during the CU "conversion" crafters and people with crafting alts quit in droves: on the order of 90% of armorsmiths quit on some servers, because of the unwanted and radical changes, for example, as it ruined every single crafted piece of armor and armor component up to that time.

Someone had a marked chart from mmochart.com showing the population dips at the CU and the NGE in here somewhere, and SWG lost big chunks of players after each (more the latter) from which they never recovered.

As to EvE being "niche", at 400k-450k paying subs be month, that is a pretty big and nice niche. And frankly, CCP is probably much happier having that, then selling 500k-750k boxes to a game and then have everyone quit in 6 months, as has been the norm for years.

And that is the thing, people play/have played that game for YEARS. So in terms of total number of paid sub months, over the last 8 years, I would put EvE up against any other game released since WoW, in terms of profitability.

Taking the long view of game management instead of the short one.

Originally posted by Yakamomoto

Originally posted by ShakyMo

yeah tokyo and NY raid just tell me theyre falling into the "need to be more like wow to succeed" trap.  Glad they are adding stuff for RPers though,  i think TSW could be a good home for all the COH refugees.

Tokyo is a new story/exploration world area and they said they will wrap up story act 1, that has nothing at all to do with "WoW".

Also the NYraid looks and plays nothing like WoW, check the video. This game is not WoW, there are no pandas and it isn´t set in medieval fantasy disneyland, that is enough "different" for me.

This game is different in every possible area that counts for me.

the wowclones are the medieval ones like Rift or Gw2 or Tera, even SWTOR is ten times more like WoW heck they even copied the combat and classes and levels system 1:1 from WoW.

Comparing TSW to WoW is basically an insult and completly ridiculous imho

WTF????????????????????????????????

Agree

Though silly me for asking [this] person.

Enjoy life and peace, SMDH(Shaking my damn head).

NOTE:  Not a GW2 fanboy, in fact I dislike GW2 after playing to max level and leaving...  However!

1)  Guild Wars 2 release nearly the same time.  And Guild Wars has a MUCH better rep than FunCom.

2)  Guild Wars 2 is buy to play.  What is the monthly sub from TSW getting players that GW2 isn't?  I'm pretty sure nothing...

3)  Guild Wars 2 uses a similar non-standard trinity.  Yes you sorta have tanks, and sorta have healers in TSW but not nearly as defined as WoW, EQ, and DAOC type games.

4)  The equipment in TSW is meh.  While they're just ICONs that you put into slots which boost stats.  Players seem to prefer putting armor and such on over just random things like in TSW.

5)  A lot of people talk about TSW making you "think" more than other games to complete quests...  This is mostly true, but also MOST people don't want to think when playing video games.  Many of us spend all day thinking about work and other things so we want to escape from that.   Personally TSW didn't make me think at all because all quests were either obvious or found online within seconds.  Once you understand the limitations of what they can do within the game it becomes pretty easy to figure out the puzzle quests.

6)  Allowing players to build kits/decks and custom ability combos is nice however that also makes it very VERY easy to build something that doesn't work....   During beta I tested probably 4 different characters starting at level 1 and 1 of them was extremely easy to level while the others was a struggle and not enjoyable.

7)  Limiting the skills you can have equipped is important for balance based on how they designed this game however it also makes things a bit dull when you find yourself using 1 spam ability and maybe 1 big ability on a cooldown.  Of all the classes I played in beta and within first week or two of launch, I never once found any combo that made use of very many active abilities.  I even wasted a lot of effort to unlock what sounded like a "pet" type ability and ended up being a terribad turret that did almost nothing for me.

I purchased TSW in hopes of finding something good in it after giving it yet another chance but I just couldn't find enjoyment.  Age of Conan is still around and "free" (with a bad pay2win style shop) so I expect this game will stick around and go free to play once they've managed to suck as much monthly subs out of players as possible.

I've decied that my next and ONLY mmorpg purchases will be games that I feel will stay with a single business model.  I don't expect WoW will ever go free to play.  Even when subs drop below 1-2 million.  Offering the first 20 levels or so free is a perfect way to let people try your game, and make an informed decision about if they enjoy it or not. 

EVERY game should launch with a trial.  And hopefully that trial doesn't pull an AoC where the first 20 levels are really good and 21+ is a joke.