I'm pretty sure Everquest didn't even reach a million subscribers. 

Originally posted by mrprogguy

 

Originally posted by tkobo

Its not hard to see what bad design choice they are going to follow (at this point),in a failed attempt to fix another they now finally see as wrong.

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[quote]The Champions Online end game isn't just about large teams, raids and guilds. If you don't want to do that, there's still content for you. I'll admit that we haven't put the finishing touches on the Omega System, but I can tell you that we are designing and developing with the solo player in mind.[/quote].

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Its the standard bandaid approach.They keep the insanely wrong terms and philosphies of raid and content access limited by participant size,and throw in some "busy work" to hopefully keep the "soloers" pacified.

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Well, I got as much as I could out of your text there, after I stumbled over, around, and through the various spelling, grammar, and punctuation issues in your breathless prose, and I think I have another hypothesis:

 The developers have to be able to finish programming the thing in finite time.  What you're suggesting veers in the direction of NP-complete.    I'm sure that the customer-monkeys have spent nigh-infinite hours telling the developers this and that and the other thing--and none of what they are saying can be programmed into any sort of game that will be remotely playable from a technical standpoint.  Translating one's whims and whimsy into manageable and performant computer code isn't as easy as the customer-monkeys believe it is.  (I've been writing software for over 27 years now, man and boy, and I currently manage a team of developers at a rather large corporation you might have heard of--but I'm not going to drag their name into this.)

Your palpable arrogance (if I may be so bold) doesn't really help matters any, because at the end of the day, you have no idea what you're talking about.  You just want what you want because you want it, and everybody else is wrong.  (When everybody else is wrong, that's a sure sign you're wrong.)  Let's face it, if you had the chops, you'd be producing your "perfect game" right now.

Instead, you're sniping way on a forum somewhere, in barely-readable fashion.

Dude, dig yourself.  Get real.  Please--if only to save yourself further embarrassment.

 

 

Well said.  Furthermore, simply scaling the difficulty of an encounter to allow more players to join in would severely reduce the amount of creativity that can be put into raids.  In CoX, for example, many group encounters involved different roles for different players, different tasks, etc.  If it was as simple as multiplying the "boss" enemy's health by how many players were in the instance at the time, that'd make for some incredibly dull raids and the no one would want a large number of players to be involved.

Originally posted by Majestico

Everquest had the most subscribers?

I thought WoW had had the most subs from a western game, or am I mistaken?  I did not realise that Everquest had had as many as 10 million subscribers.

There was life before WoW.

Originally posted by Airspell

I'm pretty sure Everquest didn't even reach a million subscribers. 

He said "none had ever reached its level of subscribers" speaking of Everquest. Which at the time, there wasn't another MMO in North America that could even touch Everquest's numbers. This was *before* warcraft.

How many of you are there on these forums?

Originally posted by dalevi1

 

Originally posted by Airspell

I'm pretty sure Everquest didn't even reach a million subscribers. 

He never claimed E verquest had 1 million subs.

 

He said "none had ever reached its level of subscribers" speaking of Everquest. Which at the time, there wasn't another MMO in North America that could even touch Everquest's numbers. This was *before* warcraft.

How many of you are there on these forums?

"none had ever reached it's level of suscribers" - not sure what you mean by that, but EQ1 at max had about 600-700k suscribers.   Of course there were less MMO players out there at the time and very little choice, you had UO, AC1 and EQ1.   Still it has never even come close to approaching the popularity of Wow, either in any of the world markets.  Wow has 10 times the numbers of it's closest competition while EQ at it's best would have had twice the number.

What is with arguing semantics here?  Clearly he was referring to the world of MMOs before WoW was released.  EQ never had as many subscribers as WoW has now.  He's not talking about now.

Originally posted by Ozmodan

 

Originally posted by dalevi1

 

Originally posted by Airspell

I'm pretty sure Everquest didn't even reach a million subscribers. 

He never claimed E verquest had 1 million subs.

 

He said "none had ever reached its level of subscribers" speaking of Everquest. Which at the time, there wasn't another MMO in North America that could even touch Everquest's numbers. This was *before* warcraft.

How many of you are there on these forums?

 

"none had ever reached it's level of suscribers" - not sure what you mean by that, but EQ1 at max had about 600-700k suscribers.   Of course there were less MMO players out there at the time and very little choice, you had UO, AC1 and EQ1.   Still it has never even come close to approaching the popularity of Wow, either in any of the world markets.  Wow has 10 times the numbers of it's closest competition while EQ at it's best would have had twice the number.

I never said EQ was bigger, close to, or even competition for WoW. I said, WoW was not around during the period the OP is talking about.

Originally posted by mrprogguy

 Let's face it, if you had the chops, you'd be producing your "perfect game" right now.

Not true.  Your logic is flawed.

You're implying that since someone has a long financially successful career in commercial game design, then the design choices they make must be inherently correct and 'best' and most innovative simply because they've been doing it for so long, and that someone who's outside the industry doesn't know what they're talking about because they're not 'in the biz'.

Hogwash. 

Like everything else in the world, commercial game design dances to the almighty dollar and panders to mass market taste.  Some of the best and freshest new ideas come from outside the established studios, from minds who haven't been beaten down and contaminated by the demands of Corporate sales and marketing.

Just because a Big Company churns out the same drek year after year and makes money doing so doesn't mean that the producers, designers, programmers, artists and sound guys they employ somehow have any insight or even a clue as to what the "perfect game" might be.

Originally posted by acidblood

As for a solution, I don't think just scaling encounters would work. I mean, why mess around getting a big group together if I can go and kill a boss and get his sword of uberness solo, or with a friend, right now.

This is a common argument of pro-groupers I do not understand.   You advocate grouping yet you sound as if getting a big group together to go kill a boss is a hassle.     I thought the reason you'd want to get a group together to kill a certain boss is because that way is more fun to you.    How would you achieve having a group-encounter without getting a group together?    Maybe you could just check a group box and be auto-teamed with others?

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Someone else said (sorry, not sure how to put multiple quotes in)

"Forcing players to group=bad

Having no need to group=bad"

These two sound at opposites to me.   Forced grouping means you need a group to accomplish mission X.    And yet you say you want the game to have a need to group?

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Anyway, this is precisely the reason I prefer soloing.   Teaming can certainly be fun.    But there aren't words enough to describe how much I despise when a quest-giver says "You'll have to gather x number of companions to attempt/complete this mission...".   

My suggestion:  Offer huuuuge bonuses for grouping.   Massive incentives; to loot, exp, whatever.    But deny no content to the soloer.      I think this can work.     D2 certainly had no need to group, and yet people grouped all the time.

I solo most of the time, but i don't mind grouping. However the idea that i have to group for this or for that annoys me.

I would like to see a system like AO has, the mission terminals. If i'm soloing i get a solo mission to do, if i'm in a team we get a team mission to do. Why has this system never appeared in another mmo?

it would at least be useful when you don't want to/don't have time to group up.

I definately wont being playing this game as I really hate games that cater to the soloer. It waters down the entire game. AoC is a good example of what that is like, taken the fact the content is not complete... if you look at just the complete content all you have to ask is that playstyle fun for you? For me it was fun for about 2 to 3 weeks then I was finished with the game. No promise of more content along the exact same lines excited me at all and thus I cancelled my sub.

As to everquest - it peaked at 500k concurrent subs on at the exact same time. After that it slowly began to fall and then took a big loss in subs with release of eq2 and WoW and has basically been at its current level since then. Then again they spent about 5 million dollars to make it and have made probably 20 times that since its release. Wow cost about 80 Million to make and who knows how much they have made since its release...definately that plus some.

And for those who are thinking everquest what? EQ opened the door for WoW's existence just as UO opened the doors for EQ's existance. Each proved a market that convinced investors it was worth the money to make the next game. Just as Wow has kept the market open for all these current games one of which is bound to be good sooner or later.