Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by Badaboom

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by Badaboom
In terms of crappy design decisions that I think have hurt the genre, instancing is right up there. Followed by global banking, world chat, instant travel and auction houses. 

Rewarding mediocrity, destruction of community, destruction of roleplay ride the top of my list.  Most of the stuff you mentioned isn't even on the radar.

I know it isn't and its sad. I feel that the points I mentioned are the root of the cause of the effects that you mentioned. 

Hard to tell which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Are the features mentioned a response to the other, or did the features themselves cause the negative effects?

 

Instead of writing a long winded response I will point out tragedy and hard times draw people together. This is as true in real life as it is a video game.  So the trend of video games getting easier is in fact pushing people further apart and destroying the MMO community. 

It could be argued that you just want to have fun and don't want to feel like you are working in a game but it is the work that brings a more meaningful achievement. 

Not really directing this post to you as I think you "get it".

ps: and I'm not saying that their is no place for the ultra casual games like GW2 as they are really good for a quick fix. 

Originally posted by xDayx
Yep. Open world is one of the sandbox tenets. Themeparkers will  never understand the appeal though.

Yea but if your only open world tenets consists of mainly PvP then the're missing a large chunk of what makes sandparks appeal to all MMO gamers.  Things like Crafting, Building, Housing, freedom of exploration and discovery in a PvE enviornment.  Open World PvP'ers will never understand the appeal though.

Originally posted by azzamasin

Originally posted by xDayx
Yep. Open world is one of the sandbox tenets. Themeparkers will  never understand the appeal though.

Yea but if your only open world tenets consists of mainly PvP then the're missing a large chunk of what makes sandparks appeal to all MMO gamers.  Things like Crafting, Building, Housing, freedom of exploration and discovery in a PvE enviornment.  Open World PvP'ers will never understand the appeal though.

Except Darkfall hae crafting, building, player housin and exploration. So I do not understand your point. You kinda shot yourself in the foot.

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Originally posted by jahgreen

Except Darkfall hae crafting, building, player housin and exploration. So I do not understand your point. You kinda shot yourself in the foot.

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Most of the cars have some sound system installed but I doubt there are many people buying cars just because of that.

Originally posted by Gdemami

 

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Originally posted by jahgreen

Except Darkfall hae crafting, building, player housin and exploration. So I do not understand your point. You kinda shot yourself in the foot.

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Most of the cars have some sound system installed but I doubt there are many people buying cars just because of that.

I like the anlogy, but that being said DF is a non instanced beautiful world to discover. Has awesome player housing. The crafting at the higher tiers is a little more in depth than most but I would agree the old system could use some work. So we shall see how the new system is.

Originally posted by kartool

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by kartool

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Redemp

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Originally posted by Redemp

 I really don't understand why everyone is singing AV's praises, Because the majority of MMO veterans agree with their philosphy on instancing?

I also question why anyone would consider AV a sucessful studio

Because their company went from 20 devs at launch, to 60 devs now. They're in a bigger building, they opened another server, whereas most MMOs close servers after launch. They now have enough money to self publish? They're releasing a new game? You don't do that when you haven't been successful.

 You do understand the game was dead in the water, stalled out, with no information on the release of Darkfall 2010 ( ....) right up until they announced their new investors in Feb of this year? The game wasn't "dead in the water" The devs were working on a huge update, which became the new game. Which is what we're getting, for free. If the game was dead in the water, AV's staff wouldn't be increasing, thats the opposite of how business works.

 They had two servers, the EU server is now dead. No kidding, both servers have been shut down. They lacked a substantial amount of subscribers to justify opening more servers, its a niche market the same standards of success and failure do not apply here. By all metrics, the game was a success.

There are other reasons to be happy with AV, but declaring them one of the most sucessful studios in the last eight years is grasping at straws.

Reality must hurt you for some reason. If we look at growth, the vast majority of MMOs and MMO companies have been shrinking and CLOSING servers. AV did the opposite.

Because they were finally letting people buy their game?

The only time people couldn't buy the game whenever they wanted was the first week of launch. Know why? Because if all 300k people bought the game and tried to pile into a server that had a max capacity of 30k players, NOBODY would get to play, and they'd all have payed for it.

Sounds like AV did the smart thing.

The smart thing would have been to build a scalable system where they could add capacity quickly if necessary - not turn away customers.

Technology has its limits dude. And small companies have money limits. They couldn't just buy a shit load of huge server farms to handle the initial influx, and then shut those servers down once the initial rush left. That would bankrupt them.

Originally posted by Aconsar

Originally posted by zymurgeist
So no high resolution textures then?

I'd rather a game look like Minecraft if it allowed for complete open, non-instanced gameworld than I would have it look like .

Graphics have nothing to do with whether a game is instanced or not. Graphics are client side. Instances improve server performance, not client side performance.

Originally posted by Gdemami

erm...didn't they open NA server just because of lag?

They opened it because there were a ton of NA players who said they wouldn't buy/play until they had a server closer to home. An NA server was always part of the plan but it took longer to find a server partner in NA. That, and I believe AV sent technicians to the server farm locations to initially set them up. Going to California takes longer than going to Germany, from Greece.

Originally posted by zymurgeist
So no high resolution textures then?

DFO1 had high res textures if your system would handle it.  DFO1 was beuatiful with settings cranked up.  However, as a PvP game many (if not most) turned settings down 9like every other PvP game) to get better perfromance.

Originally posted by Aconsar

Originally posted by zymurgeist
So no high resolution textures then?

I'd rather a game look like Minecraft if it allowed for complete open, non-instanced gameworld than I would have it look like .

/agree

Originally posted by Badaboom

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by Badaboom

Originally posted by Icewhite

Originally posted by Badaboom
In terms of crappy design decisions that I think have hurt the genre, instancing is right up there. Followed by global banking, world chat, instant travel and auction houses. 

Rewarding mediocrity, destruction of community, destruction of roleplay ride the top of my list.  Most of the stuff you mentioned isn't even on the radar.

I know it isn't and its sad. I feel that the points I mentioned are the root of the cause of the effects that you mentioned. 

Hard to tell which came first, the chicken or the egg?  Are the features mentioned a response to the other, or did the features themselves cause the negative effects?

 

Instead of writing a long winded response I will point out tragedy and hard times draw people together. This is as true in real life as it is a video game.  So the trend of video games getting easier is in fact pushing people further apart and destroying the MMO community. 

It could be argued that you just want to have fun and don't want to feel like you are working in a game but it is the work that brings a more meaningful achievement. 

Not really directing this post to you as I think you "get it".

 

ps: and I'm not saying that their is no place for the ultra casual games like GW2 as they are really good for a quick fix. 

Well said i agree with all you said here :)

Originally posted by jahgreen

Originally posted by azzamasin

Originally posted by xDayx
Yep. Open world is one of the sandbox tenets. Themeparkers will  never understand the appeal though.

Yea but if your only open world tenets consists of mainly PvP then the're missing a large chunk of what makes sandparks appeal to all MMO gamers.  Things like Crafting, Building, Housing, freedom of exploration and discovery in a PvE enviornment.  Open World PvP'ers will never understand the appeal though.

 

Except Darkfall hae crafting, building, player housin and exploration. So I do not understand your point. You kinda shot yourself in the foot.

Sure it is there but it is there in its most basic form. Crafting is basic, player housing is basic, City building is even basic and exploration is basic. The game was made only for PvP in mind nothing else, (although PvE AI may be an upgrade from WoW mob AI's)

Originally posted by zymurgeist
So no high resolution textures then?

why not? they dont hesitate to charge a subscription + box + expansion + additional services (cash shop) these days to "maintain and evolve" the game so.... our money has to go to development in general and we havent seen that happening lately. The technology is there already, and keeps evolving on a fast pace. I personally think its lame when there are excuses that an mmo cant have some features put together because maybe the servers cant handle the resource demands or something. If you (dev) cant evolve the genre then dont make just another clone and then charge full price on top of it.

EDIT: note im not talking about DarkFall, that goes to any developer that sacrifices game features for lame reasons.

Originally posted by DavisFlight

However, DAoC functioned perfectly without instances. I never waited in line for a mob spawn. Nobody ever stole my kills (which I always found to be a dumb objection anyway, because if someone were to go about stealing your kills, they could do it in the public zones just as easily)

I did wait in line for a mob spawn. A lot. Both rare spawns and also xp groups in "special spot" where you had to get on a "list"

Helped only by the fact that playing on US server, I had the EU timezone to my advantage.

Examples: Cloudsong, Shades of Mist, GoV, Battler etc (and in some cases, not even drop guaranteed! so had to camp and get kill stolen some more!). (or dragon epic not being up - lol)

It was common practice to rely on community that whoever was camping an encounter, had the "right" to get it. Still, there were some jackasses rush in and zerg the shit out of everything. So while the quoted statement is absolutely NOT true, on the other hand it's worth mentioning that the lack of instances pushed people to work together, to forge a sense of community, to "organize lists" and other forms of self-discipline which lead to a true MMO feeling.

I did not like darkfall for other reasons and will never play it again, as some of its design choices are definititely not my cup of tea: however, kudos to bold devs having the balls to do something different and speak the truth.

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Originally posted by DavisFlight

An NA server was always part of the plan

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Can you provide a quote how NA server was always part of the plan?

Originally posted by karmath
Say what you will about AV, but no one can fault them for actualy trying to do something different and stick to their guns.

This.

I play SWTOR and I like it, don't love it, but I like it. Somethimes I just think, all that money and that is what they did with it. Yet smaller operations like AV are really trying to do something different. Credit for that at the least.

Originally posted by Gdemami

 

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Originally posted by DavisFlight

An NA server was always part of the plan

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Can you provide a quote how NA server was always part of the plan?

 

I do recall it being part of the plan as well, something AV had promised very early on but took quite a  while to achieve.

Edit: Found it.

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=191365 (27th May 2009) as well as from their old website's FAQ (first paragraph) http://www.darkfallonline.com/faq/general.html

Roaming the threads from early 2009 reminds me a lot about Launch and the issues we had buying the client and the queues when entering the game :P

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Originally posted by MadnessRealm

I do recall it being part of the plan as well, something AV had promised very early on but took quite a  while to achieve.

Edit: Found it.

http://forums.darkfallonline.com/showthread.php?t=191365 (27th May 2009) as well as from their old website's FAQ (first paragraph) http://www.darkfallonline.com/faq/general.html

Roaming the threads from early 2009 reminds me a lot about Launch and the issues we had buying the client and the queues when entering the game :P

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Well, all this information is months after the EU launch, also that does not imply they had the idea for 2 separate servers from the start.

As far I can remember, Aventurine philosophy was only a single server ever and opening NA server was just because of latency issues.

Iirc, if you already owned EU version, you had to purchase NA version again if you wanted to play on NA servers. Overall it was a very lackluster thus somewhat I do not think it was a part of any "plan"...planning and foresight aren't Aventurine's forte...