We don't hate F2P; we hate your pathetic, condescending and insulting writing Richard. As usual, you trot out another article without a shred of actual fact or analysis. A bunch of vague assertions and strawmen strung together to make you seem clever and superior.

That particular corp/alliance are hi-sec vultures, not suicide gankers. They (and various other patsies/alt corps etc) tend to war dec large null sec alliances and others who aren't "focused" in high sec and then rake in the kills on the clueless idiots who don't pay attention to corp wardec notices (or are otherwise clueless). They are more than moderately competent on average and serve a very useful darwinist function :) Congrats to them on bagging one the biggest idiots out there!

PS YES CCP deliberately wanted things like this to happen. Like many other changes they have made recently, they want the ISK value of PLEX to continue to rise. The more ISK you can get selling a PLEX, the less attractive any of the ISK sellers are and the harder it is for the farmers to make payroll.

I hope not, for a couple of reasons.

First off, to be honest I dislike most of the "new" additions to the 40k universe; I don't think any of them have added anything to the games that wasn't already around. They have just been more excuses by GW to push shiny new (and ever more expensive) figures on players.

Secondly, I'd rather see them get the basic game *right* and with some serious depth before they go worrying about frills. I doubt they will manage that as is, even if they just focus on say the Imperium, Chaos and Orcs to start. Trying to add in other races at the start will just confuse things and garauntee that everything is unfinished/unpolished and generally sucks.

Originally posted by Phry

i've only really noticed lag on the large fleet actions.. changing your in game settings for these is common practice and does work fairly well, brackets off and effects off etc. It is worth mentioning i think, that this game has been continously growing, continually increasing the number of concurrent users, so while lag is an issue for some, not for all by any means,

I'm sorry, but that is a mistaken set of beliefs.

The various setting gimmicks are the *baseline* for all serious fleet actions, not what is causing the lag problems. Everyone who knows what they are doing (or at least follows orders) is already turning off all brackets, all notifications, playing on lowest video settings, turning off in game chat and playing with weapons on manual etc. It occasionally means you have a slide show and get to fire a few times instead of getting the BSOD. When everyone has done that and *everyone* on a 100+ plus voice chat has the same experience, it is a whole lot closer to all than some.

Longtime players are worried because CCP broke large fleet combat; the lag when you get 100+ ship battles is very often unplayable and it is those battles (and the massive alliance wars they represent) that make EVE, EVE. Without them, EVE is largely a sub-par spreadsheet program. (yeah small scale pvp is fun too, but I can get that in a lot of games with a lot less time investment than it takes in EVE)

The worry is that CCP is basically ignoring that problem in favor of dragging in shiny new customers with DUST and Incarna; I see it as a completely justified worry really. It's not hysteria to be worried that a company with very limited resources is admitting that the biggest concern of the current playerbase is way down the priority list for the next 18 months.

...and after a brief detour, we return to the regularly scheduled propaganda from Richard!

No discussion of any specific games, why they are good or what a dev team has done; just another tirade on why everyone who dislikes F2P is wrong, misinformed and irrationally biased.  Yet again using generic strawmen, what a shock.

"All F2P games require spending a lot of money to reach high levels" Never seen that argument raised against F2P personally, but I'll admit I don't go looking for all the anti-F2P threads.

"F2P games make no money, or make very little" Never seen that one either; What I and others have said is that F2P games do not make the up front money from box sales that sub-based games do, this makes it harder to get massive investment to cover large development costs.

"The quests in F2P games consist mainly of "kill 10 rats" quests, except it's more like "kill 100 rats"" Again, I've seen that complaint about all MMOs, never directed specifically at F2P. Now if you are trying to talk about how F2P games require more "grind" than sub MMOs that is different, it's also not a misconception.

"Most F2P games are rushed into America, resulting in broken English translations" I've never seen this claimed this way. Many of the F2P titles have had bad translations, but not because they were rushed. Generally the complaint is that they are older "recycled" games that are cheaply ported to the western market after they are released to the asian market. Again, it's not a misconception. While not true of all F2P games it has certainly been the case on way too many of them.

"Cash shops encourage developers to work only on cash shop content" This is a misconception how exactly? "F2P" games only make money off the cash shop, so point me at a management team that doesn't focus on revenue?? Every company that has gone or is going F2P has pulled devs to work on the F2P release from other content.

It goes back a LOT further than NATO exercises...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_%28wargame%29

Kriegspiel, arguably the first modern example of "wargaming" originated in the early 1800s.

"The rules set, which was modified several times established several conventions for wargaming which hold true to the present day, such as the use of maps, color coding the opposing armies as red and blue"

Thinking back...yep, a couple of times...

AO around month 6 after launch and the game was still totally broken

SWG when the NGE hit

Beyond Protocol after the games' producer basically called me a cheater in voice chat (for using a tactic I had told him and several other devs about in detail during beta lol!)

LotRO when they stonewalled for six months and then announced the F2P move....

However, just for perspective...I've also played and just quietly drifted in and out until I stopped altogether (or the game closed) in EQ, EQ2, DAoC, WoW, WAR, Tabula Rasa, CoH/CoV, WW2OL, Auto Assault, Fallen Earth,  DDO, EVE, AoC, PotBS and Vanguard.

So, 4/19....and I think the circumstances where I have gone off the deep end were pretty extreme.

Never is a bit final, but will I be very very cautious before buying anything from Cryptic? Heck yeah. I made that decision well before now.

CoH/CoV were fun but they had some real problems and lacked depth....when I talked to their team at GenCon before they launched Champions they had no answers and it was obvious they were doing the same thing with STO...thus why I didn't buy either one.

They could, in theory at least, completely change and do a much better job on their next project...but they'd have to do whole lot of convincing first...

Originally posted by Kwansei

I like how many of the so called casuals are called "lazy". Were this a job I would agree but as it is a recreational activity. I'm a father, husband, doctoral student, research assistant etc..  I am not lazy at all (wish I could be) rather my life limits my playtime. I think much of the issues is less with playstyle and more with a growing crowd of folks wanting instant gratification. I remember in EQ1, where in a long session I could gain maybe 20-25% of a level or maybe an AA point at higher levels. I feltmy character was progressing, But what is currently defined as "progression" is a lot more than it used to be. I think this need for gratification and progression inflation as it were are some of the key problems many older MMOers see with today's games.

While I agree with the 2nd part, you missed that it comes from what I call "frustrated power-gamers". One of the main reasons games have been "dumbed down" and "sped up" is so that 'casuals' like you can reach max level faster. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is a direct consequence of Devs trying to 'equalize' the play experience between players who devote widely varying amounts of time to the game...which is ultimately doomed to fail or produce a so-so experience for everyone. Everything has been made faster and easier so that casuals can reach "level caps" in a reasonable amount of time, which makes the game feel "shallow" and lacking content to anyone with more time...and often feels like a repititve theme-park to the casual who is basically roped to a levelling machine and pulled through to the "end game".

Far too many 'casuals' whined about not being able to keep up or reach max level for far too long and this is what we get.

Which is why we need different types of games that offer differing options. I think there should be lots of games with quick levelling, instant gratification and ment for casual players...but there should also be intensive games where you simply will not be able accomplish much without a lot of time invested.

Originally posted by Lienhart

Time invested in game + jobless/uneducated tools playing it = no chance for newbies + harsh death penality = hardcore game

In otherwords, a hardcore game is one that is catered to those who don't have a life outside of MMOs and can play 10+ hours a day + living off wellfare.

Project your inadequacies on others much? Or just a typical forum troll in training?

Some people play things like volleyball "just for fun", others play them "hardcore" in competitive leagues...while holding down perfectly reasonable jobs. MMOs are no different and like any hobby, some people go massively overboard with them...has nothing to do with the hobby in question being "hardcore" or not.

Others have really said most of it already, but I might as well waste some space too ;)

First off, like any categorization of a game "harcore" is a purely subjective term. I wouldn't describe what I want from a game as "hardcore" precisely because of that subjectivity. What I do want however is what a fair number would call "hardcore", so I might as well explain it a bit better.

To me, a game needs a couple of key components to be truely "great":

Meaningful death penalty - by this I mean, I want to feel that losing a fight is a bad thing, not necessarily so bad that I have nervous breakdowns over it, but bad enough that suicide to cross a zone faster isn't a reasonable option. Bad enough that there is some sense of fear, dread and risk when exploring new areas.

Sense of significance - I want territorial control PvP and it want it to be hard to maintain. I don't want to go into some instance that resets in 15minutes like a bad pay-per-view cage fight. I want to fight for a castle or region over multiple sessions, not have it and the whole balance of power change every few hours. I want there to be a tangible benefit to controlling that territroy for my faction.

Travel - distance should mean something. I don't want to be able to hop from one side of the world to the other in seconds. That said, I don't want pointless tedium either. Travel should *be* an adventure itself; between bandits, wildlife, other travellers, pirates or whatever. "The point of the journey, is not to arrive" - Rush; travelling long distances should be fun and significant.

Pacing - I don't want a game that can be "maxxed" in a few weeks; I want a game that I will be playing for a year or more.

Lastly, challenge; I don't want a game where player skill is totally irrelevent and anyone can play any character as well as the next guy. No macros, bots or 3d party assistance to do my job for me. It doesn't have to require that you be a twitch-junky or x-box grandmaster, but your knowledge of the character and how well you play it should matter.

PS I don't expect that a game like this would appeal to everyone, but that is part of the point. Something some on these forums and a great many developers fail to comprehend is that not every game has to be for everyone!

I admit it, I AM bitter towards Funcom...and their legions of fanbois.

It's not just "their last game"...Anarchy Online was a total trainwreck that they never made right for the people who bought it at launch. AoC followed the same pattern of over-hype and over-promising coupled with a dismal launch and lackluster support. They have an 'established' pattern and it is not a good one. Any successes with non-MMO games that never went mass market doesn't offset that. (citing games that I have never seen in a store, read a game magazine review of or knew anyone who played as 'major successes' is a huge stretch!)

With all that said, there are no absolutes. I simply do not trust FunCom in the slightest. Secret World may be the exception to their pattern but they will have to PROVE that to me before I buy into it. Their past flops and blatant disregard for customers as anything but a quick buck makes me very suspicious of anything they say or promise. If however they somehow manage to convince me that this is worth playing, I will try it. The market options for MMOs simply sucks too much atm to skip a good game because of a grudge.

Been a while, so forgive me if I forget anything...

SWG was a problem child from the start. Why you ask? Because on the one hand it had some of the best "sandbox" elements ever in a game, but on the other hand it had some truely game breaking flaws in the basic mechanics. I am not sure any decision they made by the time you are talking about would have made everyone happy...or fixed everything, they had simply made too many major mistakes leading up to that point.

The major flaws (pre-CU) roughly speaking broke down to these:

Devs not understanding what players wanted or would do: Some significant portion of the dev team were just clueless and never understood why people would devote entire careers to the "non-combat" professions. This only got worse.

Lack of a Jedi system - I seriously doubt the "hologrind" was in the game at launch, it probably wasn't even possible to become a Jedi then...and it should have stayed that way until they had a MUCH better idea of how to implement it. I doubt you'd find any defenders of the hologrind era anywheres. I hope whichever dev thought of it is working for walmart as a greeter!

Failed promises/unbalanced systems: Pets(CH), housing, cities, vehicles, jedi etc. Many things were either not well balanced, not functional, not well integrated or simply missing early on.  Many of these were never fixed or fixed badly along the way.

Totally broken "flagging" system for Galactic Civil War, lack of a smuggler faction...to have gotten something so core to SW so badly wrong took a special kind of talent. To take something that could (and SHOULD!) have been the central theme for the game and an endless generator of "content" and make it the horribly muck that they did was just amazing.

Then of course there was the basic flaw in the entire combat system at launch...which made changes and eventually the 'CU' a priority...even if it made lots of people mad along the way.

Finally toss in the item and credit dupes early on that resulted in millions or more of bogus credits and lots of legacy high end gear....

>deep breath<

So, after all that...and even after the nightmare of the hologrind, what could they have done? The CU and the revamp of the Jedi system were both badly needed...do those in some significant form and then add content, either by fixing the GCW mechanics, adding the Smuggler faction and I think you've basically "saved" the game. Add in some new planets over time, more quest lines etc and it would have been fine. There still would have been problems, but the game would have staggered on with 250k+ happy subs and might even have grown significantly again as people who left during the hologrind era came back.

I have yet to see any indications that the industry will move from "casual" to "hardcore" at all.

It seems rather that "casual", meaning that they will use existing 3rd party applications and ideas to implement social networking has replaced a lot of what used to be "content" for games. Most companies seem to be deciding that casual and cheesy social BS is cheaper and easier than real content and keeps enough people happy to get by.

Originally posted by shava

Right.  Someone said earlier that they hadn't added anything but token content for TWO YEARS.  Must not have been you.  Unless, this is a science fiction game and we've crammed two years in since Moria/Lothlorien/Mirkwood.  There are days I'd totally believe that...:)

Shava

Since I evidently wasn't clear - I was talking about since Mirkwood. I'm being generous and giving them a pass up til Mirkwood...even though Lothlorien was pretty weak and Mirkwood was totally "phoned in"...(talk about cookie-cutter, same 4-5 3 step quest lines at each of 6 quest hubs...yippee) and the skirmish system was very weak.

It will be well over a year since any significant updates when "Enedwaith" is finally in and they have stated that there is nothing major at all in the pipeline for 2011, thus "2 years+"...that clear it up?

Now maybe I will be proven wrong and Enedwaith won't be (at best!) the same low grade junk that Mirkwood was but I am pretty sure it will be. However, even if it is they are still miles behind on promised content updates.

Originally posted by Dameonk

Originally posted by shava

You call Moria "token content?"  Geez, you are hard to please...

 

LOL, I was thinking the same thing.  People are way too up in arms about this.  The Turbine Store was a great thing for DDO, and so far it looks like it will be great for LOTRO too.

And I've never liked any cash shop games, ever.  Except DDO.

Are you delusional? Who said anything about Moria? It was fine...and Lothlorien was "okay"...

It's the absolute nada since that has pissed people off. Not one significant content addition since and nothing on the horizon for the next year (try reading what TURBINE themselves have said!).  The stopped ALL content revamps and development ~Dec 2009 / Jan 2010 at the latest and pulled the token few they had left working on old content on to new projects like the F2P store and the F2P zone revamp. (Try reading Orion's old blog entries now...what they said and when they stop...)

"Great" for LotRO? Seriously, what are you smoking? From what they themselves have said, Enedwaith (yep. one tiny zone and one book chapter) are it for this year aside from the F2P launch...and 2011 is scheduled for bug squashing and minor tweeks that should have been done ages ago....that's from them...directly....so enjoying paying that sub fee for the next 18mnths+ before anything new hits while they refine the F2P side...

Of course, given past history even that timeline could go away...they'd just have to move the person who said it to a new project and poof! It becomes meaningless...just like the promised content updates.

The "real" issue has nothing to do with the F2P move; it has to do with them deliberately misleading their current players and delivering nothing but "token" content for close to 2yrs while they implement the new system.

If they had kept up with the promised level of content updates and generally delivered better content *as well* as going F2P virtually no one (aside from the hysterics) would complain. That is not what they did however, thus the outrage amongst current players. We already got kept in the dark and shat on so they could do the F2P move....which strongly implies that the "new" model and customers will take precident over old ones as the game goes forward and that should terrify all current players.

Lord of the Rings Online - Interviews

That would be the heading it was under for me...it's not a big deal but you would think that since basically every company does periodic SS releases it might have its' own category or heading...rather than being lumped under "interviews"?

This is just a technical quibble with MMORPG.com, but is there specific reason that they cannot call a press release a press release? This isn't an interview by any stretch...so perhaps call it a Screen Shot Release...at best?