Thanks for the review! 

  My nephews [and I] love LEGOs, but based on the "camera makes me ill" and the lack of a hybrid payment option, I know I will pass on this one.

Great article - spot on for us older guys married to non-gamer wives.  My wife tried and likes LOTRO, but we both have so much other things that we HAVE to do, that gaming gets a back seat.  Oh well, at least she lets me play MMos with our nephew Friday nights! :)

I sounds like this is merely saying that the case may procede, not that the case has any merit. 

What will be interesting to see is if the new rules on credit cards which no longer allow them to have the user give up all rights to sue and to be sole arbitrators of any disputes, will have any bearing on this case.  As stated, many states do not allow companies to force consumers to give up their rights to sue in order to use their products...

I read or skimmed this entire thread and nobody has mentioned Ryzom!  Ryzom is totally skill-based and using their stanza system, you can modify how your skills work.  You gain skills as you use them and they don't diminish, so you can't gimp your character.  You would just start using the skills you want to improve.  With 4 base skills [Harvest, Craft, Fight, Magic] that branch as you level them, it is just about the perfect system IMO.  As one poster above points out, like Eve, newer characters will never catch up with vets...so what?  Most 4 yr olds, most middle schoolers, most high schoolers, most new college grads won't make the same income that I do after 15 years on the job.  Age & cunning beat youth and hyperactivity 99% of the time!

If you think you want a totally skill-based game, try Ryzom!

Originally posted by sadeyx

There is only one thought that needs to be kept in mind:

 

Cartoony

 

I dont like WoW because to me its a pi$$-take out of D&D with its bright blue dragons, oversized eyes, armor and move rip-offs.

 

Neverwinter is an atmospheric, detailed and quality IP that provokes emotion, suspense and intrigue....  that would not suit Crpytics "lets make everything rounded and brightly coloured" attitude.

 

I dont normally like to pre-judge things, but at this point in time I can say with confidence that I wont be interested in this bastardisation at all.

 

Agree 100% - never played WOW because of the cartoony look, won't play this if it is that way, too.

GW 2 -  No, SC 2 - very possibly Yes.

This sounds like a great addition - it's the way I would like to play CoX.  Played a 14 day trial, didn't really care for the heroes classes, but liked some of the villian ones - be great to be able to play a mastermind hero!  That said, with limited playtime, I'll wait 'til it goes F2P with item shop instead of paying $15/mo for it.

PvP is just an annoyance in otherwise fun games.  There may not be actual packs of griefers, but there are enough in every game with PVP to make the game unenjoyable.  With limited playing time, I try to accomplish something in every session - be it 30 min, one hour or multiple hours.  Getting repeatably ganked while harvesting [Ryzom] or running to an appropriate level dungeon [AC Darktide] or just fighting different MOBs [DAoC] wastes my time and essentially ruins the game for me.  It was always repeatedly ganked, sometimes by the same individual[s] and sometimes not, but it was never just once so that I could "ha ha, good moves there /salute" and move on.

Good, well thought out article!  The only thing that I think Turbine and SOE [EQ?] should ALSO do is to make 2-3 servers that are p2p only.  That would show whether players really are committed to paying for the game as opposed to playing for free/microtransactions.  Turbine could do this fairly easily [I think] by just turning off the store and only allowing subscribers to transfer characters to some new server.   Unfortunately, I bet within 6 months, those [that] server[s] would be closed/merged because of low population - they would be on the same downward trajectory that DDO was on before f2p.

While the creatures may be Kuo-Toa, the models appear to be the present Sahaugin models.

I wonder how they will incorporate z-axis movement with combat and if that presages a "Fly" spell [an iconic - to borrow the word from DCU - spell from PnP].  If there is no z-axis combat, then bleh, just more of the same with bubbles!

It's "separating the wheat from the chaff" not the "weak" - the weak ARE the chaff  [in PVP, anyway! ] :)

I also wonder why you chose to look at those f2p games.  Is it that DDO [and soon LOTRO] have been written about so much already?

Thanks for the interview/article!  The fact that many of your readers play SPRPGs as well as MMOs makes this relevant IMO.

Wow Soe finally gets something right!  Wish Turbine had done this with LOTRO/DDO - maybe let freebies transfer characters to paying server when subbing, but keeping the cash shop out of the sub servers.

That was a wonderful article!  Very well thought out and presented.

Originally posted by shadow9d9

2. Starter towns. There are WAY too many of them. Due to the AP that are scattered in all of them, even if you find a guide, you will have majorly outlevelled content and gone bored out of your mind by the time you have trekked through all. This made no sense to me. Why incentivize outlevelling content and reducing any limited replay value that an alt would find?
You could Start your alts in different towns - I started in the "wrong" town with my first character and started my second in a "better" town.  Other than saving chips on books, I didn't really see much difference between towns.
3. AP missions. Due to AP missions potentially being everywhere, unless you follow a guide, you are forced to do pretty much every mission everywhere. Yes, some people will argue that you do not HAVE to get all ap, but that is how you improve your character, which to most, is the point of these games.
can't you just move on to sector 2?  Or are all the AP missions in sector 1?
4. Quests in general become repetitive in nature. This is the trend MMOs have been going, but I do not like it. Fetch this, fetch that, defend this, kill everyone there. I much preferred the leisurely exploration and hunting from the original Asheron's Call to the Fallen Earth system or most of the current MMOs. What is the point of being an indie "sandbox" type game if you just follow the done to death formula of current games?
I must disagree with you here - while the missions are "the same" [hell, what else could be coded into a game?]  I play "freestyle" most of the time, just passing through towns exploring and killing stuff to make more ammo on my way.  The low amount of storage forces me into towns fairly often, however.
5. Factions and APs. If you want all ap, you must first join factions that you do not want to be a part of. This is incredibly obnoxious, repetitive, and anti-thematic.
I gotta agree with you here - again, though, can't you reach max level/AP without doing ALL the missions?
6. Crafting. I actually enjoyed crafting in this game. I've never enjoyed crafting before. However, there is not nearly enough info in game to learn what each research will actually give you ahead of time. What will improved vehicle parts level 1 give me vs level 2 vehicle parts? Motorcycle is improved 1, but dune buggy is 2? Give me some info in order to make informed choices. What is the difference between stats on each horse type BEFORE I spend the raw time and resources in making them!? I like my info in game and accessible. Having to look for charts out of game just sucks the immersion out of the experience.
Again I agree with you - there should be a "mouse over" that tells you what each recipe does before you make the book.  I DO like that you can make your own books and don't have to find them all on merchants.
7. Crafting 2. Real time is a unique mechanic, but sometimes is a bit obnoxious(15 hours for some?). You are restricted to queuing up 20 items at max? So, you can't just make 40 bandages? Why not?
Maybe they could go with a certain max time worth of crafting instead of a limited number of items.  I have found this frustrating at times also - especially when I have had to wait for those bandages to finish before I could craft a rifle!
8. Auction house. There are not nearly enough auction houses in the game, and their fees are prohibitive to low level players, and the time in auction is way too short. I don't care if this might be fixed in the future. The game is a year in already.

9. People. There pretty much are none. 1-2 max in low level towns and the top amount in ANY town I have ever seen at once is 10 at new flagstaff. If you ask to group for harder quests(which are rare), you will likely get no response. Joined a nice clan, but 95% were inactive. Could I have looked around more? Sure, but it is still indicative of popularity. I do not want to join a game and spend time when there is not much hpoe of a future.
You must've been playing at an off peak time - i've tried to get away from everyone else and haven't been able to avoid people - note that his is in S1, perhaps there is more sparcity in S2-3?
10. Chat. No real easy way to find groups. The best you have is regional chat, which rarely gets a response. Yes, join a clan, but I look for games hwere you could get PUGs too.

11. Respecs. The "hardcore" people fight against this. I read a lot beforehand and didn't spend AP til I absolutely had to. However, it is absolutely preposterous to have someone spend 100s upon hundreds of hours in a game, just to have had a decent portion of their experience misallocated without a way to fix it. It is a sure way to turn people off.

The best solution to this is Asheron's Call's system. Beside for the stupid initial train/specialize choice, it didn't matter if you wasted xp, because essentially there was no xp cap and you could always just use future xp to add to other skills. All you lost was the time to level up the first skill.. and since skills were easy to raise at first, and slowly got harder, this was rarely hard to do.
This is coming in the next 1-2 patches, before the end of August, if the Devs' forcasts are accurate.
12. PVP. With factions being worthless and changed around for ap, I cannot see this as being meaningful. My only experience with pvp was once having someone 3 shot me when I was around level 14. I eventually would have had interest, but with the wonky forced ap gathering, I must guess that some people didn't have the stomach for it and this will cause slight unnecessary imbalances.

13. Ammo. As a rifle player, and a newbie, I was mostly poor. I kept up with crafting, which kept me near broke. All the way until my current level, I stuck with my lowbie melee weapons to finish 99% of the content, only using my crafted guns for the absolute hardest content that i could not do with melee. Boring, but cheap. Ammo flows like water, and crafting more takes time, endless resources, and money.

Zip ammo is pretty easy and cheap, but it gets progressively more time consuming and expensive.

Didn't like it.
I am a pistoleer/crafter and I have been able to keep myself supplied with ammo with almost no problem [run out of bio mats mostly since i dig more than i kill!] I've only crafted melee weapons that give bonuses to nature, geology, etc and fight with my pistols, so I'm not sure what your beef is here - if you used rifle, didn't you stay with that? Or were you trying to level melee and rifle?
14. Guns. I always maxed perception and rifle, yet my crosshairs even on the newest guns never got super small, no matter what I did. Maybe this was done to put everyone on a similar level and take some skill out of the equation to balance non fps players.... but if you are going for FPS players, the current system is just a poor hybrid.

15. Mobs. Once you've seen lizards, creepers, wolves, spider, and men, you've seen most of the content for the first half of the game. At around level 25 I saw my first new mob, a wasp of some sort. More variety is needed.
If you had gone to Oilville, you could have seen ants, blight wolves, chickens, and my favorite, Sandworms [ala Dune!]
16. Crashes. The game still crashes way too often. I could go some days without crashing and sometimes 2-3 in an 8 hour period. Inexcusable for a game a year in.
I've never had one .  I started in April and have played on & off until now.  May not be the game.
17. Conclusion. In the end, I just don't have the desire to continue going from town to town doing the repetitive missions. I loathe the thought of having to grind my faction back to my desired faction. The population is poor and without the major hype of the release to continue to spur growth, the game has a very small future. Not enough new, too formulaic, too sparse, too many crashes, too little fps control, etc.

It has been fun, but I do not see a future in it for me.

This is just my personal opinion and I am sure the game hits the spot for some people.

 

Btw, when I posted this to the general forums of FE, the mods deleted it to squash dissent.  So much for listening to feedback, eh?

Originally posted by olepi

 

How many other items in your life do you "pre-order"?

 

Life Insurance :)  Try buying it AFTER the person being insured has died...

With respect to DDO [the only f2p game I have played]:

1.  You can play for free - you just can't play all parts of it for free.  I don't know for certain, but I would be willing to bet that there have been f2p players that have reached max level [and have used just earned TP to buy many of the adventure packs].

2. See 1 - like pnp D&D, there is no "finishing" of the game.

3. Cash shop is not needed to finish the game - see 1 & 2 above.

4. Bannings are rare in DDO.

F2p IS a legitimate business in DDO's case, anyway - people have the option of going f2p, subscribing, or mixing the two.  Personally, I really like the flexibility because I have limited gaming time some months, and nearly unlimited time other months.

Lastly, why would you laugh at another's misfortune, if there were any?  Schadenfreud is not very becoming.

Well, you can't on the freebie horse nor a riding horse; however,  you MAY be able to on a Combat mount [can't afford one so I don't know, yet]

Less than 200 now - got mine :)

Just paid for box via Amazon yesterday [doh!] - $19.99 - wasn't worth the extra $10 for a funky hat or a bike that you can't make gas for [at the early levels anyway!]

link:  http://www.massiveonlinegamer.com/news/announcements/703-get-your-fallen-earth-key

Siembieda deserves to win - the game is lifted right from his intellectual property, name and all.   Trion should have licensed it, stupidity on their part thinking that they could get away with it.

If they'd have stayed with the "Heroes of.." title and called the Rifts "planar tears" or "Intersections" or something, they MIGHT have gotten away with it...

Too bad there isn't a REAL Rifts MMO being made.  Impossible to balance, other than limiting what can pass through the curtains, but great premise nonetheless.