Hmmm? What? MMOs? Oh, I gave up on those a while back.

Maybe Blizzard's next one will be nice, you know, in five years when they finally release it.

Maybe.

More likely, though, it will come out, completely dominate the market, and then go cash-shop + pay for the game + pay per month... hell, WoW's doing it right now, the whole double/triple dip into your wallet.

But whatever, not like I have to play their terrible game anyways... not until they add some sandboxish things into WoW will I step near it again.

Well, as far as I could perhaps tell from my limited EVE-xperience...

- Players are currently taking PLEX around the universe with only their, probably quite cheap, ships to lose, because PLEX is a 'special' item that can't be destroyed/looted/whatever.

- This is making trading of PLEX a bit unrealistic, it's like saying gold is special, if you raid my caravan, you can take all of my silver, my food, my horses, you can even destroy the caravan, but the gold stays with me and can never be destroyed no matter how much you burn my body.

- Removing this initial safety measure (as, when they first introduced PLEX, they likely knew they were already dipping their feet into dangerous ground) will make PLEX an item just like any other, that can be taken from players or destroyed, removing that wierd safety net that made players really enjoy sending in cheap ships with PLEX onboard into low sec space for easy cash

Originally posted by VirusDancer

I think it is a combination of people not thinking the games are worth the money and simply not having as much disposable income.  I'm glad I only spent $19.99 for DoW2 Gold... I would have hated to have paid full price for the original game and the expansion for how little play I got out of it.

I think Dawn of War 2 was made as a multiplayer game, for the 'replayability' factor, not that I enjoyed it.

I didn't like it much, though. I played as Orks in the first one - loved having hordes of guys stomping around the map, and the strange "WAAAUUUGH!" resource.

It seems they didn't care much for hordes of things with the second game - especially considering that you would usually go in with three-four squads, position up the seige/suppressing squad, get snipers in place, and have assault/marine squads taking the damage up front.

The game was met by myself with a yawn - multiplayer was interesting for like five minutes.

---

As for the video game industry, digital downloads. Enough said.

But let's say more!

I haven't played a new innovative game since Braid - and it was a platformer at heart, with some neat "time travel" functions to it. Cool! I haven't finished it yet, because it is somewhat difficult. Yay! By completing what I have so far, I have already 'felt smart', because it was challenging.

It was such a breath of fresh air, and was pretty fun (if a little slow paced, compared to my usual FPS high).

As for MMORPGs? Nothing. Nothing new at all, have I played, in terms of innovation. I can not wait for the day when someone goes "Hmm... do we have to tank, heal, and dps?" in the design room, and actually acts on it.

And I simply don't have the time for MMOs, 'cept EVE, because I don't actually have to play to progress. Woo!

A good graphics engine has scalability. If this is the third iteration of their engine, hopefully they're getting closer and closer to having a well-scaling engine, i.e. one that looks kinda the same on low settings, but can run on a NVidia GeForce 6600GT, and the 'best' settings looking a lot more detailed, nice shadows/water/lighting/polygon increases etc., on... I dunno, the 270 HD cards or whatever they are now.

Anyways, cool, new graphics engines for new MMOs. I like it.

Ooo, nice one maplestone.

My problem is this:

Arcade games are designed to be fun. Fun games can be totally ridiculous, have no storyline or relevance to anything, and just be about going on a Rampage! or something like that.

MMOs were originally about the fun of role playing in an imaginative world, but have now been turned into pretty things that are, wait for it, more addictive than fun.

:O

When someone makes an MMO that is the other way around, I'll consider microtransactions on the same level as arcade games, but for now, it's all about following the carrot on a stick! That's a crappy game design that has made billions, and that makes me sad.

On the flip side, I really love the offline leveling thing.

I can't comment on which is the best crafting MMO... Tales of the Desert?

Nawwww... it's a shame the trolls have caused you to perhaps overthink something like linking your work. But besides that, a writer's work is liked by people subjectively. Some people will like your work, others will hate it, all based on some of their own personal experiences and opinions. Also, don't feed the trolls.

I'm interested in the position, but have no real experience in the field. I suppose I'll throw my hand in though, or I'll never know if my bluff will beat the guy with a three of a kind.

May I ask what you mean by weekend work, though? What place in the world do you mean? Will I have set hours during the week where I am expected to be online? Would Australian Time make me need to be 'working' at 11pm over here? I shall send all of these (and more!) in an email. Cheers.

I love how people jump to conclusions just by reading other people's posts.

3rd person? Yay.

System options? Yay.

Let's hope it's like Heroes of Newerth's Open Beta - where it was for like a year before they released it.

Also, buy Heroes of Newerth if you liked DotA. :P (I like S2 games...)

My WoW account got hacked along with like, a few hundred thousand other WoW people.

I wouldn't be surprised if my account was in there with the others. Or somewhere else, at least, my old account details.

Hopefully some small company will build something unique and interesting from such a great IP. I'd like to see a game that really throws balance out the window on some levels.

A huge orc should be able to deal huge crushing and physical blows, ones that send a mage flying, breaking their backs against a wall.

A mage, given enough time, should be able to pull giant balls of fire from the sky to crush said orc.

I use facebook to subtely flirt with people in order to coax them into a threesome, what's so wrong with that?

That said, FACEBOOK CREDITS? AAAAAUGh... *shoots self in head*

This is why I like EVE online's system of paying...

You're paying a subscription each month to play the game. You can purchase PLEX for money, which you can either use to keep playing the game (in leiu of paying subscription) or you can sell it, in-game, for in-game money. Usually about 200-300 million ISK.

In this way, the game has gone pseudo Free-to-play, in that a player with enough free time/equipment/resources can just buy other people's bought-for-money-from-CCP PLEX with in-game money in order to continue playing the game.

Then everybody's happy, the person who doesn't want to spend money can just spend his time getting the in-game money to buy more game time, and the person who doesn't want to spend time can just spend his money getting the PLEX to sell for in-game money.

If we can support a few more indie MMO developers like CCP, perhaps we'll see a resistance to these shady shenanigans of the ol' nickel and dime disservice.

I... I just don't see what's so hard about servers... How many bytes of data do players really need? To get a player position/rotation/current animation/every piece of gear on them/race/class/face/hair/skin colour... should all only be about one kilobyte, maybe.

If there were a hundred people in one place, there'd be...

Ah, I figured out my own question. A hundred people all needing a hundred kilobytes from the server at once. Making the server need an 80MBit/s (10MByte/s) upload, just for 100 players in one area.

And that's assuming all the players can download at 100kb/s too. That doesn't even cover the NPCs. Now I know how my cap went over all those years ago when I played WoW heaps.

It probably wouldn't be a kilobyte, if they were smart about it all. More like, I dunno, 200 bytes or so.

I'd like to try to figure out how to make an MMO... like, try to make an MMO engine... that'd be a fun little project. I think I'd create "instances" for the "zones", where "instances" are different "servers".

The whole world could be made up of a few dozen zones. Let's go... 25. 5x5 zones. And the player would be semi-connected to the 8 surrounding zones (assuming it's like a sphere, a world, or something) - so they can see NPCs and players and stuff from those zones.

I'll stop rambling and get to a more on-topic thing here:

5. Instancing doesn't bother me as long as it's done right, and isn't obvious. If people are calling a place an instance, it's done wrong.

4. Questing is crap at the moment. I agree. I'd like to see more maintenance quests around the place "kill ten boars, get reward", but I'd like those to just be glorified grinding, with no item rewards. The only other quests should be ones that are well written, and big. They should involve little scenarios that play out, and NPC characters that grow on you somewhat. One of these quests should give you (in WoW terms) maybe 2-3 levels worth of experience, all up. That, afterall, is a reall quest. Think Lord of the Rings - the quest to throw that ring in Mt. Doom. That's an epic quest. That's the kind of thing I'd like to see.

3. Leveling is ok so long as it doesn't feel like a chore. Better quests/story would help this, if the game were fun, like say Mario, then the game wouldn't feel so much like a chore. It's a balance of static content vs. player content, and how long it takes to get from "having nothing" to "finishing the game".

2. Story should be, like, half of the game, if you want people to remember it. And story isn't just quests, there should be feeling, atmosphere, in the game. WAR had that one right - it was a WAAAUUUGH the whole time, and the quests were basically all 'do something bad to the opposing side!' which really pushed that feeling onto the player. World of Warcraft... does it partially, I suppose. They try to incorporate story into it all, just not hard enough, and really, with their player base, they don't really need to, now, do they?

1. Combat... I don't think we need something other than hotbars. I like hotbars to choose my abilities. I just think we could be doing more interesting things. Things that.... throw players in a direction, things that stun... summoning meteors from the sky, crazy things. What, we can create balls of fire, but we can't summon up a small volcanic eruption from the magma below us? Blegh. Especially in terms of WoW, there needs to be more interesting spells/attacks/effects going on. At the least, make us LOOK like we're progressing - make my fireballs bigger, make the swing of my axe bigger, give me physics and shiny effects, make me feel alive when I'm playing this game!

With regards to paying a dude to level your character for you...

I think, when it's such a common practice like it seems to be, you should just be able to purchase from the company whose game is being leveled already. Same with gold.

Then, let's play cash-game, the game where you deposit cash, and get a number. That number determines your ladder-rank. Insert more cash, and get to the top!

YEAAAAH!

Yeah, I can't decide on things. I think people should be entitled to have fun, whatever that means, in a video game. If people don't want to grind... then developers should eliminate that grind. I don't like eating poop. If you put less poop on my plate, it's still poop, and you're still asking me to eat it. That's what Blizzard's done so far, that's why people pay other people to eat the poop for them. BECAUSE IT'S POOP.

Niche is the future indeed. Or at least independent is the future... no progression will be made with the publisher ball and chain attached.

Doesn't even have to be targetting a niche market, it just has to be small and well polished. If a game has good infrastructure (where you've coded in 'cement' well), you can expand upon it and make a full, solid game (lots of floors made of well coded 'cement')

Take WoW's combat system... works very well. Very few notable bugs. At this point (had they not turned it into an E-sport with arenas and stuff...) they could be adding classes and races and stuff. And that would be rad, because they would all work well with no notable bugs.

They set the bars at "good, polished game." for the MMO genre.

Other companies have been jumping, and failing to get over the metophorical high-jump bar I'm imagining in my mind.

If you can't make a solid, fun, critical-bug-free game, then you fail as a developer. Hell, in our University course, that's what we've been told to do. Not something big, just something mostly bug free. If you can't get rid of some bugs (enemies getting stuck inside moving world sections... JUST FOR EXAMPLE) then don't allow those situations to happen.

Anyway, just my thoughts on the subject. Going to bed, work in 9.5 hours. Oh, setting skills in EVE first... mmm...

I'm looking forward to games becoming a larger thing, expanding throughout all of our little new social networking nooks and crannies.

I just hope they do it in a reasonable fashion, as opposed to an automated twitter message "xXJacksonXx has just looted a [Bear's Carass], come help him reach level 60 today! #SomeMammalGame"

Doom 3...

The flashlight to see the upcoming danger, or a weapon to kill it. Not both.

Some hated that, I thought it added to the flavour of the game. Eventually, you could just live off the gun-fire lighting during fights, although some pros probably managed to use the flashlight to kill things.

Either way, that game freaked me out - I would have been about 15 at the time.

My main problem with F2P games: engineered extra grind for free players, and getting the exp percentages vs. cost down to a science to get the most people to pay for them.

Wait a sec... what implications would this have on EVE?

OH MY GOD. EVERYONE WOULD BE TOO AFRAID OF REAL LIFE LAW SUITS TO ATTACK OTHER PLAYERS, SINCE PLEX IS RMT!

:O

Since Pilot License EXtentions(?) are about $17.50 each (I think $35 for 2, from CCP), and usually sell for about 250,000,000 in-game currency, suddenly, in-game currency is worth $35 for 500 million.

Or about $1 for 14.3 million ISK. If you lost a several billion ISK ship (including modules, etc.) - you could perhaps sue for thousands of dollars! CAH-RAAAZY!

To the matter at hand - the guy got banned from the game. What did he do to violate the EULA or Terms and Conditions agreement? Idiot... now he's trying to make a buck and possibly ruin all MMORPGs forever or something.

Then no game will ever make risky business like EVE again forever, and CCP will likely close shop. SADFACE :(