There aren't a ton of games for the iPhone that would be considered MMOs. But I have discovered a couple. One is called Parallel Kingdom. Another is an EVE-like game called Outer Empires. Another is a Diablo-style game (looks great) that should be out in the next couple of days called Pocket Legends (and it's on the iPad right now).

I'm sure there are others that I don't know about. It would be nice to see them included in the forums here, and maybe some articles on the better and more interesting ones.

Originally posted by Omali

The client in most stores is $15, the cost of a month's subscription, anyway, so really it's just streamlining the process.

There's sales tax on that $15 from a store. But subscriptions I don't think are subject to tax. So maybe it's a little cheaper to go the other route, technically. All other things being equal. Nitpick!

Thanks for the answers. 

I saw a video of the side-scrolling gameplay. It looks like it's instanced, right? Is it kind of like Guild Wars where the towns are hubs and then when you "go out in the world" it's your own instance that gets populated with a set number of mobs just for you?

I know, I know, I'll give it a try. I'm just super busy right now and it's easier to ask here for now.

Hey. I'm not too keen on F2P, but the side scrolling 2D action looks tasty enough for a good old college try.

Questions:

1. I'm on the west coast of the USA. I would be playing the game fairly late, probably around 10pm PST. What server would you recommend so that there's a healthy population at that time?

2. Does the game have quest rewards and gear drops, or do you have to pay for that stuff?

3. I'm not a teenager. (I'm older.) Will I be put-off by grouping and the community in this game?

4. How's the PvE? I read it's grindy. 

5. Crafting? Does this game have it?

6. How are you today?

 Ha, I guess nobody cares. Well I ended up deleting the app from my phone anyway. It was just too difficult to get near an item. It would be placed in the middle of a big store or something and you would have to get something like 30 feet away from the pinpoint in order to pick it up. And in some areas there just didn't seem to be any items at all. Kind of a fail. Good idea though. They can improve it by fixing the "drop rate" and making the radius about 3x bigger.

I still haven't tried Shaiya yet, but I probably won't. I'm not a f2p guy.

 That's good to hear. Do you think the economy has improved? When I first started playing I was hoping to have some serious trading and moneymaking going on. You know, run goods from point A to point B and play the market for fun and profit. But somehow it seemed like the only way to do production properly was to be in a guild with structured roles, in a closed system. The open market was kind of stagnant. Basically: has it become easier to be a solo-trader type of person? Or do you find yourself being forced to participate in PvP combat as it was in the early days?

Hello,

I discovered this game because I downloaded an iPhone app called "iCollector". This app is a GPS-linked game where you walk around in the real world and there are hidden virtual items and when you get close, you collect the item. It seems to be mostly gold and then some in-game items for this game Shaiya.

I've only used the app for about an hour or so (haven't even walked around) and I've never heard of Shaiya before. I was curious if people on here use the iPhone app and can weigh in on how they work with one another. Is it pretty cool? What do you think? 

 OP here... Two days ago I reactivated my subscription (previously 21 day old trial character) for a 3 month subscription. And yesterday I unhooked the PC from my living room TV and moved it onto a desk. I've got it on my old 19" monitor. Haha, monitor technology has changed so much in 8 years. I might have to get a bigger widescreen monitor, maybe a 20". It's much easier to read now at any rate.

Now I just need to figure out what I want to do with my character. Training up learning skills for now and doing PvE missions while I re-learn basic controls.

Originally posted by Gdemami

---

 

I wouldn't call it a 'fixing'.
Using something they way it is not intended is not really problem anywhere but on your side.

No, you can't set larger font than 12pt in option menu.

My side? Take it easy man. I was just asking if there's a larger font size setting now. I got my answer from the first guy.

I'm one of those that keeps trying to play Eve for small periods of time. About 1.5 years ago I hooked my PC up to my 34" HD TV and it works pretty well for most things. (Get to have my TV be the main center for A/V stuff, works well in a small apartment.)  But the last time I played Eve was about a year ago. And the foremost problem I had was being unable to read anything. It doesn't help that I have bad eyesight. But as I recall the only settings were you could set font size up to 10pt font and also a "small/large" option for the UI in general or something like that. But it still didn't make the text large enough to read. I'm just wondering, did they by chance fix this problem? 

(Grumble nevermind human avatars I need to read the screen grumble.) 

OP here.  Lol I love these responses. People are so jaded: it's just a video game and I'm just a guy posting some thoughts on a board that gets..what? 4 new threads a day maybe? My advice is don't scare people away from the boards you enjoy reading, because there aren't many here.

Anyway, I probably should have posted after a little more time spent with the game, which is exactly what I did last night. I rerolled with a warrior and did some starter quests. I did the adventuring one where you attack troll guys or whatever and that was alright. Standard "go kill x" fare. 

Then I tried out diplomacy a little, and used someone's advice here saying to set up the cards beforehand. I failed my first battle of wits, and decided to go give crafting a try. I'll come back to diplomacy later. I have a quest to go defeat 5 or so NPCs in diplomacy. This sounds interesting... do you come into a new area and get these quests to diplomacy-battle people? What does that accomplish? (I.e. what rewards to you get?)

Now crafting was fun! I was hoping to see something like this in Warhammer (and instead ended up just sticking some seeds in pots to grow in that game grr). I like how it goes in stages and "complications" pop up, and you try to pump up quality while you can. And it looks like you can craft as much as you want in a day, if I'm not mistaken? You just need the requisite supplies, eh? I like the work orders. That reminds me of Eve. I wish PotBS has work orders or something to stimulate the economy more, because in that game it was all about closed economies within a guild. Anyway things look up on the crafting front.

Then I found a harvesting guy. I picked mining and quarrying since I figured that would go along with blacksmith. I didn't get a chance to try harvesting anything because I was coming up on 12:30am. (I started late because of long work hours.) Hopefully harvesting is alright.

Oh I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered the equipment page and found multiple tabs with a ton of slots. I like the idea of optimizing my harvesting gear versus crafting versus adventuring etc. I only worry that the drops might be too numerous and fill up my bags too quickly, but hopefully they have that balanced.

Anyway that's about it for now. I'll tackle some more quest chains and diplomacy maybe later tonight. Peace!

Thanks. Yeah I was just sort of doing a blog style thing of my first 10 minutes playing the game, because I thought it might be interesting to some. And to the guy who said it wasn't feedback, I pointed out an egregious bug, explained my mild frustration with getting ganked by a high level mob, the confusion with learning to be a diplomat, and I called out things that I liked too. If this isn't feedback I don't know what is.

I'll definitely slow down and try again. I was just running out to see what it felt like. I might want to focus on harvesting and crafting if that ends up being fun for me. Thanks.

(I'm going to try and give more updates to this as I play a little bit more.) 

I'm sort of a casual player. Life has been busy lately, but I thought I'd try out Vanguard a little bit. Well let me preface this... I've played 8 months of WoW, almost as much of GW, maybe 1-2 months of WAR, POTBS, CoH, and tiny amounts of Eve and Ryzom. I quit WoW because all I was doing was buying/selling on the auction house and it became a second job. I really wanted to like Eve but was physically unable to play it (font is too tiny and I have bad eyes). And POTBS was close to being a great game, but I was hoping for more from the economy.

So basically I'm a PVE guy who likes crafting and economy and that's what's drawn me to Vanguard. I'm coming into this without preconceptions, I've glossed over people saying bad things about the launch, but don't put too much stock in that. Anyway on with it. I give games a pretty fair shake; I'm not here to cause drama or whatever. I just wanted to share.

Setting up the SOE station account and downloading/installing the game was  a breeze. It downloaded pretty quickly. (Had to update ATI drivers to stop from crashing, but whatever, that happens with every game.)

I didn't spend too much time on character creation, but it looked pretty standard. I see they went for a realistic style. The wolf people looked kind of freaky. I just threw together a ranger so I could jump in the game and check it out.

The first thing that grabbed my eye once in the world were trees falling down in the distance. I ran over and it was an NPC chopping down trees. I approached a tree and saw a negatory chop-down-tree icon and thought it would be cool to do some lumberjacking later on; I assume that's harvesting for crafting. 

The models and shaders and stuff look pretty solid. I had to turn down graphical quality to get it to run at framerate, but I'm running on a 1080p screen right now, lol. My character's jump animation looks a little wooden/floaty. I don't like how if I stand still for more than 3 seconds (literally) he starts swinging his swords around. But I've certainly seen worse graphics out there.

I talked to an NPC and he's like "go over to this other guy". They were giving me the runaround with not much to do, so I decided to run off and find a mob and check out the battle system. Well there weren't any obvious mobs nearby, so I just kept going in a straight line, and started swimming. I swam to the bottom of the lake, and then kept swimming: I swam right through the ground! Great a nice bug in the first 5 minutes of gameplay. I got myself back on land somehow, finally saw some sort of spider/lizard mob or something, ran up and he two-shotted me and I died. Being a noob and not knowing the hud well enough yet, I had attacked a level 45 mob because I assumed it was a level 2 or something, being the starter area. They really shouldn't put such high level guys right where people start the game. I really didn't go that far from where the game started. I admit I was running off instead of doing the starter quest chain though.

So next I went to do this introductory Diplomacy quest. The card game started and it was my turn to make a move. The dialog said to choose a card from... trying to remember the wording... the little tray or whatever of cards. First of all the tray thing wasn't open. The dialog didn't say how to bring it up, and finally I poked around in menus and found a listing of cards, with a button I pressed that popped up the shadowy tray thing. (Sorry I can't remember the terminology.) I tried dragging cards, which I assumed to be skills, into the tray, but that wouldn't work. I tried clicking the tray...tried hitting the action button on the game window... nothing's working and no explanation. They need to hold your hand just a little more on this first dialog tutorial. I got frustrated and gave up on that.

Then I had a phone call and my friend came over and I stopped playing. I'll probably give it another try in a day or two. My initial impression is that this might be another rushed SOE game like POTBS. I always hope for a hidden gem, but I'm sure most people reading this thread know how that goes: you have to compromise and "look the other way" on things. Anyway I'll post back with more impressions later.

 

Oh I wasn't a RP'er on Bonny. Although the RP people would end up in the pre-port-battle command room "in character", for better or worse. As the French we were barely able to field a decently sized resistance (usually fending off a British attack on a port). Population was so unbalanced, as I'm sure it still is right? (Pirates === British >> French > Spanish).

I stopped playing at the end of the first 1.5 month, even though I had paid for 3, lol. Quit after both my RL friends stopped. I was looking for that niche but didn't find it. I figure a few months of polish/fixes and server consolidation would have helped. So there are 3 American servers now, one of which is "a ghost town"? Hmm.

So what do you guys love about the game? I'm almost a fish out of water because I usually like PvE and crafting in my MMOs, but all the MMOs today seem to beat the PvP drum, which isn't exactly what I want. I guess I'm old school. (Loving Fallout 3 at the moment by the way.) Maybe I can come back to Pirates and roll a Freetrader instead of Naval Officer this time and focus on trade.

The sony account won't let me post on the official forums. I played on Bonny at launch for about 1.5 months. I kind of liked the game, but left for reasons that I'm sure have been discussed ad nauseum. I see that they merged the servers, and Bonny is no more. I used to play with a guild called Represailles, a bunch of mature guys. They seem to no longer exist as well. I did a couple of port battles and that was pretty fun.

So I don't know. How's the game now? Is the population better now that there are fewer servers? Thinking about coming back and rolling deep in the econ stuff. Is the auction system better now? Does avatar combat suck less?

I'm keeping my eye on that Darkfall game too, which will either be a joke or the sleeper MMO of the millenium.