All Posts by ethion

Originally posted by Kilmar

Originally posted by Stridar

Originally posted by Kilmar

Who uses Xfire? 12 to 16 years old people? So we know, which MMOs 12 to 16 years old play, wow great. Its like talking about stocks on mmorpg.com, not meaningful

 

i'm 34, my brothers are 26 and 24, we've used it for years, my 13 year old brother has never heard of it.  hey cool sig you have there though, seems like one of those ones the 11-15 Year old crowd uses to show off their characters.

 

The only person I know playing wow is the young son of my neighbour, a single example cant speak for the whole

yesterday there were 13k xfire users playing war... and 99k playing wow.  I think its more then a single person don't you??  This is a pretty sizable sample of the game playing population.  From this one could even speculate that there are 1/8 the number of active subs playing war that are playing wow.  Only issue is I've heard that xfire isn't used in china or some asian areas so you would need ot figure out how to cut the number to just western populations.  In any event these numbers probably indicate that war has more then 500k active customers at the moment.

Even better numbers would be something like lotr and aoc.  lotr is around 2k and aoc 1.9k.  If Lotr is 150k subs then Aoc is probably around the same number.  War is about 6x lotr so maybe it could be as high as 900k-1m.

Bottom line is that war is doing very well for their launch.  What xfire will show very well are the trends moving forward.

Originally posted by checkthis500

Originally posted by ethion

No this isn't an open world.  The path through the world is very linear.  You will go along the road you see on the map which will lead you to the next map of the same tier.  Each map is about 5 levels of advancement through a fairly linear series of quests.  This is broken up by PQ quests, Senerios where you do pvp battleground like things.  Each pair of maps also has a section in the middle where you can do RvR for strategic points on the map.

I think people should start straying off the roads.  There's a lof of things to find off the beaten path.  There are several PQs for every chapter, and you're only lead directly to one, maybe two of them. 

I stumbled on a PQ marked "difficult" after straying off the path in Greenskin Chapter 2.  I would have never known it was there without wandering a bit.  There are areas like this in every area it seems, and I would definitely suggest not letting the game lead you by the hand. 

Go exploring, there are things to find. :p

If you just do the quests from the outposts you will encounter everything off the road which doesn't really account for that much space....  There are quests in most cases that send you to all the PQ areas and that send you into areas where their might be any random quest givers.  I'm only lvl 16 but having played almost all areas to lvl 10 it is pretty consistent and very well polished in the layout.

Now if you are an explorer there are things to find.  There are little clickies hidden around that will give you lore and little rewards.  You can probably still find these while questing but you definitely want to keep your eyes open.

No this isn't an open world.  The path through the world is very linear.  You will go along the road you see on the map which will lead you to the next map of the same tier.  Each map is about 5 levels of advancement through a fairly linear series of quests.  This is broken up by PQ quests, Senerios where you do pvp battleground like things.  Each pair of maps also has a section in the middle where you can do RvR for strategic points on the map.

When you get to around lvl 6 or so you will be in the middle of the first map at an outpost that leads you to quests for RvR.  There is also a transportation vendor at this outpost.  This will allow you to switch to one of the other two paired areas for the other races.  There are 3 in total.  So if you don't like doing the high elf area you can switch to the dwarf area.  So from a pve content point there is a lot of content.  Also each racial area has a different scenario so you can mix it up some for variety.

Originally posted by whisperwynd

I know what Xfire is, and I don't have it...but are these threads some kind of code you give to another or something? 

How can something only a portion of the playerbase have realistically gauge a game's popularity? Seriously...

Can you really be asking this question?  Seriously.... 

almost every game spikes up on release.  holding strong is just plain silly.

if in 2-3 months it's still in this spot I'd say holding strong might be appropriate.

Originally posted by Simkyn

Well the in game chat, at least on my server seems to be very decent. There are conversations going on. You dont see any world chat, as there is none. It's all local and specific to the area you're in. It makes it more realistic in that aspect. People seem to be very helpful in every way from my experiences. Though again, this is going to depend on the server completely. I like that there's not a ton of chat going on, just little conversations you run into here and there.

BTW if you're wondering how to chat in general zone wide chat, it's like it most games. Type "/1" and start chatting. It's not stated anywhere, so that might be why a lot of people are silent or just use "/say" when they want to speak.

/1 is not zone wide.  It is only the little areas you are in.  Like a village or a pq area or any named area.  There is no zone wide chat which is why other then maybe in a town chat is pretty non existant.

Originally posted by spartanp1

How is the overall feel for the community? Is teamwork really worth it? Or is it just a giant zerg cluster you-know-what? Anyone done any raiding yet? how does it compare to WoW?

Generally speaking unless you are in a guild there is little to no community...  Communication is near non existant and everyone pretty much just runs off and does their thing.  Problem is the chat system is very limited so other then guild chat you rarely see any chat in game.  Since all groups are open people pretty much just join unannounced run around together then move on frequently without a word spoken.

Kinda sad I really hope they open up chat channels zone wide at some time.  Would be nice for pulling people to join an rvr fight or just to put some energy in the battle.

Originally posted by Lobotomist

My fellow MMO players , its happening as we speak.

The unthinkable is happening. WOW finally has competition!

In fact WOW is being brutally pwned by a game that made PVP fun for EVERYONE (yes including carebear and hardcores - in fact there is big battle of carebears vs hardcores happening right now somwhere on WAR servers)

Dont listen to naysayers. Cause they them self will be playing WAR pretty soon

 

Only If you play your MMO for social intellectual reasons you could skip WAR ,

 

But if the reson you play MMO is to have FUN , than your time has finally come.

 

 

Looking at xfire this game has had no real impact....  During the week it might be down so but on the weekends it is unaffected.  So maybe some wow people are testing out war....  Feedback from my friends is that it is a wow wannabe and falls short of wow.  So they looked, they said so what, and went back to wow...  Not a huge samplining for sure.  But it doesn't look like this game is gonna affect wow at all.

Originally posted by ILOVEFUNCOM

Originally posted by ethion

Well it looks like AoC is gonna pass lineage 2 next in it's downward path while I just noticed that warhammer has appeared on the scene and is going up fast.  It looks like it will pass AoC tomorrow and it isn't even released yet.

Another interesting point is that wow looks like it is taking a significant dip?  down like 20%??!!

Could warhammer be taking a chunk out of AoC?  xfire isn't tracking warhammer by default yet so I checked there site and apparently you need to tweak xfire to get it to work with warhammer for now.  That will probably change after release.

Actually AoC is already spiking up from the PvP patch it is a bit down today from PATCHING but most pundits have predicted a doubling in the hours played for this weekend which given the subscriber base is a lot of hours played!

somehow I doubt that we will see this game going up.... It is again back under LoTR.  I just don't see people giving this game another shot....

Originally posted by Scalebane

i never pay attention to xfire, don't even use it, never will, it will never be very accurate since not everyone will use it but hey whatever.

Ok the amount of people posting this kinda stuff is rediculous.   xfire is a very good indicator of game performance and an indirect indicator of both the current number of subs and a very accurate indicator of trends.  If you don't understand this or don't believe it then maybe some simple math will help.

Not all gamers use xfire.  This is a fact.  Some percent of gamers do use xfire.  Lets say 1% for simplicity sake.

So if 100k gamers play a game then 1000 gamers will show up in xfire.  Thats 100kx.01 or the percent of xfire players.

Now if the number of gamers increases to 200k then we have 2000 xfire gamers.  So you can then infer from xfire stats that if a game doubles in hours it has doubled in users.

ok now you say but I don't use xfire therefore it isn't counting me.  Yes it doesn't count you because you and 99% of the people are not counted.

Now comparing war to say wow is also valid.  The underlying assumption is that gamers are consistent between games.  So 1% of gamers in war use xfire and 1% use it in wow.   If this assumption is true then I can take xfire war numbers and divide by wow xfire number and use that to calculate the number of subs relative to wow.  And therefore come up with a fairly accurate assessment of how many subs a game like war has.

ok that is the simplest explaination possible.

Now the flaws in this and the variables I glossed over.  typically xfire primarily shows hours played not users.  This does vary depending on the game by upto 25% which gives a margin of error if you are simply looking at hours.  This is only applicable for comparing two games.

Another factor could be a game that doesn't work with xfire.  that would hurt its numbers compared to another game.

However generally speaking mmo players are very likely to have a very consistent percent of xfire users as longs as there are a significant number.  The smaller the game the greater the error.  So comparing a game like daoc and eq might have a larger percent error because the number of xfire users is very small.  A larger game will have far less error deviation.

This means that for a large game I can look at xfire and compare it to a known game and do some analysis of hours and come up with a statement like it has 150-200k active subs.  Or I can say it has lost 25% of its active subs by looking at a dip in xfire.

This type of statistical analysis is used in every discipline in existance and if you don't understand at this point its time to just concede that you can't have a valid opinion because you don't understand the facts with which to intelligently have an opinion.

Originally posted by Dreamagram

Originally posted by Hazmal

People wouldn't use those programs if they knew how intrusive they were on your system and how much info they can and do pull off your system.  Read the agreements you sign off on.

Exactly why I don't use it myself. :-p I still consider the numbers others put into it interesting though.

I didn't know, as was mentioned, that Warhammer is not yet supported by Xfire. Will be even more interesting to see how the numbers progress when it does.

And yes, sales numbers are of course another interesting stat. One doesn't invalidate the other though. They all show different parts of the picture.

They added a patch yesterday that supports warhammer now.  It downloaded it but didn't install it.  I installed it manually and it is working fine now.

Originally posted by Sidereus

Originally posted by ethion

I'd really argue that War has next to no community nor do I see that changing anytime soon....  There is no chat channel in the game that a community can use.  99% of the time there is NOTHING in chat.  And when there is it is so rare nobody notices...

I'd give community a 0.

 

find a guild buddy...in my guild the chat is almost flooded...lol and I didnt even ask for being recruit...

but tell me what do you want to see in a general chat ?...spammers ?..idiots telling blond jokes ?...I mean we are at WAR and like many people said there is no new mechanics in WAR so we do not rly have to ask for tons and tons of questions

I got a guild.  I came to the game with my own community. What I'm saying is that the GAME has no community I do.  But if a new person came into the game they would get virtually no player support or contact.  /1 hello do you like the game?  ...... Nothing.   /1 Hello can anyone hear me?  ..... Nothing. 

Thats a personal experience.  I've seen maybe a handfull of messages posted in chat and generally no response.  The area chat is too small and area to be significant.  Areas are these small sub areas in the zone.  I doubt you have access to a dozen people with your /1 message unless maybe you are in a PQ but even then people don't respond.

So War community = non existant....  What is community?  players helping players not players playing the same game.  My point is there is no interaction and the game is kinda breeding this non intereaction situation because people are pretty much learning to ignore chat altogehter since there is never anything there.

So I'm a new player and want to get help or ask a question - war doesn't support this.  I'm a new player and want to just chat with some poeple - not supported.  I'm looking for a group and want to ask if someone wants to group - not supported, other then the autojoin groups.  I want to tive away a helm of something - not supported.  Anyway I'm beating a dead horse and clearly people either don't care or are too much fanbois to hear anything other then positives.

I'm running vista 64

Originally posted by SgtFrog

Originally posted by ethion

Originally posted by SgtFrog

they say they improved toon animation,its just as bad as it ever was and toons are still pretty ugly :(

the trial island looks poorly made. but iv been in the game and it looks a ton better.  not a very good example of how nice vg landscape is.

meh...its a shame...game itself is not bad....its just so ugly..

 

The animations were not changed in GU6 what they changed was the number of polys in the models so that the performance would be better.

Personally I think the game looks great.  Some animations definitely need improvement, running, jumping, capes etc.  However some are really great like the monk/disciple fighting, rogue idle moves, etc.

when will the imrove animation? 

i thought i was supposed to be in GU6...:)

GU7?

 

There isn't a set date.  I think GU7 will be mostly about adding new content.  In a podcast silias said something about looking at the animations sometime next year.  I think for now the intent is to focus on adding more high lvl content and new stuff like fishing etc.

So if the animations are a make or break it issue don't hold your breath.

Originally posted by achesoma

No "chucknorris" chat is a good thing imo.  That is the sign of a very good community. 

While I'm not a fan of chucknorris chat, it isn't the sign of a good community it is the sign of no community.

Originally posted by Adythiel

Next time you are logged in, type /1 Hello!

Why yes and you get nothing back...

I'm actually surprised at the number of clueless people that responded to this post who seem to have no idea how the game works....

/1 is not a zone wide chat....  /1 is a region chat, which is virtually useless.  If it was zone wide it might be good.  regions are the small areas you run through that change the title on you map.  So each zone has maybe 10+ regions.  So you can see /1 probably only hits a dozen or so people in the best of cases...

When you join a warband or group there is very rarely ever one word said.  But then in a PQ you don't need much.  However doing RvR it would be useful to coordinate a bit or have some communication.  Like in a senario there is rarely any communication.

As to being in a guild, as I said to start with people can bring their on community in the form of a guild for sure.  I'm in a guild and I use vent all the time.  But that just means that I have a community with my guild not that the game has a community....  Different things.  Learn to read.

For a new person coming into the game there are significant obsticles to them communicating with people, asking for help, or doing any form of chat.

As to the /order /chaos thing I tried that but it didn't work for me.  Might require some setup and I've NEVER seen anything on my chat so even if it exists nobody knows about it or uses it.  I did make a channel called order once but that isn't the same.... I was in this awesome channel with 1 person, me :P

Seriously I've played maybe 40-50 hours of war and I could probably put all the chat I've seen in that entire time on one page of paper.  If you try to say something in /1 99.99 percent of the time it will not have a reply...

Originally posted by Dreamagram

WAR ranked #5 on Xfire with 42801 hours in on Sept 18th. Not yet the first weekend, so doing quite well, in my opinion.

AoC reached #4 on June 1st, and I think WAR will have no problem with grabbing that spot from CSS, probably today or tomorrow.

Any thoughts on whether it'll catch CoD2 for the top 3? If yes, when?

(Sorry, I'm a sucker for stats and numbers speculation. :-p)

The standing will improve considerably when xfire actually supports warhammer....  Right now you gotta edit the ini file to get it to report warhammer...

Perhaps the biggest indicator of warhammer impact is not the warhammer numbers but the wow numbers.  Since war went into beta wow numbers have undergone a pretty significant change.

Originally posted by Mordoth

How well does this game play on Quad-Core processors?  Just wondering since I had read the EQ2 doesn't deal well with Dual Core even, so wondered how this one does with Quad-Cores.

 

it run on a quad core cpu fine.  But you don't get much benefit.  The game is not multithreaded.  You will see some benefit from the OS and drivers and things...  My biggest change was my mouse was more responsive ;)

Originally posted by redavni

Well I reached 10, and did that dungeon with a full group...was still easy, but I did need to put clothes on my psi sadly :P

I am sticking with VG for sure though, it's the first MMO in ages I've actually wanted to keep playing and go into work a bit late for. I am on the Seradon server too, i'll look them up.

The dungeon on IoD is not a group dungeon.  You can solo that one pretty easily.  The dungeons on the mainland around lvl 15+ are group dungeons.  This means full of 4 dot mobs with some 5 dot boss mobs.

The biggest problem I see with War is that there is no chat channel to communicate with other players.  As I play the game it could be a solo game as far as chat goes.  Every other game I've played there is always a level of chatter and you know that there are other people and you can interact.  In war there is no chat.  nothing.

Hence there is no community.  You group or not doing PQs but nobody talks.  You do some RvR but again silence.  This is gonna be a big failure and will hurt the game.  Especially for new players that aren't coming into the game with an established guild community or not battle hardened MMORPGers.