There's a suspicious number of first post users who joined the site on the same day in this thread...

I haven't played Wizard101 recently myself, though I certainly enjoy the game - it has more varied content than most AAA games I've played, and it's good to see they're still continuing to expand.

Originally posted by Thenextbigthing

Didn't go well for them? I've been playing for five years since launch and it's a brilliant game with plenty of exploration. It's not a sandbox but it's less linear than SWToR or TSW. It's head and shoulders above the crap that's been released in the past year that i've also played and binned within a month in boredom and then gone back to lotro.

Before Mirkwood I would have agreed with you. However, in its current state, it's good as far as other F2P games go, but it's pretty far down the list when compared to the genre as a whole right now.

Originally posted by Thenextbigthing

Originally posted by DavisFlight

Here is an early article on it before they decided to get rid of PvP.

 

http://www.ign.com/articles/2003/12/18/middle-earth-online

 

Also note that the instancing was going to actually attempt to be immersive, rather than just instancing everything with a giant "YOU DON'T HAVE THE QUEST TO ENTER HERE, TOO BAD." message you have in current LotRO.

 

This is just complete rubbish, everything isn't instanced in LOTRO and if you don't have the quest chain then go away and do the quest to get in! How hard is that? If an instance is generated specifically for the quest then of course you need the quest, so what?

 

It makes me wonder if anyone on here actually even plays the games they slag off, or at least beyond level 10.

The point is that it's a cop-out to avoid fleshing out the world more fully. Try the cities in EQ2 sometime - most of the buildings in the game you can enter, and it does amazing things for immersion.

Originally posted by kaiser3282

1) They do more expansions on a more frequent basis than pretty much any other game

2) Theyre completely free, also unlike nearly any other game

3) They at least make some attempts to add actual new features / aspects to the game, even if they wind up not being very good. The standard expansion in most MMOs is equivalent to a new dungeon / zone that plays exactly the same as all the previous ones and doing something like moving skills around.

This was pretty much all that needed to be said.

The zones are one of the things I hate most in GW2. As others have said, there's absolutely no excuse for the boxy zone design. Back when LotRO was new (pre-Moria), you  could walk all the way from the Shire to the peaks of the Misty Mountains without ever see a loading screen. Heck, even in  WoW back in 2004 you could circumnavigate Kalimdor (Teldrassil included) without ever seeing a single loading screen (you only saw one when switching between continents).

I really don't understand why seamless zones aren't more prevalent. They simply require better engine design, not massively more powerful hardware.

Originally posted by coxyroxy

The problem is now that once you have tried GW2, you just dont want to pay a sub fee to these games that just dont address the issues the players have.

GW2 offers the same and so much more for no monthly sub. I dont know wether its their games or if FC just cant cut it. But I see TSW going the same route as AOC. FC new this would happen, so they attempted to suck as many life subs in as possible at the start.

GW2 may crash burn some day, but really any new and old mmo is due the same out come these days because I think its us the player that are running them down. Is that because we just have to many choose from these days or because really we just need to move on and stop beliving there is a big fat pot of gold at the end of every tunnel.

GW2 isn't really relevant to the original point that the OP was trying to make. TSW is a bit of an overlooked gem. GW2 is a fantastic game, but there are a number of things that TSW does better.

Originally posted by ShakyMo
I have to ask again, as the haters don't seem to be able to answer

Skyrim has ffa pvp?

Yes.

First-time poster telling us why why he/she's quitting the game.

Nothing to see here everyone, move along.

I find the unnecessary bashing by the OP and others in this thread to be incredibly grating. Yes, the game probably isn't for you. However, the neat thing about demographics is that there are so many of them, and there's certainly one for a game of this type. Variety is a good thing, especially in a genre like MMORPG where there's a massive overabundance of games targeting certain niches (medieval/high fantasty, I'm looking at you).

If you don't like a game, that's perfectly fine. But don't make a thread solely to bash it unless you have more substantive reasons.

Originally posted by ZoeMcCloskey

Originally posted by OG_Zorvan

Originally posted by Painlezz

I think the real issue isn't why men choose to play female characters in video games... But why men want to spend hours customizing hair, make-up, and clothing in video games... 

 

I don't see anything wrong with a man who wants to look at sexy female boobs/ass all day long.  But I do see something wrong with a "man" who wants to spend hours doing hair and make-up...

And why is that?

I'm 100%-Grade A- No doubt about it -heterosexual.

But I have been known to have better "fashion sense" than many of the women i know. In fact, being able to show a woman you can make her look "hot" is one of the quickest ways to score. lol

Besides that, playing a girl ingame is the only time I can play Barbie Dress-Up without having to punch someone in the nose when they say something stupid about it.

Edit: And we won't even mention all the 100% straight guys making hundreds an hour doing female stars wardrobe, make-up, and hair.

Exactly, screw gender stereotypes and peer pressure.  People need to do what they want to do and not fit into closed minded people's views on what they "should" be doing.

This. Gender stereotypes are incredibly annoying.

Originally posted by grunty

Originally posted by tank017

on top of that,you have to worry about that professional scamming you..

 

what you dont know,he can take advantage of,enabling him/her to tap your wallet dry.

 

kind of like a mechanic..

The vast majority of people you hire to fix your stuff want to do a good job. They like fixing stuff. They don't like breaking other peoples stuff or screwing people over because their boss wants them to upsell an over priced extended warranty. They like educating their customers.

 

 

I wonder what you lost this time.

I work as part of an internal IT department for a university. I'm constantly taking systems, replacing parts, rebuilding, and doing exactly this. While there are bad apples everywhere, none of my colleagues would ever try this sort of scamming that you're describing. Ethical issues aside, it would waste time and money for both the customer AND us. Lose-lose.

Originally posted by TangentPoint

Originally posted by Presbytier

Originally posted by Cyrael
The gameplay model is old. I never intend to play a quest-hub based game again. I really wanted to see FFXIV succeed, but not by propping up outdated mechanics.

There are no such thing as outdated mechanics; only preferences and tastes. I mean just because it uses quest hubs(which I really don't believe are going away; no matter what a GW2 player says) does not mean it will be bad. Now if quest hubs are an outdated mechanic then so is quest text since we can have audio, and don't forget that we should just make walking an outdated mechanic since we can just teleport.

Agreed. The amount of overstatement coming out from GW2 players is really quite much. But, just like with TOR, which had a similar love-fest over it,  the cracks are steadily beginning to show.

 

The game has just launched, what, a month ago or so? And they already want to crown it "genre changer". It might influence some ideas for other developers, just like other MMOs influenced ANet for GW2. Calling it a genre changer is extremely premature at this point.

 

The "no quest hub" system GW2 uses isn't all roses and rainbows either. Based on the substantial amount of complaints and issues I see mentioned about the whole DE thing - from big fans of the game, not just "haters", etc - ANet didn't strike gaming gold with that setup, either. It has its share of issues and limitations.. just like Quest Hubs do. Personally, I think there's room for both, "quest hub" type areas, as well as DEs. Taking it farther, I think there should be quests you can obtain by locating certain areas, or finding certain items, or killing certain mobs, or given by wandering NPCs, etc. There should be a variety of quest types provided in ways appropriate to how they're given.

Note that nowhere in my post did I mention GW2. While it does fall into the "no quest hubs" category, it wasn't the first, nor will it be the last. The first MMORPG I ever played, City of Heroes, had no quest hubs to speak of. Just tiers of contacts, though they did lead you through zones in a similar way. None of the games I've played recently work on a quest hub system - that includes Wakfu, Eve Online, and yes, GW2.

While I don't think GW2's dynamic event system is The Game Changer, I do think developers are going to gravitate towards more dynamic content in a similar vein. If FFXIV had decided to model itself on one of these games, I feel the experience would have been better, especially given that levequests in their basic form were extremely well suited for this type of gameplay. But instead they chose the traditional path, in no small part due to the fact that Yoshi-P is a self-proclaimed WoW fan.

Which is probably just fine for many people. The thing about personal tastes is that everybody's is different, and it also tends to change over time. But as someone who's spent years like myself playing games like Aion, LotRO, and WoW, that particular gameplay system is tired, done to death, and basically no longer fun.

@Presbytier By and large, games, both online and off, ARE moving towards audio-heavy, easily accessible systems. See Skyrim, GW2, TOR, TSW, etc for examples of this. I don't believe this is a passing fad, either.

Originally posted by Eluldor

Originally posted by grimal

Originally posted by GrayGhost79

Originally posted by grimal

Longevity 9?   How in the world did you come up with this number?

Edit:  I guess since "hundreds and hundreds of hours" equals a 9, the expectation is for an MMO to satiate our appetites for a month?  If so, what's the big deal if it's B2P or P2P since all the content is done within that first month and there is never a need to pay past the inital box price?

I've put in almost 300 hours in the last month and ... theres still a ton of stuff for me to do. Contents there and will last you a good while.

That's one month.  Compared to every other MMO (including Vanguard, EQ and everything else), a 9 is basically saying the longevity of this game is the length of playtime all MMOs should strive for.   Have we gotten to the point where 1-2 months of play is a 9????

300 hours into one month is 10 hours a day, I hope you're old and retired - because that is pretty absurd otherwise. 300 into 2 months is 5 hours a day, that is still above my gaming rate into the game, and I consider mine to be pretty high at 180 hrs over 40 days (4.5), and I'm sitting around recovering from a foot injury. So for folks working and having other hobbies, I can easily see these be expanded to twice its length. That is 3-4 months.

As someone who plays about 8-10 hours a week, I'm personally looking forward to my next three years of GW2. :)

This is the first MMORPG I would personally rate at higher than 9.0 in a long time. For me, here's my tally of the games I've enjoyed most so far:

City of Heroes: 9.4

Eve Online: 9.0

World of Warcraft: 9.1

Lord of the Rings Online Pre-Mirkwood: 8.9

Lord of the Rings Online Post-Mirkwood: 7.5

Everquest 2: 7.6

Aion: 8.5

Wakfu: 8.0

Final Fantasy XIV: 7.8

The Secret World: 8.2

Guild Wars 2: 9.3

So yeah, I agree with Bill's score. I like the game more than both Eve and WoW, but it falls just shy of utter magic that was City of Heroes before I burnt out on it (over four years paid time). Regardless, I'll be playing the game for quite a long time.