If you don't have any other reasons (friends playing, guilds, etc), I'd suggest the Antonia Bayle server.  It's classified as a role-playing server, but it's also one of the highest population servers and has a very solid economy, or at least it did when I played over a year ago.

Extra bonus in that I think there are more frequent GM-run events, which can be quite fun if you happen upon one.

I actually played on Unrest, because my guild mates chose that one.  It's not quite as busy, and has a lower economy, but once you get up into the 30's you'll find people around you.

Give me a reason TO play.

From what I saw in beta, it's just an asian theme slapped onto the same old mechanics we've had since EQ1.  Same chokepoints at zone boundaries (even if there's no loading screen), same sitting around watching auto-attack while you wait for button cooldowns, same stupid monsters that run right up to you and slug it out face-to-face with no attempts at flanking or group tactics.

Yawn.  I'm sure the folks worked hard on the engine and the graphics, and I did think some of the storylines were interesting.... but not enough for an MMO.  I want improvements in gameplay mechanics.  A good single-player game will beat the pants off this for story content, and eye-candy too.

How can one "sell out" of a virtual commodity?  They may well have run out of STO beta slots to give away, but turning away $200 lock-ins for a game that may or may not succeed?  That's madness.

Personally, I think the idea of bundling beta-invites of one game with another is stupid.  STO and Champions are totally different systems, and totally different styles of games.  I would suspect half those beta keys never get used.  Half the ones that are used will be Champions fans who just want to poke at STO because the Champions servers are down, or they're bored in some other way.  Only a fraction will actually WANT to play STO.

Oh, and if you spent $200 *just* to get in the STO beta... you need to think about your priorities.  You could have sent that cash to ME and paid my cable + electric bill for the month! *grin*

I played EQ2 at launch.  Back THEN, it was unstable and prone to server-side crashes.  The infamous Christmas 3-day rollback should be proof enough of that.  However, every time I've returned to the game since then, it has indeed been rock-solid, both client and server.

It's a very different game than it was at launch, to be sure.  I happen to like *most* of the changes they've been making, although I do wish they hadn't dumbed the crafting system down quite so hard... and that "Station Cash" crap is an insult... but overall, I'd resubscribe if I wasn't playing anything else right now.

I too, have been critical of SOE in the past, but looking back honestly, it's really only the bad decisions they made with respect to that science-fiction MMO which I shall avoid naming that caused me to blacklist them for years.  MMO's evolve, or they die.  If you don't like the direction your game is headed, find another one.

Having played a bit in the beta, I really can't say that Aion is much different than WoW, or EQ2, or *insert-fantasy-MMO-here*.  It has nice asian music.  The graphics are better than WoW, but not as good as LOTRO.  The combat is the same old, same old.  The quests are the same tired variations on "fetch me a spoon", and "kill 12 swamp rats".  The story is more interesting, but the gameplay overshadows it so it feels more incidental.

Of recent games, only Age of Conan offered a refreshing change to combat.  I would probably still be playing it, if it had been finished, and if my computer were a bit beefier (PvP at 5fps is not fun).

For sheer enjoyment, I actually like what they've turned EQ2 into.  Nice looking, polished, decent storyline, same-old combat mechanics, but enough variations to keep it interesting.  LOTRO looks very nice too, but I haven't dug into it enough to tell.  I play WoW because it's a way to keep in touch with friends I don't get to see in person very often.

That last point is why it'll be extremely hard for ANY game to "kill" WoW.  Building a better game isn't the hard part, getting a critical mass of people's friends and families to switch en-masse, that's hard.

You guys are being babies.  CCP hasn't said anything about how the games will interact, so there's no point in wailing and gnashing your teeth over the unknown.

Maybe the level of interaction will be as simple as downloading the soverignty data to decide which planet surfaces can be used by which factions in the "new" game.  Maybe ground wars will decide who owns a planet.... Maybe you'll have to buy gear from the regional markets in EVE.  Maybe it's just that every time a Gallente gets shot on an Amarr planet, another Exotic Dancer gets generated as loot in your EVE mission.

It looks sharp.  I hope they do well, as it would nice to see something a little different in the incredibly boring FPS market, and more money in the coffers means improvements for ALL their products.

EVE-Online has the most flexible payment options I've seen.  You can pay the usual $14.95 a month, which can be paid by credit card, or paypal.  You can pay in the usual 1, 3, 6 or 12 month increments, shaving a dollar off the monthly price with each bump.  You can also buy game time codes from multiple retailers.

What makes them stand out though, is that they implemented an in-game item which can be used to apply 30 days of game time to whomever uses it.  That item is purchased from CCP, just like a regular month's subscription, but it's not bound and thus can be sold using the in-game market system.  So, those who have enough real life income to do so can gain in-game currency from those who can't afford (or just don't want to spend) the usual fee.

This is a very elegant solution, IMHO.  CCP gets their money for every player, even if some players are paying for others to play.  Those who would normally buy gold from farmers can now do so above board, and not add any extra currency to the system, since it doesn't just appear -- some other player has to buy the time.  AND, since it's a fully player-driven market, the demand will set the price.

Originally posted by jusomdude

I don't want to hijack the thread, but is the game world mostly seamless like WoW or is it mostly zoned like EQ2?

WoW is hardly seamless.... it's painfully obvious where the zone boundaries are, espcially if you cross one away from the roads.  WoW uses the same technique Shadowbane used, caching the boundary stripes so you don't have a loading screen or a discernable pause.

Vanguard tried to be seamless, but didn't get the cross-node communication working right, so NPC's would walk along the edges of grid squares, and there was some hitching as well (the famous death by falling as your flying mount disappeared back at launch).

AFAIK, nobody has fully accomplished this in an MMO yet.... although several single players games have done it.

Dark & Light.  There can be no worse failure than that.

Let's take a terrain engine, ignore the licensing restrictions, tack some half-hearted combat systems in with cookie-cutter textures.  Then, let's write up a giant feature list of what everyone has been asking for all these years!  After delays and much backpedaling, let's release what we've got as a "preview" and then open pre-orders to suck $60 out of a few thousand people.

Oh yeah, that preview we said wasn't the game... yeah, that's the game, but we re-seeded the random terrain generation so it's got a whole new world!

Fortunately, I didn't fork out any cash for that pile... but I did get my hopes up quite a bit.  Oh well, now I know better than to ever bother trying to play an MMO when it opens.  If it's still there and not a ghost town 6 months after launch, it might be worth buying.  We'll see how Darkfall turns out...

I think it's mostly because when you first play WoW, you think the game runs smooth, the graphics are decent, and the gameplay is dead simple.  So simple, 12 million monkeys could learn how to play it!

After you've played for a while, you think this is pretty repetative, but I know the endgame will rock so I'll keep grinding away and be ready to kick some butt!

When you get to the endgame, you realize that the game really is just as simple as it seemed in the newbie village at level 1, but the monsters got bigger, your shoulderpads got bigger, and it's more laggy now.  Now that you've slogged through all the content, it's time to sit back and watch while your Epic Pants play the game for you.

SOME of us like a little depth to our games. :)

I'd rather see a different kind of micro-transaction.  Why can't I just decide to pay 50 cents to play game X, today?  Just today... If I want to play tomorrow, I'll cough up another 50 cents.  If I like it enough, I'll shell out $5 for a week, or $15 for a month.

There are lots of MMO's I used to play that I'd be happy to pay a few dollars to play again, but I know I wouldn't do so for very long.  Likewise, if my schedule only lets me play irregularly, paying 50 cents here and there would let me enjoy it as much as I can, without feeling like I'm wasting money.

Overall, I'd rate it a B-.

Graphics: A+

Performance: D-

Content: D+

PvE gameplay: B+

PvP gameplay: C+

Community: A-

Administration (Dev responsiveness and FunCom): F

Overall, it was a fun game.  I would have played longer, but on my hardware I got about 6fps average, and PvP is not much fun when you can't see who's killing you.  My friends who are still playing say the content is a wasteland of repeatable quests from 40 to 75, which is sad and shouldn't be tolerated these days.  Bugs galore.  Zero response from devs on the community forums.  The absolute worst customer service I've ever seen by FunCom.

Do I want my $100 back?  Grudgingly, no.  But I won't be giving them anything more this year.  Maybe if the game shapes up AND I get a new job so I can upgrade my system next year.

Originally posted by Lydon

Eve is one of the best-marketed games on the net in my opinion. Hardly a day goes by where I don't see an Eve advert on a website. I don't even play the game but through visiting sites such as this I knew the new expansion was being released.

 

As usual, I'm glad to see CCP are constantly adding new content.

That reminds me of ZenMUD.

It was an old text mud where you gained experience by sitting idle, but when a trivia question was asked, you had to reply (right or wrong), or you got disconnected (and thus stopped gaining experience).

I played CoH from late beta through the end of the first year, then quit for a while, and have come back a few times since then.  It's a fun game, and while it has had some pretty rough changes, overall it still has the best "feel" of any MMO out there.

If CO was being done by the current NCSoft CoX team, I'd jump in a heartbeat.  Jack "Statesman" Emmeret isn't a deal breaker for me, but it does make me cautious.... Hopefully he has learned to listen to the player base and make use of the feedback from the test servers.

EQ2.

I hate to say it, especially since I jumped on both games the day they launched (and was even in the beta for Vanguard)... but EQ2 has a very good community, a healthy in-game market, and just feels very polished and fun.

Vanguard has awesome ideas, a nice complex crafting system, but even after all the bug fixes it still feels fragile.  More importantly to me, the community just isn't there.  Now, if it can manage to slowly grow a player base, it might turn into a great game, but I don't want to invest my time in that slim chance -- even if the player-crafted boats are cool. :)

Put it another way... in EQ2, on a weekday at 10am, I can log in and see other players running by, even out in the middle of Nek forest.  In Vanguard, I can walk around Martok (the main city on Kojan) at 7pm and I'm shocked if I see anyone else there at all.  I don't need to pay a subscription fee to play a single player game.

Although if you also play PotBS, you might just want to get a station pass and then you'd have both EQ2 and VG.

An expansion is a way to keep existing players happy and extend the storyline/content of an existing game.  A sequel is typically when the devs want to take the story in a radical direction (blow everything up and start after the dust settles again), or when the old engine just gets so dated that nobody wants to play despite the content.

The example is, of course, Everquest vs. EQ2.  When EQ2 launched, they had set their storyline centuries in the future of the EQ1 world, after a cataclysm.  That allowed them to reshape the world and not have to stick rigidly to existing lore, but still pull favorite elements from the original game.

EQ2 featured a radical redesign of combat (for those who didn't play at launch, it was almost impossible to solo because most mobs were "grouped" and you only got experience/loot if you killed every mob in a group) with encounter locking, a complex and deadly crafting system, and a tiered class system where you started as an "adventurer" and specialized as you gained levels.

Bringing those kinds of changes to EQ1 would have had the same effect as the NGE did for Star Wars Galaxies.  Most of the faithful core players would have left.

Additionally, you can slap a new graphics engine on an old game... but it's still an old game.  Anarchy Online is trying this, and while their graphics will be prettier, they will still have 3D models that won't take full advantage of what the new engine can do.  The code that handles physics won't know about new features either, so it won't be as fast as it could be.  Starting over with a sequel lets you move to newer technology.

Of course, I do think the trend in the future will be away from naming them WoW 2, or EQ 3... Instead they'll have some new name with a tag line somewhere saying "set in the World of Warcraft" or whatever.

As a former SWG lightweight player (pre-CU) who knew quite a few addicts who were among the first to unlock their Jedi slots, and who were also in the top 5 of their crafting profession for their server, I can say that the ONLY way any of them will ever come back is if SOE rewrote the game engine again and restored most of the original features that made the game popular and challenging.

The combat "upgrade" dumbed down combat to the point that you could map a handful of abilities to a joypad and play well.  The crafting system (arguably the best in any MMO to date) was likewise simplified and nerfed so 5th graders could play while they watched their teen idol shows.  Finally, the NGE destroyed the entire game system, turning a complex skill-based system that rewarded careful thought into a simple level-based system that can be played with your brain in a jar next to the desk.

To make SWG fly again, they'd have to restore the gameplay of the pre-CU era, update the market UI to be as flexible as EVE-Online's system, and add a facelift via a new graphics engine so the game does't look so spartan.  Even then, many folks wouldn't trust SOE not to screw them over again in a year or two... but without that, they might as well shut things down and make a new one from scratch.

Originally posted by pencilrick

The thrills of EQ were numerous, but among those included having the home starting cities as safehavens and places to train and sell, and to have cross-continent journeys and the excitement of risking getting caught in Kithicor Forest after sundown.  Stuff like that gave the old world a culture and a feel to it.  (And yes, high level players could still buy a druid port if they didn't want to make the journey.)

That sums up the change in genre between early games (from text muds on up through EQ1) and the modern games.  EQ1 required the player to do a lot of bookkeeping by hand.  It was the last game I drew maps (with the original multimedia design tool... graph paper!) while playing.  It was the last game where I would spend an extra hour after intending to quit because I *had* to retrieve my corpse before it decayed.  It was also the last game where I got to know the layout of the game world like the back of my hand.

In-game maps destroyed so much of the feeling that EQ1 had, it's really a shame.  The reason Kithicor was so terrifying was that it was dark (I mean dark as in you could see 20 feet ahead of you, and that was it... unless you didn't have a torch, in which case you could see almost nothing).  But dark alone isn't enough... you also had no in-game navigation beyond typing /loc to get your coordinates, and a little compass which wasn't always 100% accurate.  No in-game map with little radar dots, no gowing trails to waypoints.  Just you and your knowledge of the game, or your printout of eqatlas's maps and a notepad.

Don't get me wrong... I'm not a young kid these days.  I don't have the patience (or time!) to draw maps and try to remember which similarly-named mob I got a quest from (to turn it in... you had to remember!), and which one would sell me stuff.  But I also know nothing will have the same kind of intense feelings because nobody will give up those comforts.

It's a real shame that Vanguard failed the way it did.  If they had stuck to their original "no teleporting" and "no maps" concepts, and had released a game that wasn't so bug-riddled, it would have given you that same feel.  The fact is, instant travel and maps makes the world itself redundant.  It doesn't matter how far across the uncharted oceans a city is, if you can buy a ticket to take a safe ship which goes through a portal.

As for pre-cu SWG... Only way that could ever happen is if SOE dug out a copy of the server code from that time (cvs, svn, source-safe... they must have one somewhere) AND dug out a copy of the client from that time as well.  You'd have to suffer with all the bugs of the old client AND server, since I gather the changes to the code infrastructure were significant, and they wouldn't stick any developers into back-porting bug fixes unless they could prove it would be a significant source of income.

Happy New Year!

I know why big companies like the idea of RMT.  They don't have to put development dollars into finding ways to prevent it, and they get a cut of the profits.

I don't understand people who don't see a problem with it though.  The main reason many people play online games is to escape some part of their own reality and compete on a level playing field.  If I'm physically weak, I can't win in real-life sporting events, but I might be able to play a beefy warrior in an MMO and smack people around.  If I'm financially poor, I can't have nice things in my home, but I could outfit a virtual home with all kinds of neat stuff that I crafted or looted myself.

Adding RMT as a legitimate thing takes all that away.  Now the rich get to win here too.

I know why companies want this.  I know why rich kids want it.  Unfortunately, they're the only voices that matter.

*sigh*