Originally posted by marik_ishtar
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Elf - Fast c.speed/ low dmg                         
D.Elf- Slow c.speed/ high dmg                   
Human-  average c.speed/ average dmg
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The cast speed differences between a human and elf are almost non existent.  I think it works out to like .2 secs faster on the LE with full buff.  Since most people don't run around to pvp without full buff, it's useless to consider the difference otherwise.  Plus, necro is the pwner of all.  Upwards of 12k hits with pet and hits just as hard as any other caster, if not harder.  In my experience, Spell singers and spell howlers are red or dead classes.  You will either go red because you have to kill them quickly or you will be dead because you flagged and they turned around and 1 shot you.

End game, the hawkeye will crit  just as often as the SR but for twice the damage.  With dash, the SR is not going to outrun the human.  What are SR's good for?  They make good red killers, since nothing can outrun them.   They are also good for killing off mages since they get a personal magic defense buff.

Originally posted by xchioszx
I'm thinking of making a buffer, but i can't decide who is the best buffer in the game? I think it depends on the gamestyle but I would like to hear your oppinion.  I heard SE-s are  the best.  The Prophet has more buffs but they are weaker, and in then end a player is stronger being buffed by SE. I don't know much about the Orc buffers, I've hadn't played with Orc's much. Anybody who has a buffer plz write something about it.

The Warcryer is a very good buffbot and a hell of a lot easier to level than a prophet, but all of their buffs are group oriented.  SE doesn't get haste so the advantage of  vamp rage is cancelled out.

Originally posted by Raserei

Originally posted by i_own_u
Looks kinda like one of those Diablo knock-offs.

Hey smart guy, Flagship STudios is filled with ex-Blizzard employees who created Diablo. So pretty much, they ahve the right to make another game like it without the flames. Learn to research

He has a right to his opinion.  Personally, regardless of the fact that the devs were former producers of Diablo, trying to get people to play a fixed, top-down, 3d side scroller that isn't really an MMO, and paying for it is a bit late in the game.  How many years ago was it now that those types of games went out of style?  Maybe in Korea where they still have a 4 million population at Lineage 1 it would work.

Originally posted by Amathe

The fact that the OP thinks that getting to level 30 in WowWin a week means you are "hardcore" and "l33t" discredits him beyond anything I could ever say. But he is right about one thing. The target audience for Vanguard was always people who think they are hardcore, which of course is a far different thing than being hardcore. But as the market has shown, there aren't enough of those people to support the game.

I hate to tell you, the target audience for any game with PvP is the "hardcore" "l33t" "wannabehardcore" crowd.  The more open the pvp, the more of that audience you will see, which from what I am hearing, VSoH has a pvp system similar to Shadowbane.  Completely wide open, no safe areas. 

The crowd that is causing problems now will be gone soon.  You'll see them start falling off the map as the levels even out for the players that want to play the game.   You've all seen them in various games.  The guys that camps the zone in EQ pvp or the guys who city camp in L2.  Enough people, that want to continue the game, will get fed up with them and make their gaming experience a living hell where they can't even log in without getting pummelled by superior numbers. 

The game was just released in January, so the real clue as to whether it will or will not survive is coming very soon, usually around the 6 month mark.  You'll start seeing posts about how Xx|33+xX guild is leaving because they "dominated" the server they were on, when in actuality, they only won vs characters and groups much lower level than them because they had some knowledge of the game, usually from beta experience.

 

As to the original poster's comment, MMO's today are flooded with the fragfest quakers/halflifers due to the fact that there have not been a whole lot of FPS games on the market.  They are not used to dealing with something long term and expect immediate gratification from their playtime.  Therefore it is to be expected that if someone releases a game, like WoW, where you can max level in less than 2 weeks, those people are gonna jump on it.   Those same people will be bitching about the game being boring in 3 to 4 months and the server population will die down to the diehard fans.

Originally posted by Talyn

Now that I've been in for a week (give or take a few days due to work) I'm really having a good time. Groups can be difficult to find, but then as in other games, I've taken to starting the group myself and get instant responses. It's quite amazing how many people just stand around idly in so many games waiting for groups instead of just starting a group and getting it over with. One thing I'll say now: so far my experience with PUGs has been incredible. Everyone, and I mean everyone, has been great -- very helpful and mature.

I typically do a lot of solo play in MMORPGs, either due to my work days and hours being out of sync with my friends, or just not in the mood to group sometimes, and I find DDOs solo difficulty setting a bit... difficult... starting at the level 2 medium+ length quests. As for grinding the quests, so far the only thing I've done that on is the level 1 and level 2 short quests on solo difficulty. Not because I had to, but because I wanted to.

All in all, so far I'm pleased with DDO. I never even planned on trying it, but I'm glad I did. After all the other MMOGs I've done, I'm just not in the mood for yet another traditional timesink game over the summer. I can pop into DDO, pick a quest or few to run, and logout. I don't have to commit several nights a week to raiding for 5+ hours at a time, and right now that's what I was looking for.

 

Hehe, the lower levels are like that.  Once you hit 5 or 6, you just about can't do solo missions.

Originally posted by OrionStar
I wouldn't consider a Dell a gaming rig... but maybe you will be able to play it.  My advice would be to stay away from VG. 

The XPS line was specifically put out there for the high end users.  Admittedly, it's not the top of the line, when you consider the best FSB you can get is 677mhz where you can put up to 1066 into a machine you build yourself but you don't get get all the support in the self built machine like you do with the Dell.

Originally posted by Somnulus

UseVSync=True

Interesting that you chose to turn this on, due to the fact that most frame rate junkies and dev teams for 3d games say to turn this off to increase frame rate.  VSyncing forces your video gpu to go through another check.

Originally posted by roadwarriors

Seriously. And In my opinion wow has better graphics than this game, you can see farther, the spell effects look more realistic, etc. etc. I.e. fire in wow looks like fire.

My brother made comment on this to me one day about this game.  He has since upgraded his machine from almost as low as you can go and still be within the minimum to one of the best machines on the market.  After doing this, he made the comment that, because he had to have his graphics set so low, a lot of the animation was just not there, on his old machine.  With his new machine he runs at the high end of the graphical setting and is seeing a lot more animation and continuity.  Perhaps this is the problem you are having with non realistic graphics in VSoH

Originally posted by Gamer1974

The lag is terrible and Xarfox piles up lies when the company is taking bandwidth to support their new games. Xarfox is trying to make players believe that GMs doesn't have a "say" about new additions. On the contrary, Xarfox is sending a to do list to dev and they working on them.

Ummm, maybe I am misreading this but I have yet to see a game where the GMs actually had a say in things like bandwidth and support options.  The GMs are part of support.  They are the end of the line for the customer as far as contact with behind the scenes employees but they are far from the end of the line as far as decision making at a company.  They field comments from users and pass them up to the people that do make the decisions, that is usually about as much control as they have over out of game issues, i.e. bandwidth, content, new servers, etc. 

Originally posted by julrichh
after ea screwed up battlefield 2. Then screwed up bf 2142 ( banned thousands of cd keys for no reason...then wanted to charge to replace them.)
Is anyone even slightly nervouse about their involvment here?
The only thing ive ever seen from ea is bug filled games where no fixes are ever made. Players are banned for no reason (ea got in trouble for this). Worst of all is their customer service.
Even though im looking forward to this game I hope EA is minimally involved with it

EA is funding the project, Mythic is handling the development.  Who will be handling the day to day?  That is the question.  If it is Mythic, there are no worries.  I played DAoC off and on for 3 or 4 years.  I never had a billing or out of game incident with them.  If it's EA, well, then you might want to worry.  Of course, if Mythic has their back side development built up properly, any monkey could handle the day to day and there should be no issue.

Everyone always forgets this guy when they are thinking about MMOs.   The database dev/manager.  Without a good database, both on the game server and on the login server, the game will go to crap very quickly.  People who can not login or have problems with mobs spawning with weird stats tend to leave the game, unless they are alpha/beta testers.  It seems to me that a lot of games, recently, have had very poor database devs.  You hear about it in almost every game where player X logs in and has stuff mysteriously missing from his character.  The CSR looks it up and either, 1: the hack was not logged or was logged improperly or 2:the item was lost because it was not saved properly in the database.   With a good database, this option 2 would not be happening, period and option 1 would have enough info that it would be readily apparent that there was an intruder on the account.

Originally posted by Stroylken

I've been reading all the replies and I couldn't figure out one or more common behaviours. And I was wondering 3 things. For each of the MMO you played:

1. Did you guys performed High End Raids ? If yes, how many times a week ?
2. Did you belong to a guild ? What was the average size of  your guild ?
3. How many hours a week did you play ?

Thanks for any answer

Yes I was in guilds on almost every game I played.

EQ we had a 40ish active member guild.  Big enough to do the big raids, like hate etc?  No.  IMO making mobs that required 200+ max level toons to kill ended this games fun.  The community, in general, had very little clue as to how powerful the bard class was.  I was one of about 6 that went above level 50 before I left.

DAoC I was part of one of the biggest alliances on Albion Galahad server.  I was also part of the guild that lead events on Midgard Morgan Le Fey.  Also, was part of the Lurikeen uprising held on Lancelot to protect the rights of the wee people :D.  Yes we raided and yes it was fun.

Planetside Sturmgrenadiers.  No need to say anything more.  Sturmgrenadiers dominated any continent we went to.

Lineage 2 Part of one of the bigger alliances on Seighardt.  We controlled Giran and Antharas Lair when I left that game.  Levelling here wasn't the issue, the issue was gear.  You could very easily out level your gear and not be able to hunt with that toon anymore till you upgraded, unless you were a silver ranger.

CoH/CoV  small supergroup.  8 to 10 actives with several semiactives.

Shadowbane we became the dominate clan on the Scorn, assisting LAPD to run Rolling 30s and Clan 187 off the server and remaind the dominant clan till they shut the server down to consolidate assets.

Recently, I have stuck to beta testing new stuff so I haven't been a part of any organization.  IMO, if a game can not be played solo(i.e. Final Fantasy Online), then there are serious issues with it.  No one can get online only when the guild is online all the time and a guild member that falls behind ends up not having a lot of fun.  So this is what I look for in those games.

Originally posted by Kyleran

Got me to thinking back on why I quit my MMO's...

1) Lineage 1 (6 months) - My first MMO, I didn' t know any better.  Boring, repetitive game play that serverely penalized grouping and had me camping 8 hours one night just to pop a single boss mob.

1a) EQ 1 - I had an incompatible video card (didn't realize it), thought it was a problem with the game, uninstalled it after one night.

2) DAOC (2.5 yrs) - TOA, TOA, TOA....  single handedly pushed me out of the game... I'm back now, on a Classic (no TOA) server. (bought a new video card for it, btw)

3) Shadowbane (3 months) - Server instability coupled with silly city building system that let other players destroy them down to just 7 buildings without having to declare a war.  (which always seemed to happen at 4 am EST....)

4) City of Heros/Villains (4 months) - Just nothing much to do at the end game, on either one, combat a bit simplistic... Pvp was... eh...

5) Lineage 2 (5 months)  - Its the grind... stupid.  No, I didn't have the patience to grind past level 51.... and hated the way I could be one-shotted by 70+ archers during sieges.... and I hated the stupid Care Bear Alliance (who were anything but) that took over every castle in the server.

6) WOW  (1.75 yrs) - quit 2 times now..both for same reason...leveled up a few 60's... ran through the end game (MC, BWL) grew bored of raiding, faction grinding etc and the pvp was not to my liking.

7) DDO (3 days) - Didn't like the instanced combat and forced grouping (in the early days). Wanted a chance to master my character before embarrasing myself with others.

8) Matrix Online and Horizons (0 days) Bought both of them at the store, came home, read about them on Internet and decided to return them to the store unopened.

9) RFO - Did the 10 day free trial..seemed like Lineage 2 in space.... though the grind was less harsh... had no community though.

10) Anarchy Online (3 days) - My one regret, I didn't really give this a fair try, I have a feeling I would have enjoyed it.

In the end I'll confess that I'm guilty, I change because I'm looking for the one "perfect" MMO.  You know, with automatic "I-win" buttons for people who suck at PvP like me (too old and slow), that don't reward players who have too much free time by making them walking gods compared to me, that have interesting crafting, housing zones and a friendly community.  Whose producers are responsive to player suggestions and concerns, and don't make sweeping changes which totally change the game play.  And one that doesn't automatically nerf whatever class I chose to play just moments after I reach the top level in it.

Looks like I'll just have to keep searching

I think you hit several nails on the head with your comments.

1.  The "I Win" button.  Power gamers want this so they can wtfpwnedubbqurazz the casual gamers.  In response, the casual gamers mass evacuate leaving the community full of /shouts about how l33t some 3 year old is cause he one shot someone 50 levels lower than him on a game that only goes to level 60.

2.  Boring repetitive playstyles.  I am not saying this to be racist, but do Asians have anything better to do than sit in front of a computer for 5 billion hours to make one level?  I'm all for valueable play time but come on, killing the keltir 100 times to make a level 2 is rediculous.  Quests are more of the same.  Instead of something fascinating, like DAoC had, you get these go kill these till you have XX number of quest items.

3.  I played EQ 1.  I enjoyed it a lot till it got to the point where you couldn't get any items higher then midlevel gear unless you were in these uber guilds who required that you spend 20 hours a day, every day, in front of your computer.  BYO Bottle and bag toilets.  I still love the Bard class from EQ 1 the most out of any game I ever played.  Unfortunately, they totally screwed bards in EQ 2 by splitting the class skills making one a buff bot and the other a very underpowered fighter.  This game also has another issue.  Add on fever.  In order to continue to enjoy the game with the community, you must pay for each add on.  I understand they spend time and resources to build these but come on.

4.  Shadowsbane has gotten a lot better now that UBI has ruined it's name and decided not to support it anymore, however, since it is currently free to play, the chinese have overrun every server and PvP against their guilds is just asking to fight at least 5 to 1 odds.

5.  CoH/CoV  CoH is very interesting because of the totally new realm of play and being the first game on the market to do instanced missions/dungeons.  CoV was supposed to add the element of PvP but my understanding is that balancing issues continue to cause horrid problems and not many players or guilds actually go to the PvP areas.

I think to solve these issues, the developers need to spend a little more time on content than what is currently happening.  Be mindful of the fact that the power gamer is probably going to leave anyway so don't cater to them.  Keep levelling and PvP areas seperate, like in DAoC and CoH/CoV.  I can't tell you how many times I tried to throw my keyboard at the avatar of some retard on Lineage 2 because he thought it was fun to KS the tank or healer or simply logged off because the overpowered dagger class moved into the area and started pking anything that moved just because he could do it fast to anyone and everyone and no one could stop him.  I honestly feel that the gaming industry trying to pull FPS and RPG into one package has caused many of the problems that you see now.  Most RPGers don't mind player vs player but enjoy content a lot.  The FPS guys want to frag non stop but don't want to spend 4 years getting to max level so they can compete with anything on the server.  The prefer the Quake/Half Life ideal of everyone starts on a level playing field and hand/eye decided who wins, though more than a few of them resort to cheating in some form or another.

Mythic had and still has the best product, RvR and content, on the market IMO.  Yes ToA ruined it horribly but the Classic servers are about the only server that see play time anymore so I think the community has spoken to them.  I'm interested to see how their new game is going to be, I think it's called Imperator Online or something like that.  Roman Empire didn't die and has lasted far into the future.

Hi,

I have installed Norton's IS 2006 and now can't access your website without turning it off.  I added you to the list of allows but all I get from that is a bunch of ascii characters in the browser.  Any clues as to what I need to enable to be able to allow you to pass through?

Some of you might remember a small developer company named Wolf Pack.  Well they sold out to a large production company named Ubi Soft and their game, Shadowbane, went all to hell.  Major component changes a week before release, dictated by the parent company, caused some major security holes in the game.  Code leaks by the parent company to consumers who then studied the code and started producing their own out of game, 3rd party system hacks.  I hope Mythic doesn't see this happen.  IMO, DAoC is probably done.  EA will push Warhammer and Imperator to the front and abandon DAoC as a game that has seen it's shelf life and more.