The industry is mostly closed off to newcomers unless you have connections or an outstanding profile. If you don't have connections then applying for something like game tester is just a way to get your foot in the game industry. It's a means to an end, but not a requirement. They aren't essential skills in game development, although this varies depending on what exactly you are working on the game.

But as I said, they are mostly outsiders who handle the actual in depth game testing. Programmers, artists and everyone else involved in building games work tight hours already as it is. Lots and lots of crunching when it comes to game development. This doesn't leave them time to go through each and every nook and  cranny in their coding.

Are you saying that the majority of programmers in big companies spend time doing tedious and menial crap looking for bugs in their games? No. Of course they do play testing, they have to see what the game they are making looks like, but they don't have time to go for the really in depth testing. That's why they hire their friends to do it. They can do it cheaply and their friends will willingly do it, because, hey, "I get to work for video games!"

Anyway, what are your credentials to say I'm wrong?

Usually people who are play testers aren't people who went to school to study compsci / art / whatever and then later got a job in game development. Usually they aren't even people who know how to code. They are just friends of friends who have been hired to look for bugs.

So what does being a play tester have to do with being a game dev?

While I have more fond memories of vanilla (being that WoW was new back then and everything was more exciting), I have to say that TBC was the high point of WoW. It had less crap that wasted my time and was more straight to the point while not being a complete snooze fest. Pretty much everything you did in Vanilla was nothing but a drawn out waste of time.

It depends, I suppose. Lets be honest, MMOs don't have good gameplay. The only reason to play them is for the carrot on a stick rewards. If I can spend days grinding without seeing any character progress, then the game isn't fun. If you can max out a character fast then it means that the game flow is also fast paced, and that's all that matters. Only a very bored person can spend many days engaging in banal grind against mobs with poor AI comparable to pacmans ghosts in a game where the combat mechanics aren't engaging and you cycle the same few skill over and over again in endless repetition just to see a marginal increase in your character sheet eventully.

Richer than all my friends.

Oblivion is only worth installing if you intend to install Nehrim. It's not a simple mod; it's basically a whole new game running on Oblivion's engine. The world is hand crafted instead of generated by a program (which is why Cyrodiil is such an uninteresting and bland looking place), combat is slightly better and the leveling system has been revamped. It's just a more tolerable game all around. Highly recommended.

Originally posted by TerryMiller

Kudos for the woman that had implants. implants save her from the vemon of the snake. and poor snake for dying that karma for ya for biting boobs. lol

A snake acting like a snake and then dying due to poisoning is karma now? Son, don't ever use that word again.

Free to Play is a concept that looks excellent on paper. If there is content you want, you pay for it. If there is something you do not care for then you can ignore it.

The problem is that this kind of business model will always end up costing much, much more than simply purchasing the full package from the store, paying a monthly sub or even a combination of both.

Personally I don't see anything wrong with a monthly sub. I don't play MMOs anymore, haven't played one in over a year, but when I did play MMOs, it was the cheapest hobby I ever had. 15 euros a month and that was it. I devoted all my time to that one MMO so I hardly bought any new games either.

WoW going F2P is anything but a sign of doom n' gloom. It's just Blizzard going with the times and bracing for the next method how games will be played and payed for. Subscription based games will be a thing of the past within 10 years. Heck, even now WoW doesn't have a monthly sub in asia. It never did.

Flying mounts killed world PvP in WoW, not BGs. In WAR doing RvR yielded inferior rewards to BG grind plus it lagged like crazy. At least that was the case during the launch days. People are lemmings and they need to be guided with bread crumbs. If one path offers less bread crumbs than the other then why follow that particular path?

Oh boy. Another one of these threads where we confuse time consuming with difficult.

At first the "WoW clones" were nothing but EQ clones, seeing how WoW was nothing but an EQ clone itself during the vanilla years. Now WoW clones are games that look exactly like WoW. They ape gameplay elements, the terrible art etc.

Sci-Fi beats Fantasy, unless the game happens to be an RPG. 95% of the time you'll still have swordsmen wielding swords made out of inferior metals against space orcs or space goblins.

So I got the game from Steam since it was only 2.50€. Admittedly I'm not very far in the game, but so far it's a decent game. It's something I could probably grow to enjoy quite a lot. My only problem is that the population seems to be direly low. I hardly ever see anyone, and the auction house doesn't have many items for sale. For a game that is entirely supported by the players, this isn't a very good situation to be in. So my question is: where is everyone?

Originally posted by Yohanu

Originally posted by nariusseldon

Originally posted by nanoviper

It's been 10 years since the release of Ultima: Online, back in good old 2009 we would have thought that by now games would be on such a level classics like Ultima, Asherons Call, and Everquest, would pale in comparison. However it is now 2009, and most gamers who have played MMO's for any period of time would agree that nothing on the market today can even live up to these original releases.

       Nostalgia aside, when critically examining these games, it appears as though with each new release the games are being dumbed down; It reminds me alot of the Mike Judge movie: Idiocracy where overtime people became dumber and dumber as technology allowed them more and more luxeries. 

       What I have been wondering is why no games with depth and challenge have been introduced to the market since 2003; The closest we have come is darkfall (don't get me started on that tangent) and in many ways I don't even feel as though, it has lived up to it's potential.

     Am I the only one who feels like this? Is that why there are no more deep challenging games on the market? What do you guys think?

 

Yes, you and a minority of the players. I started with UO & EQ and they *are* pale in comparison to the newer modern MMOs in terms of features and fun factor.

Is that why UO has Player-Housing, Taming, Player-Driven Economy, Skill-based system and plenty of more features which are vastly superior to modern day mmo's?

SWG had those as well. Big whoop.

I've recently returned back to EQ and I can say with 100% certainty that it is no less stupid than WoW. They are both equally crappy games. Even SWG, my first "kiss", turned out to be really, really horrible when I went to try out SWGemu.

I've come to realise that the whole MMORPG genre has always been a very bad game genre. They are very boring to play and the mechanics are hardly ever anything other than lame. Mediocre at best.

How did I realise this revelation? All my friends have quit playing them, but I still clinged to them. I realised that the fun I had was because I played them with friends; both people I met online and irl. Every single good memory I have of MMORPGs is of me and my bizarre antics with my friends.

And this takes us back to the problem with modern MMORPGs. The most recent new MMORPG I've played is Champions Online, and like most modern MMOs, it's so solo friendly that it actually hurts your XP to group with anyone. There's no need to play with others, thus no one does. I tried several times to spark up some conversation in the general chat, but rarely did anything come out of it.

In conclusion: maybe MMORPGs actually haven't gotten better or worse. I think that they are pretty much the same now as they were in the past. The only thing that I can see that has changed drastically is the mentality of the players. Without the players MMORPGs are just bad games with mechanics that feel so old and outdated that they make old atari games seem fresh and innovative. Which is what they pretty much are when you get down to it. Whether it's EQ or WoW, old or new, it doesn't really matter. Both suck and so does the genre.

Massive flood of gameless people and the dev's wouldn't know what to do with them, nor how to please them.

wenches, all of them.

OP is just angry because he wanted to be hardcore, but his mom wouldn't let him.