To answer your question, yes the combat has always been that slow and if you find it boring then yes it will pretty much be the same all the way up.

Some will say this is skill or requires strategy, but it is really just slowed down combat with less mechanics and abilities to deal with. 

It does get better in groups, but the same goes for any mmo.

Those prices are crazy.  Just another reason why I avoid cash shop games.

On a side note, I can't think of anything that sounds more ridiculous than people preparing for pvp battle by putting on perfume.  It just feels like a horribly contrived concept to cover up some revenue decision. 

I'm curious what crafting has to do with housing?  A house doesn't have to be a workshop.

Wow crafting is just fine as it is.  It may not be very complex, but it also doesn't conflict with the gameplay of the world and trivialize most of the game content.

Player housing would be pretty cool just for a place to hang out and make your own, but it is a real balancing act.  Give it to much utility and it replaces common areas of the game and turns the world into a virtual ghost town.  Done right it might be nice, but it

I hope that blizzard doesn't add housing and guildhalls like EQ2, because they don't really make the game better and actually caused more harm than good.

A good portion of the game didn't need to enjoy running a mall or shop.  There were plenty of other avenues to play in and honestly if everyone wanted to run shops then it wouldn't be much of an economy. 

Even before the NGE the whole game was fill with systems that were only 50-75% complete, flat out broken beyond tollerable levels or just simply missing. 

A great community, interesting IP and loads of potential that have not materialized will only carry a game so far. Most of the other games on that list didn't have the potential to be good.  They just sucked and there was no changing that. 

Originally posted by wolfing

Originally posted by MMOman101

Originally posted by TheHellfire

 Lets face it STO is sinking faster than the titanic

 

This has to be one of the biggest failures of a AAA MMO with a popular IP ever. 

/golf clap

 

It'll be hard to dethrone Matrix Online though

I think The Sims online beats everything else hands down.  The most popular PC game franchise in history backed up with hundred of millions of dollars to develop the game (and the online division).  It would be very hard to beat the volumes of failure in that game.  

The life of vanguard is really in the players hands now.  Soe already admitted they are thinking about merging servers, so populations have declined well below capacity and after that there is the bombshell which pretty much says long term growth of the game is over. 

It really depends now on how long people are willing to hold out with minimal content that will not cover much or really expand the game.  Personally I think the real damage is going to be watching the game slowly die from an inside perspective.   

However soe is more than willing to let a game run with little or no support at all.  I doubt they will shut the game down for money reasons unless they have something to replace it with on the station pass.  Vanguard isn't going anywhere for a while, both forward or away. 

If you like the game, enjoy it while you can.  As long as you don't go in with big expectations and accept that the game may go away, why not enjoy it?

Originally posted by NightCloak

Really the mastery system just sounds like it will add passives to enhance the tree you go down to further form your toon into that tree and increase the number of "free" talent points that are left over from the cookie-cutter standard builds comprised of those "must-haves" mentioned.

 

So you will likely see more variance in builds, but the overall effect is the same. Each toon is specialized into one of three builds and it will become more pronounced.

 

Cat might bring me back to WoW. Have to wait and see.

Actually the concept behind the changes is to allow more freedom of choice to players and not force more "must have" choices.  The mastery system itself is meant to replace all the passive benefits of old passive bonus talents.

New talents are intended to focus each point spent to give some meaningful change to your characters abilities instead of being filled with tons of passive bonuses. 

If blizzard somehow succeeds in that, it will be really interesting to see the different paths people take, but personally I think they are changing to much [again] between expansions and it is going to be a balance nightmare.  If the end result is that cookie cutter builds end up being something like 50ish similar points spent with 20ish points that differ from player to player I think that is a big improvement. 

TLDR version: if people complain they don't have enough talent points to get all the good talents when the changes are released it will be a success. 

I get a chuckle out of the number 1 reason.

The number 1 reason Aion in the #1 mmo is because it is the number 2 mmo!  

Worthy of a top spot on a Letterman top 10 list. 

Originally posted by Ragemaster

Originally posted by Moirae

I know how to read Ragemaster. But you obviously don't want to be here because you want to be able to PvP the way you want to. So find another game. Thats fine. Most people just leave. Because thats the mature thing to do. And honey, you don't have to take part in the battlegrounds. If you don't like them, don't play them. And go play on Lucan D'Lere where you can get your freak on.

 

Again your missing the point, there is a large amount of bugs that were introduced with this expansion that is plagueing the pvp serves. I am not complaining about battlegrounds, im complaining about the fact that that game breaking bugs IE unintended changes going thru due to devs not fully testing the game. Then again you dont PVP or live on nagafan, so you dont see the game breaking bugs and balance  issues that have come up. 

Go away is a pretty standard answer to issues around here.

Originally posted by Layra

I want SOE to burn in hell... blah blah, they ruined my SWG blah blah (few tears) ....  

There you go, now we have got that out of the way, MAYBE we won't see it in the next 50 posts on this thread but probably not...

Because 50 posts asking for features that soe will never listen to or create is any different? 

Everyone is essentially saying the same thing to one degree or another which is "we hope soe doesn't screw up again"

I would like to see a company that is interested in making games given the opportunity to make another everquest game. 

Put a team of developers into a room and leave them alone for a few months and see what they can come up with.  Keep all the parasites money grubbers away from them until they have their final design in hand AND THEN figure out how it will make money without changing the gameplay.  

Barring a change like that I have little doubt that the next everquest will just be another attempt to bolt a game on top of a revenue idea and fail just as hard as other games have been doing. 

Originally posted by Umbral

Originally posted by Daffid011

I imagine playing a scout class in pvp is a joy seeing how limitless the stealth seems to be. 

 

How limitless the stealth seems to be?

So you don't really know how stealth and stealth detection work in EQ2 right? But I saw a couple of posts and replies you made full of criticism about Everquest 2 and its classes mechanics, but now you revealed you just don't  know how the game works... interesting.

But yes, at least in the past scout classes were fun to play in pvp, but not my personal choice...

Anyway...

Interesting videos, EQ2 battlegrounds seems to be really entertaining. I will try to experience it as soon as I can... I really like EQ2 PVE and class/group dynamics...

I don't know exactly how stealth works in pvp and that is why I phrased my statement that way.   However, not knowing the exact specifics about 1 mechanic is totally different than my opinion about the overall class system of the game that is also repeated by current players that I reference. Maybe that is the disconnect?

Judging from that video however, I doubt there is any stealth detection other than latency applied to ranged attacks. (That is sarcasm in case you miss that too)

Originally posted by J.Yossarian

Originally posted by just2duh

 The reason you still play warcraft is... because you know nothing else, it's what you're used to. 

 Try anything else and you'll be surprized at how much money you've been wasting, when pretty much every f2p game out there offers the same basics.

 (Sorry if that sounds negative, but it is true for most wow players)

 

I suggest you try to prove that.

Its funny how many people make that claim and never rattle off a list of titles.  Also had to laugh at "free" to play games being some money saver over a sub fee. 

I never said your analogy wasn't perfect, I said I dislike analogies period.  They just don't work and almost always do not represent the situation correctly.  It isn't anything personal, they just suck and litter decent threads with misleading information and flawed comparisons.  Suddenly people are arguing about coffee or something else and the issues are so screwed up it just ends up in plain silliness.  

I am however, right next to you with the frustration with the current market.  Sorry if I came off with a barbed tongue, but your last line sort of felt like you were talking down to people.  I often come off sounding harsh when I don't mean to.  My apologies. 

Originally posted by olepi

Originally posted by hehenep

Originally posted by olepi

Originally posted by Daffid011

Originally posted by echolynfan

 Wow really messed up things for MMO's because they cam along and made MONEY. The larger companies took notice and wanted a piece of the action.

STO sounds very similar to what City of Heroes was at release.   Same company, same results, so I don't think this is a case of Cryptic doing something different, because of wow. 

The only real difference is they rushed this game out in an unrealistic time frame. 

 

The big difference is that CoH has a HUGE number of ways to play the game. You could hit the enemies with a sword, use mind control, send your pets at them, toast them with fire, shoot em with arrows, etc, etc, etc. They have lots of classes, and each class has lots of options on how to build. And each character can be two classes at once.

That makes for enormous replay value.

The other major difference is that CoH has a LARGE PERSISTENT WORLD. You can level your character up without actually ever entering an instance. It is only when you do quests that you enter instances.

STO is like CoH if CoH had only door missions, and 3 classes.

While it's true you could street sweep to 50 in CoH I can't imagine why you would.  Sure there's a ton of different places to go outdoors and fight things (especially in CoH, not so many different zones for CoV) but they've incentiveized running door missions so much that you'd be silly not to run them.  Large XP bonuses for completing them and reduced XP debt if you die in them and all.
 

I know that's just an example and all, but I just shudder at the thought of doing it.  I know people did in the early days of the game, but that was before they added so many incentives to running the instanced content.

 

I was just pointing out the architectural differences in the games: one is completely instanced, the other is not.

I had a blast fining my favorite spots to just casually kill stuff: the park in the trees, on the beach, on the rooftops. I could hang out in the swamp areas and watch other teams killing stuff; might get an invite too!

To me, that is a big difference: in CoH you could log in and decide what to do, where to go. The world is persistent, so that favorite spot you found last week is still there, and the boss is too, unless someone else killed it recently.

STO is like CoH with ONLY door missions, and 3 classes.

To be completely fair, my comment was about COH at release and how similar it is to STO and CO release conditions.  While all of their games are almost completely instanced, including coh, there really wasn't tons of things to do in COH at release.  It was a pretty shallow game, but it was one of the smoothest running games.  

This was really a golden chance for Cryptic to make themselves a major player in the market, but I think their haste is going to cost them dearly in the long run.  I'm nor sure either of their games is going to get the extended honeymoon period that COH enjoyed while it fleshed out the game.

I imagine playing a scout class in pvp is a joy seeing how limitless the stealth seems to be. 

Originally posted by echolynfan

 Wow really messed up things for MMO's because they cam along and made MONEY. The larger companies took notice and wanted a piece of the action.

STO sounds very similar to what City of Heroes was at release.   Same company, same results, so I don't think this is a case of Cryptic doing something different, because of wow. 

The only real difference is they rushed this game out in an unrealistic time frame. 

1.5 year old game that has not really changed much.  It is like watching vanguard: saga of heroes all over again.

Honestly I saw most of what the game offered at release and since then 1 new zone has been added while the developers seem to think the solution to gameplay is putting tokens everywhere and removing elements of gameplay they cannot fix.

Maybe the game will be worth another look when Mythic starts talking about an expansion, because that will send a signal that Mythic has confidence in their base game.  Until then I see a company that is still working to resolve launch day issues over a year and a half after later and it looks like it will easily got to the second anniversary without change. 

It is good to hear they are making some progress though. 

Originally posted by girlgeek 

For instance....Starbucks. FFS they are PROUD of their product, aren't they? But I used to work in a coffeehouse in Overland Park (upper class area of Kansas City on the Kansas side) that had the absolute best espresso you have ever tasted other than maybe Illy from Italy, but Illy is 40 bucks a pound, so..... Anyway, it wasn't bitter like Starbucks, it was sweet, and smooth, and clean tasting and nutty and smelled like HEAVEN. It had a crema that was like satin. It was a blend made by the owners of La Dolce Vita. They traveled all over the world to get the best blend of coffee beans for their espresso blend, and boy....the difference in taste was astounding.  BUT....they are a middle aged couple, wealthy, yes....but do they have the finances to compete with STARBUCKS in marketing???  No way in hell.

I tell you what though....that was one BUSY coffeehouse. And Pat and Leslie made a fortune within a few years.  And there was a Starbucks right across the street that ended up closing DOWN because of La Dolce Vita. The coffee was THAT good. But you know what....none of you people had EVER heard of them.  And I bet EVERYONE here has heard of Starbucks. 

This is why I dislike analogies, because they introduce or ignore factors and just do not represent the topic well. 

Of course no one has heard of this little sole-proprietor coffee shop near you any more than they you have heard of the local coffee shop near my home that I think is fabulous.  Yet I don't think that entitles me to talk down to you and everyone here as if they are somehow uninformed about the entire market and translate that into ignorance of mmos. 

I'm sure starbucks started out just like your little coffee shop did and built into the empire it is today without some massive advertising budget to draw on.  Starbucks offered a better product for its time and grew like crazy, just like it can happen with the local little coffee shops of the world. 

If there is some little mmo that offers far superior gameplay and quality than what the big names offer, then word of mouth will spread and the game should do well.  However I just don't think the mmo market is filled with examples that mimic your little coffee shop which is where the analogy continues to break down.

Originally posted by MavisP

To the question the title poses, no, you arnt doing anyone a service or a disservice. In your little corner of the world you are crusading to bring the evil doer to his knees and in reality only succeed in fueling your own fruitless hatred. I guess everyone needs something to live for but most choose something a little more productive.

Always about the people with the issue isn't it?