Im going to have faith in mark this one last time. 

He has produced one Warhammer which was billed as a diamond mine and  insted was... silver.

produced Darkness falls which was unheralded and became a cult success like finding gold when looking for gold

And then DAoC which was billed as a silver mine and produced PLUTONIUM!!!!!!!

<pushes all his chips forward>

Im all in

Lets see,

The game will obviously have high Arthurian population. people  ALWAYS want to play "cute " elves

So I expect to play norse. BUT, as always, I have underdog syndrome, and will play whichever realm is the most underpopulated. the true Maverick in me

I will never play a game for enjoyment thats Free to play, review them? Sure, but for my own casual at home consumption I know its a business. More money and more profits mean more work hours. more work hours = more patches. more patches = better product. Think about it, what killed warhammer? a rough spot when the economy in real life took a nose dive also the same time they had a major bugs that just didnt get fixed fast enough and made a large chunk of the population leave. and thats a company WITH subs.

compare how many patches came out for DAoC in the first  18 months compared to the number of patches that came out for LoTR. Even Guildwars which is selling like hotcakes still dosent have patches fast enough.

I will pay my 15 bucks per month. 80 of us pay 15 per month and thats the salary for a QA , change management or a Jr Dev.

stealth?

How about we have stealth like it was in the BEGINNING beta phase of warhammer online

if you are directly in front of a persons cone of view you will be seen...

stealth drains ENdurance/action points per sec so its not permanant.

PERIOD.

let stealth be something you use in combat to close the gap.

no perma invisibility

I am ok with archer classes being able to spec high in a tree for "stealth while standing still"

but no way am I down for perma invisibility and stealth zergs and the like. no wa

Originally posted by MidHealer

 

As the title says, no GCD, pretty please :)

 

Such abomination as GCD is maybe good for WoW and whatnot, but it will only ruin CU experience.

 

On the similar note, please reduce the number of instant, timed abilities - this leads only to people waiting for timers to recycle, and then dumping (almost) all of the instant abilities at once at the beginning of the fight, thus often ending the fight in the first 2 seconds.

Some instant abilities should, of course, still be implemented, but having too many of them, either as spells or as item abilities is only serving to ruin the fun of tactical fighting, what with fights being over in few seconds.

 

i for one dont want 9 spells being cast per seconds. think about it, daoc didnt have a global cooldown but every spell had a cast time and all melee abilities had a delay timer based on the weapon speed. 

But I agree with you on one point, there should be almost zero instant abilities in the game and the ones in the game should be about as powerful as rank 0 cantrips in D&D.

example 5 sec cast heal would restore 90% health. 2.5 sec cast heal would restore 30% a  2 sec cast HoT resotres 60% health over 15 sec. but a cantrip insta cast hot restores 10% health over 10 seconds.

it made me so angry when i played WoW that a mage could take you from 100% to dead and never actually STOP to cast a single spell. a game where casters didnt cast just dosent sit well with me. but having a game without global cooldowns only works for me if we use weapon delays and cast times. if you want "faster i press the button the faster i attack" then im not for that at all.

I want my pvp to be determined by what i press WHEN, not by my twitch skills.

Originally posted by ShakyMo
I think they should take 1 thing from WAR. make shield carrying tanks the main crowd controllers and copy some of them pvp tanking abilities like hold the line.

This is one thing war did very well, tanks in pvp, probably better than any other mmo (although weirdly eq2 does tanks good in pvp too)

Actually make it 3 things, I really liked the morale bar and the tok too.

I agree with you 100%! I feel all class and spec types should have a role in pvp, especially tanks. playing a protection warrior in wow was useless and playing a Paladin tank in Rift pvp was useless. but my group in WAR couldnt function without our ironbreaker snaring, knocking down and especially punting people away from heals.

The reason I want there to be a reason to play a TANK, weather it be for the CC or the utility of guarding a caster/healer. Make the tanks abilities and anytime spam attacks be WEAK, but the attacks thay key  off block parry dodge be extremely powerful and have utility,

Question for you all.

Are you ok with mez/sleep?if so , how long is too long and how short is too short

Are you ok with snares? who should have them, should they be grouped in with CC and have an immunity?

Should CC be clensable?

Should Tanks be resistant to CC like in daoc?

Do you like fear as a mechanic more than Mez/Sleep? can a game use both?

Of the following which can stay and go Mez/Sleep, silence, Fear, snare minor (-10%) snare major (70%), Disarm/Dont Act, Root/Dont move,  knock down, stun, , knock back, Polymorph, Reversal (your attacks heal as opposed to harm) Banish (cant move or act but cant be hit)  and finally "feedback" (take a large % of your life every time you do X until you die)

Originally posted by cronius77

 

I think people are jaded here not saying you or anyone in particular , just saying in general . They seem to forget all the bad and terrible things with DAOC and blame wow and other games for doing it instead. Hell I remember I could win every single fight on my reaver with thorn weed field and unquinchable thirst for souls with a pocket cleric with divine protection. I used to tower dive 8 man groups and get a free 8 kills every 5-10 minutes for realm points. DAOC did have some of the worst cc out there 9 second stuns are stupid in any game spam fest or not . Taking a toon out of the game for 9 seconds and not allowing them to do anything except with determination every 3 minutes is poor gaming design and shortfalls for making classes more balanced.

Well, I did not forget about things like Dragonfang, and annaihalate, I know there were things in daoc at release that made zero sense. it was not the perfect game, which is why I was suggesting  the more offense you have the less cc and utility you have. I said about 200 words in that stealthers should have zero CC.

Camelot ended up bein a pretty balanced game, if we took that beautiful new frontires map and had that be the FIRST map we all used, there wouldnt have been so much push back and more people would have stayed. this was still early in mmos so nobody had ever done a complete overhaul of the sandbox before. DAoC lost the larger load of its customer base because it made too many GOOD changes all at one time. when have you ever heard that complaint out of a company in the past 2 decades? because I havent. you changed the keep warfare, the map, and nerfed a few overplayed classes all in one patch and thus caused the nerfed people to quit and many people just couldnt adjust to the change of the new content and became irritated and left. if they had given us the new keeps in the old sandbox for a few months and then come out with the new sandbox.... thus giving people time to adjust. less subscritions would have been lost.

the way I saw it , when asked why they left daoc the reasons I got were "new frontieres drove me away" "I didnt want to pve to get my RvR gear (trials of atlantis) "i hated raiding" "gear became unbalanced"..... but these same people fled to WoW which the above was its sellingpoint...

ive talked with a few people about this over the years and they agree

as for all the mark jacobs bashing...JAWS was a great movie and groundbreaking for the amount spent on it, but "1941" the movie was horrible and a total flop for all the hype. Indiana jones and the last crusade was great but followed up by HOOK and you had to wonder did this guy even know what he was doing. Then  next year comes back with the greatest movie of all time in Schindlers list

I remember a young coach with the NY giants was called brilliant and the mind behind the 2nd best defense of all time. he was then given a job in Cleveland where he was a total flop and absolute failure and people questioned if he even knew what he was doing. he then got a job with the new england patriots...

my basic philosophies........

the more damage you deal.. the less CC and utility you have

thats where games like wow messed up. give all the cc to the rogues and mages and none to the lesser played classes.

DAoC worked well because the non popular classes had all the best abilities. how happy were you when you first grouped with an AUG healer and got celerity? remember how important paladin was with group End? how about when your mentalist buddy discovered the wonders of nearsight?

so to me the shield tanks having knockbacks, knock up, known downs, snares and stuns are ok with me

cloth caster dirtect damage , stealthers, and light tanks should have ZERO CC.

as far as interupts? I think we should go back to the days of

Spells do HUGE effects, but you have long cast time and getting hit ruins the spell. but where as in daoc if you got hit you 100% lost the spell, nd every other game has had a cast bar that only went down a little, I think it should be in the middle and have a cast bar but when you are hit it goes back to 25%, then 50% then 75% and then after that the spell wont be set back at all and repeat the process again for the next spell.

no insta cast spells. casters should have to go back to casting spells.  not throwing them.

archers , i feel should go to where they were at in Warhammer. You can move while using special abilities, but they had a 1 -2 sec cast bar.. 

Originally posted by solarine

 

 

I don't think they haven't figured it out. It's just that it's not financially sensible for them to commit to solving it.

Every major new MMO has this huge overcrowding issue at launch - say, for the first week. The only way they can battle it is more servers. And that means more money spent - for hardware that's not going to be needed after just a few weeks. In some games this also means empty servers after a few weeks as well. 

SWTOR did try to battle it. They opened up a huge number of servers. Servers which, after a couple of months, were practically ghost towns. That meant quite some money wasted and an exceedingly urgent problem on their hands.

I'm guessing ArenaNet will be cautious with the hardware upgrades.

This!

My daytime job just so happens to be "operations"

I have seen many game openings over the years, many... many many. and have been just as upset as I took off from highschool, college, dates, work, my wedding........ and many other events just to catch the opening of a game only to be let down as the game became unplayable the first days.

now that I work BEHIND the scenes myself, its exactly as the above poster said. imagine each server you play on, is actually 2 computers strapped together (raid2 server) so when it crashes you have a backup to it. so thats 7-9k for each one, you put out 30 servers and after the hype dies down of the first day you only needed 26. and after the hype dies down from the first month you only needed 22. and after people get bored/add kicks in and you are left with only the people who will play the game long term you have 18.   so you just wasted $98,000 for 6  weeks worth of time.

So you still have to have backups, but to have that much extra hardware to solve all problems just isnt economicly rasonable.

Originally posted by Rockgod99

Im 100% certain that all the former Mythic workers wished they never got in bed with EA.

 

its not an EA/Mythic thing.

Trust me, as a journalist I would like nothing more than to write up a story about hoe there is some kind of internal turmoil and drama going on with this company, it would be an interesting read.

But since I DO cover mmorpg's I have to honestly tell you all this is not just happening at mythic. Its just the economy.

EA has has layoffs all over as have most gaming studios over the past year.

and it has nothing to do with the games performance. Microsoft is one of the more profitable companies in the world and XboX is a very successful platform. Xbox had layoffs , as well as other portions of microsoft.

Because if games werent hyped we wouldnt make any money as Gaming journalist perhaps?

Nice topic GFuller!!

I think this is a GREAT ARTICLE... but then again I am biased.

as a fan I am excited about the expansion, and I feel the things in the game that are already imbalanced are so glaring and eronious they will be fixed. DAoC wasnt ruined because of class ballance... it was ruined because we as customers left because of the massive changes all at once that came with New Frontires. People claim ToA made them  leave, but most people I know didnt leave until after their frustrations with the new pvp maps and new keeps made them feel un easy.

(and WOW came out)

Now 10 years later in hindsight, I actually feel the NF maps made the game beter, but it was just too much too fast. So in short, we doged them out for doing the right thing and for comming out with better content 0_o!

add a new map to wow and people cheer.

add new scenerio to WAR and people cheer. 

Add a new map to DAoC pvp after having the same map for 4 years and people revolt.... go figure.

bet ya they wouldnt do that again.

I cant wait for this expansion , the new classes are just more melee that deal damage.

I will report more information as it is passed onto me. and you can check the mmorpg.com feature section for when I have something I will make sure you readers get asap!

Hasani

Originally posted by Quizzical

40 man raids?  Ugh.  I thought the game had a chance to be good, but unless they do the big raids differently from most games that have them, that sort of time commitment is a game-breaker.

If only I could play you the audio of when I was talking about this topic. But as much as we danced around the topic and actual content. I was told that they would have mini fortress instances for joe blow thats getting off work and wants to get together with friends and also large epic "Molten core type raids!

will update you guys as they give me more information about this, but in all serioussness dont jump off the bandwagon til I give the signal!

Hasani

Originally posted by FomarThain

Thanks for the write up. I am interested in what people's play experiences are like. I would like to see even more articles on this as well. I think you get a better feel when a player writes a hands on piece.

Two things:

1. As dsebutchr mentioned, console and PC players on the same server imo is also dubious at best. That's not a knock on console players as I like consoles too but I think communication will be tedious. Yeah I guess maybe there could be some kind of voice chat system you could use but, for me personally, I don't want to be in on a "conference call" while I am playing. I can go to work for that.
2. Bill Roper is formerly of Hellgate: London and Flagship Studios and before that Blizzard. Unless he was in stealth mode he didn't have anything to do with the City Of games.

Hasani, as was discussed in the new screenshots article posts, some (myself included) thought the characters looked weird against the background in some of the earlier pics with this stylized direction they are going in. How did it look in action? Does it look 3D for the most part when playing? A number of the early shots seem kinda flat. They are obviously 3D but the overall look is just somehow flat and kinda dull. I would like to hear what you thought and saw. You mention vivid colors but what does it look like when playing perspective wise?

Ohnoes I vowed i would always answer any non flame comment any reader asked.... but if I answer that question I may not get another interview.

Ill honestly say that YES, live it does look 3d. everything is VERY detailed. 

NO things dont jump off the screen but its about the quality of playing GTA4. yes its 3d but its not metal gear 4 type of 3d.

And I have to give a mention about the vivid colors. to be honest it seemd to me as if they wanted to have a comicbook type feel to the game with the vividness of the colors. and they did a great job in that! I will try to get another peak at this game now that I have a good contact thats a playtester, and I will revisist the game and write about it after press beta starts.

Hasani

Originally posted by Nadia

there will be both PVE and PVP servers

dcuosource.com/index.php/topic,29.15.html

for the first group, we have PvE servers where you only fight another player when you choose to (e.g. duels, PvP content). Consensual here means you have to use a specific feature or game space to PvP. You have to actively choose to do it.

For the second group, we have PvP servers where heroes and villains can go toe-to-toe (we haven't talked about the specific rules for this yet). Consensual in this case means you've chosen to be on a PvP server and to be subject to the rules of engagement that apply there. You've chosen to live in a more dangerous world.

They will have both pve and pvp servers, but no role playing server.

I just went over the audio of the interview, I was pretty sad about the no role play server part 

The plans for the servers was to make them larger as to not segregate players like they are in other mmo's.

not sure what that exactly means, Im just reporting what I was told

with that being said, the pvp in this game was fun. I would like to see how it will go with healing powers thrown into the mix.... could get interesting.

Hasani

Originally posted by phantax

Nice to see them patching useful things in in a timely manner

thats mythic.

pretty much the reason why we all follow them

I want the old system back where you have 100 levels and advances but the progression was as slow as daoc.

daoc had "lopsided" population as well. when you get 40 you may be rather thankful for being on a low population server as it will allow you more time to roam and look for a fight as a group/guild rather than alwasy be forced into a 90vs90 keep siege. My server in daoc had 600 people on at primetime, but the highest pop server had 2000.

publc quest are doable with the right classes up to stage 2 with 2 classes as long as one of them is a healer. the best loot from levels 1-30 is not from PQ's but rather from influence that the PQ's are based on. You can run ANY pq's first stage 4 times and max out your influence.

if you are ignored you wil have tons of fun.

if anyone comes face to face with you... thats another story.

but good news for you.... majority of the people in warhammer have played pvp games beore and pvp rules #4 is attack hybrids last! huray for you!

nah flex healers still need to heal or people will die.....

plain and simple.. you CAN heal, others can NOT... so you SHOULD to be most efective.

 besides, you get more RP for healing than you do for nuking...