All Posts by BoudahXL

I play between 1-2 hours at most sometimes I can be 2-4 days w/o playing.I play other MMO's and offline games.I keep this one because it's a game for casual gamer, fits the bill as a "part time" game.

Originally posted by Duilyon

I think the MMO community will play a GOOD Sci-fi MMO. Just look at EVE online! They have a thriving community because it is a quality game with a good amount of content and creativity. Even if its a rather complicated game it still gets a lot of subscriptions.

 

If tabula rasa actually got good updates that would actually add some content then this game would be just as big as SWG. It would probably still be a niche game but the population would be that of DDOs and such. Which isn't bad by any means.

 

So its not the fact that its a Sci-fi game its the fact that it lacks content and polish.

While you have some good points there, you're missing a few facts.

Eve population was disastrously low during the first 2 years of existence, and then it exploded to the level we know today.I know I had 3 accounts from day 1, sold my last one last week.

That said EVE had just about no content in terms of quests/missions or npc's, NPC were basically the same ships player flew cept for stats and few cosmetics.

The game was riddled with bugs and bad support during the first year, you could make your opponent (network)lag so much,that you could destroy his ship, pod the guy and then loot his ship, before he could even finish loading the zone.

Since then they added cloaking zoning, fixed cops, added tons of ships, modified the weapon system, basically after two years they got it right with the help of thousands of paying beta players...

I guess people tend to forget big players like Blizzard and WoW, does anyone remember how it was back then?The first year of WoW?Empty zones, not even one friggin NPC, PvP instances, siege, hero class didn't even existed, although it was promised.

Give an mmo at least a year or two before dragging it into the mud.

TR has a strong combat system, tons of missions, few bugs, now they need to fix the game so people like it.Add more fun stuff to do, high end grinding, better PvP, I dunno maybe unlock a new zone or raise lvl cap.

Thinking in the same direction Raltar I think TR has an identity crisis, where it wants to be fast, action packed, and other side you have devs trying to implement stuff for the long run and trying to build a grinder (end game) on top of it.

Maybe they just need to throw in new maps and mission raise the lvl cap by 10 once a year.

the game is too fast for the dev team.

Auto Assault suffered the same sickness, very fast, boss kill within seconds, just rush in do your stuff.Get to high lvl easily and quickly.The way to get there is fun once on top you're just waiting/wishing for some more fast and furious things to do.

Originally posted by Raltar

Originally posted by Mixie

Dunno i play at the EU server and its have always been on medium when i logged in, i always see players and had never found it hard to find groups. I have no clue aboute the other servers though.  When ppl here say is dying or dead they havent logged in. The general chat is always talking so no its not low pop , its not high its just medium.

And ppl that not play, its not helping that your spreading false statment that its dead. Im not going to lie and say its high pop and you shouldent say its low when its infact medium.

 

Back when I played Tabula Rasa the server populations were ALWAYS low. This was when people were first starting to abandon the game.

Then one day when I tried to log in I had to download a patch. It was a very small patch, must have taken me less than a minute to download and install if I recall correctly. After downloading that patch when I got to the server screen suddenly all the server populations were medium for the first time in weeks!

Did Tabula Rasa suddenly get double the number of players overnight? Or did that patch I downloaded that day simply reduce the number of people required to be online to qualify as "medium" server population? I wouldn't be suprised if the Devs have had to lower the bar several times to maintain their supposedly "medium" population...

As for the general chat, it was always pretty active when I played. But from what I recall the discussions which took place in general chat were the punch line of every Tabula Rasa joke ever told. Most people used the general chat to argue about penis size, make racist remarks or just spam random non-sense. I remember one night when myself and another member of my guild were so bored out of our minds (because there was NOTHING to do in Tabula Rasa) that we just sat and watched the general chat spam for hours. Some other guild called "Black people do work" was trolling the chat for something like 3+ hours that night. They got banned eventually, but they were all trial accounts anyway so they probably didn't care. That was also the same night a lot of people discovered they didn't get the black armor dye that NCsoft had promised to people who helped out on the test server, so there was a lot of spamming going on about that too. One troll managed to start a huge debate about if wearing black armor made you an emo or not just by saying "Black=EMO!" over and over...

I think the evidence speaks for itself. The links people posted in this thread to MMOG charts and the NCsoft quarterly report pretty much say it all. I perticularly liked the "Earnings Hihglights" section where they had a bunch of pie charts. One chart showed Tabula Rasa with only 2% of the total pie! This was compared to Guild Wars with 12%, City of Heroes with 7% and almost the enitre rest of the pie consumed by Lineage and Lineage II. The only part of the pie smaller than Tabula Rasa was "other" with 1%. I'm not even sure what "other" would be in this case. Maybe their free games like Exteel and Dungeon Runners? If thats true, then Tabula Rasa is only 1% better than games which don't even earn any money!

While I see where you come from with this, I don't think Destination's devs needed to create a "patch" to change the server load readout, this could have easily been done server side.To put it bluntly I reject the conspiracy theory

Annual earnings? quaterly?Profit?Revenue?Revenue per account?Revenue from projection?Net earnings?Gross income?1% of nothing?1% of the biggest mmo publisher?

Please don't stare at pies, just eat them!

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/51312

"The November release of Richard Garriott's Tabula Rasa (PC) recorded $5.4 million in sales, representing only 6% of total earnings for the calendar year."

This article is not even clear picking up facts here and there and gluing them together.Total sales of what?Retail box?To distirbutors?End point sales projections?Including monthly payments?Time cards?

Unless you're a market analyst with data in hand, the only thing we could do is pick up "Internet" blogs, post and news from confirmed/unconfirmed sources, tidbits or translated lines from website that don't even need to validate the information at hand, and then make our forum headline or quote and bash or praise a product that doesn't even get us earnings nor appreciation...

Small group of people form a small company around the idea of a MMORPG, they write a lore, come up with original gameplay, artwork and maps.Game mechanics is laid out and architecture concept.

All of this on paper only naturally.

Then the model and artwork guy meet a couple days and produce a machinima of what it shoudl look like.And then the project sit on shelves as they marvel at all the works is needed to complete the game.

At some point, one will be appointed PR, he will fetch some capitals in form of investment or partnership with small API or middleware, or game engine company that could use "free" publicity.Models, maps will form, an instance of the game will see the day of light the small team will actually be able to move those models around, with some luck you might even see collision detection.

Then after 3 years it will just sit there 20-25% complete, more than half the team working day job just don't have the energy nor the time to push the project forward, the models and graphic engine will start to show ages...

One morning the PR dude will receive a call, a large corp offering the buy the IP and project for pocket change or maybe offer a position to 2-3 of them as developpers under the wing of their producer.You guys know the rest of the story, anything complicated will be ripped away from the game, the gameplay will be simplified, product rushed out the door, they will charge 50$ per box, everyone will bitch about how they removed all that was good originally.Eventually you might see an update or two, if they break even they gonna keep it up for a couple months, and then turn it to F2P micropayment garbage or just shut it down...

Are you guys sick and tired of all those empty promises?

I'm still confused by the 8.2 rating though, as hardly anyone here seems to have a good word for it! Obviously other people are posting reviews

You always hear the extremes, tha haters and the fanboys, the others are just too busy playing/enjoying the game.

PvP is the easy way out.It's renewable by itself, best balance testing ground, one map no switch, complicated puzzle, simple map (mirror) in fact it's always half a map TBH.

Lots of new mmo's choose PvP instead of flow of new content, it's cheaper to produce.

Seriously... people grinding each others to get points, rewards, items, etc...

Kinda unfair, but still, yeah this game is showing slow progress.People tend to forget but most popular mmo's out there took some time to get in gear.

Even some very popular mmo's saw their first dev team completely replaced within the first 6 months of release.Did not stop them, I guess if you have a good fan base, popular theme, money will come in eventually and your game will grow.

Not every mmo publishers have other projects and pile of money on the side to push development.It a scary world out there, competition is fierce.

One can argue TR was released too soon, but we all know the development process was borked at some point, had they got the game right (not restart twice) the project maybe all those effort would have been put into PAU and end game instances...

But here it is, so yep the game might reach its goal, but more slowly...I dunno how many players they need to break even, I think nobody outside NCSoft does, but judging from other mmo's numbers in the industry word is 10-30k depending on server required, bandwith staff, etc...

But I guess the biggest hurdle was that lots of people were expecting this game to be a WoW with guns and 3rd shooter control, when it's a different beast.

No flower picking, no beast to skin, crafting is just an aftertought.Screen shaking, fast mobs constent action make long hours of playtime kinda tough, I can't see someone hunting more than 90mins at a time, game plays too fast compared to reg mmo's.

Engineer can be a challenge too with turret deployment and shields.Shiled drones etc...

I prefer guardian for the melee side but that's just me.

Yeah this game is weird, although you can solo most of it, I wouldn't play alone, I always play with a friend or PUG.

Theh bottom line is, if I'm having fun, I'll stick with it. (Zeus knows, I spent more time in WoW NOT having fun, and don't intend to do THAT again.)

Amen brother, I can relate, first tier 1 & 2 on WoW server, yep way back!Tier 1 was kinda fun to achieve but tier 2 was just the same frigging thing in a different instance...Not fun.

I played CoX for like 4 months then left played a couple games (online-offline) then played back 1-2 months.

I just love playing an mmo for 2-3 months then another one then back to first.Look at it this way, each major mmo companies add content every 2-5 months so a good rotation ensure me a great gameplay no matter which mmo I play!

Another thing I learned, never play a mmo right out the door give it 6-12 months.

Your PC is fine, you might want to check your video settings though.

Very high or high setting should be fine my wife run this game with the same videocard as you have, a BFG 7950GT OC to be exact with 256MB, and 4GB of ram under XP64.

One thing I notice is that the 7xxx series are pretty poor at shadows, compared say to a 8xxx or 9xxx series, you might want to keep your settings but lower the shadow distance a lot and probably disable specular.That should give you a tremendous fps boost.

Kinda weird reading these forums.

On one side you have a new guy enjoying his new game, no matter his taste for beer women or mmorpg's.

And on the other side you have this vet devoted to a game that was almost as important to him than real life career.

No middle ground, no prisoners, I mean gee is it so wrong to purchase a game(mmorpg) play the game say for 2-3 months then be done with it and move to the next thing.

Does every game have to be the "end of all", "I wanna play this title for the rest of my life", "yes honey you can divorce me but leave me my game account"?

When I play an mmo I set myself some goals, a level to acheive a status, gear set, etc..Then if I have fun reaching my goal at my own pace, once I reach it I look around...Is this still fun? Is there another fun game around?

Then I move on or not, it's that simple. If you ask me every mmo I played sucked in a way, none of them could compete in term of self accomplishment when compared to retail videogames, not only that they all cost more than your regular videogame...

Just think about what kind of critics Crysis would receive if you had to grind herbs, if you had to do the same level 5-10 times before unlocking the next one.If you had to pay the game 50$+15$/month untill you completed the game :D

Originally posted by ianicus

as the topic states, 10 copies of TR where in the $10 or less bin at EB on the weekend when I was there, I pulled one out to check for certain, and indeed it was $9.99.....thats really....really bad

I mean you got to pay less to play the game ain't that a good thing?

MMO's I got for less than 20$

Eve, EQ2 +3 exp incl, VSoH, RG:TR collector, E&B, DAoC, PlanetSide, SWG, Archlord,CoV Collector...Guess what? They all closed down... No one plays EQ2, haven't you heard Eve Online is closing door, LOL I mean come on!

Age of Conan drop from 59$ to 49$ at Futureshop last weekend, omg they're closing down for sure.

-Red VS Blue  PvP is in the work released due on patch 9 or 10, I think it's on test server as we speak.

-2 instances have been added, one more is in the tube for patch 1.9

-Engineer skills have been changed/revamp/nerf/balanced, so much that you can hear the cry babies in forums.

-Spy have seen many changes

-Sniper many changes and tweaks, basically they're trying to make the skills work as intended, the class wasn't supposed to one-shot kill almost everything in game.

-Token system for CP is gone, now you get "Prestige" points, but you also get those points for finding rare items and killing bosses and mini-bosses.

-Added respec skills/attributes

-Bio and Mech Armor for both male and female avatars have been optimized.

-Added "The CELLAR Arena"

-Added couple "Flashpoint" missions since launch

-Added a couple waypoints around maps

-Hybrid and missions to unlock them

-New abilities have been added to NPC, I can think of 4 of em other people might find more.

All in all I see more new content in the first 6 months than most mmo I played in the past, but... This game was light in content to start with.If they can keep the pace 2-3 new instances every 6-8 months, move lvl cap to 60 by next x-mas this game might have a chance :)

Yes it does.

I got 3 toons at lvl 30 now, I play them mostly with my bud, we duo just about everything.

Keep in mind we level up slowly and trying to complete just about every missions before moving to the next zone.If you're the kind of person to fly through levels and your main goal is to reach top, this might not be the right product for you.

I used to love to run through lvls only to reach top and then grind the ultimate set/items...

I heard you could in theory solo pretty much everything from start to finish in TR, but I alos did a few instances with grp of 4 and it was a blast, it was furious, very much like City of Heroes once you reach lvl 40+.

Also one thing that is very hard to solo is to regain control of CP, you need a small team later on in game, pretty impossible to do once you reach 25+

It's a game for casual mmorpg'ers, it's not EQ, it's not Vanguard, it's a cross breed between WoW and HG:L.

I too enjoy this game as it doesn't require 25+ hours a week to get into and I am able to level up and complete instances, storyline with my bud.

Sure I do enjoy grouping from time to time, but I deeply appreciate the fact that I don't HAVE to in order to fully enjoy a game I pay each month.

Other MMO like CoH allow people to complete storyline/instances with smaller group.

Starfyre Studios just came up with a 2.6 udate, we won't apply the update untill next week, to give time for everyone to save stats and send us their profile before the big "wipe out" 2.6 update.

Buy cruiser,missileboat,battleship,mobile station,trade ship, we have more systems, more factions more ships, jump holes, jump gates,more loots commodity, missions well more of everything!You can do missions in group and we have an arena to compete in.There are even political wars going on.You need faction to buy at certain station, so market trade is going to be popular, there some drop only items and some missions only items.There are also very hard missions which cannot be accomplished with Fithers alone, you will need small fleet with cruiser,battleship or station.

The modification makes the games evry very similar to MMORPG but at a lower player base number that's why I used the term MORPG.This server is going to be persistant 24/7.