i think you can skip most of the group content (id say thats around 20% of the quest to lvl 20) .

there are some of quest for people that dont mind grinding (like myselve)
for example the repeatable quests for ancient coins that give you gear as well

the group content is pretty cool tough and youll miss some nice cutscenes and story evolvement if you wont do them

 i know its controvers and i myselve prefere an open seamingless world over instances

but i think the guildwars/ champions concept with 1 server (well technically many more) seems better and a lot more flexible.

even if you have 100 channels you still can log in directly and you wont have to worry that ud end up on a different server then your friends. i myselve are in a guild that wanted to go together and alreaddy people suffer 9h queues to log in.

 they made people wait 30+min on the preselection day

so no, this is neither professional nor flawless especially considering that aion is not their first mmo to launch

from the post here and on other boards and beeing a conan player myselve i have a suggestion ;)

 maybe Funcom should stop making mmos and just sell art

the teaser videos (as well as the concept and ingame art) are awesome and if they just produced sw as a cgi movie they could sell blu-rays of it for around $25 to a wider audience then theyll get with an mmo these days without the hassle of worrieing about missing endgame content, imba classes, raging funcom haters ... 

hmm since this is in the aion part of the forum i think that the racial hatred between elyos and asmodians justify any action in war. of course you can always roleplay the exception and since both races have honor as a value in their lore choosing far weaker enemies deliberatly may not suit every honorable warrior. hunting in areas where the hunter doesnt fight (pve) challinging prey might also prevent the honorable hunter from deliberatly choosing these areas.

 then as in the history of men as well there will be opportunists that dont care about the honor of their tribe and simple other lowlives that go the easy route for a kill. 

Originally posted by rwmiller

Warnings:
This is all based on levels 1 to 10 and it could all go horribly wrong still.
 

very good writeup

i liked aion so far (till lvl 18 on templar) but coming from lineage 2 i know things can change.

if any veteran l2 player remember prelude or the first few chronicles or view how certain classes in l2 completely change even now from low lvl to high lvl it is indeed a good warning not to be too over enthusiastic till weve seen the endgame levels (well and the patches yet to come...)

Originally posted by ninjajucer

The game model was a butchering at best. To seriously ask people to pay for it is mind-ogling. Not that its a bad game, but it does need work. The very fact that they went with a P2P model with limited availability in europe (and USA) showed a true lack of knowledge of how to do a major release of a game. Imitation is a form of flattery and nobody would have questioned them if they went the F2P model with a shop and a wide release with no IP ban or limit countries access. Now, we shall never know as the company failed as everyone expected, and based on the overall reactions so far, nobody really cares.

i agree but its kind of sad to see the mmo market from the pov as developer

for me tcos was a decent game with a ton of original ideas like the dress 2 impress, rotating skilldeck, manual aiming systems but in the end potential and innovation is not enough anymore.
a few years back i believe tcos could have grown slowly like we have seen it with eve but the market today is overcrowded with mmos and lives on hyped (or lets say heavily marketed) mainstream games with huge dev teams.

a rather un-innovative but polished and feature rich game like aion seems to be the way to go over smaller independent games like spellborne

Originally posted by toord

Originally posted by craynlon

 my question would be:

even if they introduced an option that some shmoe could buy a lvl 20char with all attributes to 26, why would you care ?

if your not in the game to have a challenging adventure and great entertainment with your friends but in it for some kind of obscure leveling/ item race them imho youve left the path of traditional roleplaying even bevore they introduced this service.

 

as i said bevore, i would scream hell if they introduce such a thing in any competative game were guilds have to defend their castles against opponents and people are under the pressure of constant pvp but this is not the case here.

so out of true curiosity id wonder why you would feel insulted if you yourselve never use any aids but the guy on the next table plays on easy mode. you just find your guild/ friends of people that want the game as purists as you do and just ignore the rest or even accept the fresh money they bring in for your game to stay alive

 

craynlon ,

 

If you read my post you'll notice I was already unhappy with Turbine's direction. Magic out of control, clerics and magi being able to chug mana pots like it's no body's business, dying has no meaning other than couple of minutes with neg levels, res spells (and even scrolls) cheap as dirt, dwarves with no Darkvision, Beholders, Air ellies, and many other mobs doing all sort of crazy things they're NOT supposed to. Those things were already breaking the game, at least for me. Also if you read, I was honestly expecting Turbine to, for once, to add meaningful races and classes to the game,  mounts, to "fix" long standing issues players have been complaining for YEARS (the Lag issue, no?)... instead the decided to throw all of that out the window in order to make this game your average/mainstream MMO (which is a bad thing, IMO).

 

Peace.

 

hmm ok i agree with you on the "stay true to DDO" thing.
still ddo for me with all its game mechanics of puzzling and "true" questing is a good and heavy underrated mmo.
yes it may move a bit towards mainstream but actually i hope that also the mainstream would also move a bit towards ddo in terms of quest quality.

all in all i also agree that im more rhappy with the "buy content" then the "buy potions and aids" aspect of the new service i was just interested to see if long time players would feel cheated if they played it the hard way till now.

 my question would be:

even if they introduced an option that some shmoe could buy a lvl 20char with all attributes to 26, why would you care ?

if your not in the game to have a challenging adventure and great entertainment with your friends but in it for some kind of obscure leveling/ item race them imho youve left the path of traditional roleplaying even bevore they introduced this service.

as i said bevore, i would scream hell if they introduce such a thing in any competative game were guilds have to defend their castles against opponents and people are under the pressure of constant pvp but this is not the case here.

so out of true curiosity id wonder why you would feel insulted if you yourselve never use any aids but the guy on the next table plays on easy mode. you just find your guild/ friends of people that want the game as purists as you do and just ignore the rest or even accept the fresh money they bring in for your game to stay alive

 as a subscriber and long time ddo fan i actually welcome this

i would be heavily opposing it if we were talking darkfall, war, lineage 2, eve or any other competitive game but ddo is a story telling game. there is no competition to overthrow or pwn someone and hence you wont get an unfair advantage in spending money on it.

that said i also believe that this model is the future of content-mmos

the big problem with any mmo that wants to deliver good (story)content like aoc and ddo is that good content cost a lot more in production then the usual "spawn and grind" or "kill 10 rats" quests. especially if you look at ddo with its puzzles, climbing, swimming, narrative storytelling i think any pricing model where people can get in easy but later have to pay for adventure modules is pretty nice for both casual and hardcore gamers. 

ill keep my monthly subscription fee anyway and i'll play without addional aids because i like the challenge the game offers but if turbine can bring in new players and fresh money for new and broader content i very much welcome this new hybrid mode. 

i alreaddy wish other games like age of conan would do this as well minus the items.
i mean why not bring up a shop where players can buy adventures/quests like songs on itunes or comic books and pay and rate those individually instead of having to shell out 15$/month to wait ages for an update thats 70% bugfixing and fiddling with stats. 

Originally posted by korvass

I'll be giving TOR a shot, no doubt. But this story thing does worry me too.

Some of you might understand this when I say you know how it can be the first couple weeks with a new game? The staying up till ungodly hours because the game is so much bloody fun, learning the ins and outs.. work or not, you might easily be able to spend 40 hours a week playing.

And that's where this story thing comes in. Even if every class has, say, 200 hours or so of content, that's gonna end up being what? 2-3 months of playing, at best?

What can I do besides just following the story along? Unless some of the quests take a week or more to complete, I'm concerned there's never going to be enough content to keep you interested. And what happens once you've done it all? Just go try another class? Bit of raiding or pvp.. wait for the next expansion? Once my character has completed his/her final plot arc, it's going to become increasingly harder to make story progression. The Jedi free the republic (or whatever), from the nasty Sith types. Yay, much celebration! Then what? Next expansion has story arcs for saving the universe? Where do you go after that?

Stories are, in general, journies, with destinations. And there's a reasons even long-running series of stories come to an end. Eventually there isn't anything interesting to write about. No more progression left.

Also, on the note of stories; one of the reasons I fell in love with role-playing and MMOs is because I wanted to change the ending of the story. Personally, that's what I think MMOs should be about: choice. Choose your own adventure. If I want to go over here, cool. If I want to ignore the plot and go look at some clowns over there, sweet. I go do that. Lately, too many MMORPGs have been theme-parks. I can't go over there and poke the clowns because the ride has a safety bar that I can't remove. So I have to go where it leads me.

I'm not saying that TOR will like that analogy at all, but I am concerned there simply won't be enough choice (even multiple choice tends to take you to the same destination, to a degree). I'm also a little concerned that everyone will be the same. That I will either have to get on the same train ride as the rest of the smugglers, or stand at the platform with nothing to do, and only a vending machine for company.

At the end of the day though, these are just concerns for now. None of us here know enough to say one way or the other. So far, I like the look of TOR and will give it a shot, regardless.

thats pretty much what happened to me and age of conan
i felt the story to lvl 80 was great but after it i had to little to do to stay in game.

i dont want to defend grinders like lineage2 or storyless games like darkfall but in the longrun i know few games besides wow able to keep players subscribed over a long time that are actually story based.

the chronicles of spellborne (http://www.tcos.com)

for me the descision would be fundamental bevore even thinking about an mmo

the descision is either:

"I want to make a game that tells a story and has the following game mechanics" > theme park or

"I want to simulate a world for example a scifi or fantasy setting, once the world is set ill give players the following options to interact with it" > sandbox

for me the difference is between creating a client for either an adventure game (theme park) or something similar to 2nd life (sandbox)

sandbox for me is not developing a game without story. its about moving the complexity of the virtual world away from gaming concepts (like soccer, dodgeball) towards stuff that happens on the server like resources and (monster) population management, trading and building mechanics, world altering effects (like weather, seasons) and so on.

i think even the poster boy for sandbox gaming, darkfall has only little code for world simulation and substitutes sandbox for an environment that doesnt change much but concentrates on player to player interaction in opposition to a story driven (themepark) game where a lot of NPC> Player Interaction is happening

my problem with making any suggestion is that we dont have any "endgame" data

if you look at the first 20, 40, 60 and then endgame levels in lineage 2 youll see that soloability and even the whole feeling of a class can change.

for example you could play a prophet and solo with him pretty good in low levels while in endgame levels its more like a 2nd account, out of party buff bot (similar to shilien elders...)

there also was a time where the summoners were good buffers for their pets and had nuking abilities yet in endgame they definitly need at least a buffer to xp

what im saying is, is that i really would love to hear opinions from high level korean characters because i have the feeling that even the 1st 25 levels wont give you much information on how the class works in endgame levels and most players will spend most of their time maxed out. thats one beef i had with l2, that you could spend 3years to grind up your char only to find out you dont enjoy it at the higher levels because it sometimes took a 180 on its way there.

knowing nc soft ill keep these worries in the back of my mind but cant wait to play aion anyway

i play the game for roughly 4month now on mornexus, a german pve server

so far im having a blast with the storyline (wich i considder very well written).
in total i had around 5 pvp fights in that 4month, 1 in such a mining area (green district) and 4 in an arena (mosh pit)

it may be because of the not so high population but i found in general that the crowd on a pve server is much more ganker free then on a pvp server.

since its free for 14days id say try it anyways. if you fall in love with the story and art like myselve a small pvp match once a month may be well worth the sacrifice, if you dislike the game for its story you dont have to subscribe anyway.

atm the european servers may be a bit less populated then the acclaim servers and you might as well have no pvp at all if you choose the international pve server (great community btw)

all in all i think tcos is far from beeing that hardcore pvp centered game (like darkfall) you might envision

Originally posted by Distaste

Originally posted by BloodDuality

No, pvp requires much more then just being able to circle straf. It also requires you to have better gear, a class is stronger then the class it is fighting, and having a bigger group of people then the group you are fighting.

Player skill and abilty are not requirements though, just who has the more time to spend on the game to get better things.

 

You haven't played the game, have you?

Sigils and level can help a bit but it cannot overcome a bad skill deck or strategy. Honestly i would say that level plays the bigger role but it isn't like say WoW where a lowbie can't kill a max level. In TCOS you can easily kill a higher level if you have a better strategy, hit them more than they hit you, or you don't take hits : P.

I always run with a buddy of mine. I am a Ancestral Mage and he is a trickster. We were both level 25 and we got into a battle with a rank 40 Rune mage, 26 blood warrior, 20 trickster, and a 23 AM. It wasn't like we jumped them either. They formed up out of range and we stood our ground. Both parties were ready for the fight. The result? My buddy died but we killed all 4 of them. So 2vs4, they had the numbers advantage, the level advantage, and we still won.

 

Back to the OP. Doing circles around someone will probably get you killed or at least gimped. I know when someone tries that on my I just use Thundercry(use it all the time anyways :P) which puts a debuff on them that does damage and lowers morale(gimps their damage) when they move. Then I just teleort to my pet :P.  Also circling 1 target often makes you an easy target for any ranged because you are easy to predict and the ranged aren't pressured.

i agree, pure bunny hopping and strafing ont get you that far

there are plenty of skills (for example my lvl 38th deathands shred) that will make you either loose life or stats while you move.
apart from a good combination of classes you fight alongside the opinimization of your own skilldeck also plays a role in the combat.

i feel tough atm ranged classes have a bit of an advantage compared to meele but soon well see what teams/classes come out atop of the arena matches

 i think the free 2 weeks is a pretty clever move 

i play the game for a few month on the german pve server now and really love it

if they back it up with a bit of advertising it will probably get more ppl hooked then the level restricted ftp trial because only later some core aspects like cofiguring your skill deck, crafting for looks, sigils... come into the equasion.

anyway all the best to one of (imho) most underappreciated games currently on the market

Originally posted by wazzap2121

 I think I understand where the OP is coming from.  I just tried the free trial and got to lvl 36 before it ended.  I attended one siege and it was decent to say the best.  I do know that the classes are unbalanced and will continue to be because of this reason.  Combos do not work.  Melee classes are gimped when it comes to that.  Casters are easy mode since it doesn't take much skill to root, snare, and kill.  I was actually chasing a lvl 28 necro around for a good 10 minutes because I couldn't get a combo off.  I am also aware that if you put that into a massive siege scenario, it equals unfair gameplay

and the strange thing is lineage2 got away with that 5years+ :)

i agree with some of the above post that devs should not feverishly hang on the words of the community but i wonder why you see in so many interviews that the devs themselves play the game yet some games are hardly any fun at all if your on the wrong class.

/sad agree

 if you go to a european server of tcos with 100ppl ud prolly tripple the population there ;)

but seriously tcos is a great game, but the core pvp attractions like shard conquest or arena tournaments are not in yet.
coming there from aoc myselve (and war bevore that, and lineage2 bevore that) i view tcos more like a vakation game till somethng like aion or blade&soul goes live.

tcos has all the right basis for great pvp especially when you look at the fast paced, manual aiming combat but the game is not as high budget as aoc and you really have to love the game and trust the devs (wich i do) to stay happy there.