In the US you can't copyright a title, and trademark protection is for businesses operating in the same sphere. This guy isn't doing business in any sphere, and Blizzard's lawyers know they can't sue him anymore than they can sue a snowplow manufacturer or a two kids putting on a play for their parents. They also haven't lifted a finger to protect "World of" in their own industry. This is a meaningless gesture.

And silly too, because the only reason anyone enjoys all this tacky Warhammer fanfic is because Blizzard is really good at making it.

Originally posted by rnor6084

Good god you people are ruthless. Why so damned bitter?? Seems to be a ever increasing problem in the MMO community. YIKES.

 

It's probably because the kinds of games we like to play don't exist anymore. How would you like it if I came to your Infocom fansite and tried to sell you a video card?

I was surprised to see a friend of mine just hit 85. He was always a pretty hardcore player, always raided with a good guild etc. But I remember in Burning Crusade it still took him a good long time to hit 70. I struggled to keep up and fell behind my friends, but that meant I was 63 while they were 67, and oh man wait till you get to Blade's Edge! This took a good long time.

When Lich King came out I was disappointed to see people barreling through solo with no concern for the overworld questing content, but even then it took good players a few weeks to hit 80.

I just did a double take and checked the date, thinking maybe 9 days had passed since release and not 2.

Is the game that much easier now, or is it just that the people who've stuck with it after all these years are jaded with questing and have it down to a science?

How old are those screenshots? The game didn't used to look as terrible as it does now. I'm not a picky guy, I mainly play Anarchy Online, but even with AA forced up all the way everything is blurry. I feel like I'm playing without my glasses on.

I remember EQ2 looking great when I played it a few years ago. I'm trying Extended now and it's just horrible to look at. What the hell happened?

MMOs are very time-consuming social activities, and they almost always end on a bad note.

Your guild dissolves, your friends quit, the game folds or an expansion changes it into something else. If none of these things happen, you wind up standing around at the bank for hours at a time wondering when they will.

Let's pretend you just had the best night out ever. Nice restaurant, awesome bartender, met lots of cool people, found some good coke, had a swell shag in the bathroom, and these tourists from Norway kept buying you shots... but if the night ends with your best friend crying and puking in the street and your boyfriend calling you a whore, that's the part you're going to remember.

In short, the MMO experience is like a more depressing version of the Smack My Bitch Up video, over and over again.

Minecraft is a wonderful game, and it does scratch the Lego itch in a big way, but its multiplayer has almost none of the traditional features of MMOs. Most of all, damage isn't implemented yet, so it's a bit like Garry's Mod. It's a playground with physics.

There are some excellent RPG elements in the single player game - dangerous monsters that infest the dark regions of a world you can explore endlessly. Once this stuff is integrated into the multiplayer, and servers given the ability to connect to each other, Minecraft will essentially be an MMO, and an amazing one. But that is many months away, and the result should be a terrifying and deadly serious game that fits nicely on your shelf between Dwarf Fortress and Darkfall.

That is, nothing like this one.

It baffles me that somebody with an apparent love of Minecraft would come here just to piss on a game which appeals to a similar type of player but doesn't have similar features and will never have the same purpose. As a fan of Minecraft who didn't know Lego Universe was already out, I'm pretty excited about both of them.

Yes, because if we are to interact meaningfully with other players we must know that we can encounter them by chance and track them down or vice versa. Never mind the inevitable nonsense of "lol im at the fountain now i dont see u." Knowing that people are running around in a different copy of the same place - your friends and enemies, on the same server - makes the experience feel staged and pointless.

It hammers home the fact that we're awash in preordained single-player content as substitute for naturally occurring multiplayer surprises. Most of all it's embarrassing. We know it's a half-assed cost-cutting maneuver, B-list behavior heralding the downfall of the MMO form and a signature element of most recent failures & disappointments. CrimeCraft, Champions, STO, APB - pathetic, cynical games built on smoke & mirrors, drenched in excuses.

I'm not concerned they will nerf it to please old-world puritanical conservative types. Those guys are too concerned with having a black man in the White House to focus on their usual buffet of moral and sexual hangups. But NCsoft might well tone this game down in order to appease the armchair neckbeard feminists that seem to be multiplying out there.

Women with nice bodies don't hang out at GameStop or play Magic: The Gathering, and we all know about not being able to look directly at them (or heaven forbid speak to one) until we're old enough to do so with the aid of alcohol. Consequently, there's a growing number of young men in the US who think all feminine beauty comes from Photoshop, and in an attempt to seduce the women who do play TCGs and hang out at GameStop, many of these gentlemen have convinced themselves that games like Blade & Soul don't realistically represent what women should be like.

Chin up, fellas. We've got a long fight ahead of us, but games like this one show we are making progress.

I don't agree that this is primarily a PvP game. The PvP Chip War is arguably the most important part of the game, but it only happens every 8 hours. Apart from that, PvP is a small part of the overall experience as the vast majority of your time will be spent grinding up levels.

While you are grinding levels, you will be repeatedly killed by high level enemy players. You will stand no chance against them. You'll be lucky even to see their names.

Now it sounds like I am putting this game down. I am not. Grinding in RF is fun because of the large variety of spells, physical strikes, and debuffs involved, and also because you are constantly drinking potions. The difference between your attacks is largely meaningless - damage type matters but your strategy won't change within a single fight - however the sheer amount of eye candy and sound effects, along with better danger from adds than most grinders, makes the action pretty satisfying. Pounding potions is silly, but it's so constant you will begin to think of it as just your regen rate or any kind of upkeep.

While you do this, you will be in constant danger of being ganked by high level players. When they enter the area, you or someone is going to get their ass handed to them. Your job then is to run like hell, hope you aren't the next target, and call for help. If you get to safety, the high level players on your side will come looking for the offender. This might not sound like the kind of fun you'd want from a PvP game, but while your experience of RF is about PvE grinding it makes the game a thousand times more surprising and suspenseful than anything else in its category.

There is no corpse to recover, so there is no corpse camping, and the endgame players are only doing it to provoke their equals. I played this game for hundreds of hours and don't think I ever was killed repeatedly by the same player. In fact I don't remember ever being angry at someone from the opposing factions.

I haven't played on the CCR server in a long time. Last time I went there, the chat was dominated by gold spammers to the point of being utterly useless. There was no moderation whatsoever, including by players. How this is possible, in a game where players are elected to moderate and appoint moderators, I have no idea. Can anyone tell me what CCR's server is like now?

With that caveat, I recommend this game very highly compared to anything similar. It is far and away my favorite F2P game.

Originally posted by MaDSaM

No Newbes aka. small PvPers, means an overhang of higher PvPes who naturally kick the smaller ones butt.

If there were more Newbes, there´d be far more small level PvPers, who could for example gang up on an older guild.

Saying things like what you said above is sadly what keeps palyers from even trying to get somewhere and get together with others, because all they read is: "I can´t make it by myself". And thus don´t even want to try to make it together with others.

For the record, it is a tremendous pain in the ass to get flagged for PvP, and I have never been attacked maliciously in the wild. I did get ganked several times in town by someone who found the flag precocious.

The problem of PvP imbalance was solved years ago, and there is really no excuse for this. At least Ryzom has done the right thing by allowing self-flagging, and not allowing you to hop in and out of PK status for a laugh.

You can definitely make it by yourself in this game, and in fact it's even more fun that way. You will craft things you can use, it will be very difficult getting from place to place, and your discovery of the world's locations will be spread out over your experience rather than presented to you all at once as a favor.

Cutting off the appeals process one day before the free return weekend was dirty pool. It showed contempt for former subscribers, as though we are not real customers. Never mind most people who bought Aion will buy from NCsoft again, and a good number of us probably subscribe to some other NCsoft product, or at least play Guild Wars.

I didn't lose any names so I don't much care, but it tells me I could invest a lot of time in one of my characters, take a break to play something else, come back and find the name taken. (Then again, last time I did that my account got stolen and then banned, somehow without NCsoft's system informing me of changes to the password and payment information.)

I wonder how many people actually reupped this week. Personally three days just doesn't tell me anything. I'm not going to spend 10-15 hours of my weekend finding out if it's a good vibe or not. No one even talks in this game anymore. Was it just a slow part of the day? I guess I'll never find out.

Originally posted by VengeSunsoar

I played Ryzom for three months.  At first the game seemed amazing... I can develop any skill I want wow, I can craft everything wow.

After three months of fighting the same mobs and the same plants the same way no matter what I use, dagger, sword, axe.. I'm bored of it.

After digging in the dirt for three months to craft the exact same looking armor as I allready have (there isn't very many styles) just with different stats.  I'm bored of it.

There needs to be more to do in that game than just digging and fighting, or at least more variety while doing it. 

In other games I can roll a different class for a new fighting experience, or a different area.  In Ryzom this doesn't make any difference at all, virtually all skills fight the same and craft the same.  Once you've traineed a few skills to 100 or more it is just mind-numbingly repetitive.

Venge Sunsoar

edit - What I would like is a game that has as many fighting and crafting options as Ryzom with the exterior housing of Istaria, the interior housing of CoH, and the variety of activites as WoW.  That to me would be the perfect game.

Please tell me something about Istaria. I have always wondered about that game but never got around to trying it.

Have you played Anarchy Online?

SPOILER: This turned into a rant post. That was an accident. To anyone would would rather not read a guy's negative opinions about an essentially wonderful game, stop here.

Everything you said above is true. I love Ryzom but I cannot play it for very long, and the often hostile attitude from people who want me to pretend I'm doing something more interesting only makes it worse. If I want to "make my own fun" that's what my word processor is for.

What some of the more enthusiastic posts here don't mention is that PvP and world events are mostly closed to you until you reach endgame. The enemies are simply too powerful for you to stand a chance. I did several missions over and over again to get my PvP flag, only to find that everyone else with a flag will kill you in one hit even if they try not to.

Another depressing element was not being able to use anything you craft yourself. Whatever you make, you will have so many of that they must be vendored. Which means everyone above your level is doing the same, and eager to give away their creations just so some of it won't go to waste. You will quickly find yourself outfitted in items you could never make youself, and they will be tailored for a specific damage type, which means you must now fight just one kind of monster.

Sure, you have the option of doing anything else you want, but difficulty in this game means little besides the speed of your progress. In day-to-day PvE you will never say to yourself "Man, that was a close one; good thing I thought to use XYZ in time." Apart from the occasional thrill of being set upon by wild dogs or jumped by respawns, the fighting becomes pretty repetitive. You'll never learn that this mob runs for cover at 1/3 hp, that mob casts a spell you can't interrupt with melee, etc.; it's just hit hit hit hit. I suppose I should use my imagination and make my own challenge.

I didn't mean this to turn into a rant post. I actually checked this forum because I want to reopen my account. But it drives me crazy how people think this game is something it is not. Making your own spells is another example. Because this is confusing at the start and not copied anywhere else, fans of the game will sometimes offer it as a sign of the game's sophistication. It is nothing more than a loadout system: I want a bigger engine; oh dear, I can't power my launchers. Okay, install a new capacitor. Crap, now there's no room for the hyperdrive. It's a cute system, but there is always a best version of the spell, and trial & error will get you there quickly. It's enjoyable to make different versions for different enemies.

Lastly I am sore at them for wiping out the starter island. It was probably the best tutorial I've ever seen, with a great atmosphere and some thrilling situations, and last time I checked it was empty of activity, because where at one point it was the best place to meet other players, it is now a  major hindrance to that.

I hope you've already tried and tired of the other games you mentioned, because they are all better than FE.

I'm sure things aren't the same as they were during the first two months, but I don't see how they could have improved. Maybe the remaining community has seen the writing on the wall and realized they need to spend time in the low level areas and actually play with newbies, instead of just giving advice and winking.

I met some nice people and joined a pretty mature clan. I could not get people to group up for love nor money. Group content was minimal and unnecessary, and almost all of it was instanced so you couldn't wander into a group area and team up with whomever was there. Distances were great, fast travel was nonexistent, and there was no reason for people to make alts or means of level-locking them. The chat channels were chopped up into regions whose borders had no clear definition, and were separate from what the game map and other UI called regions. I haven't had so much trouble playing an MMO with other people since I made the mistake of trying Rohan: Blood Feud.

Hopefully they addressed some of this, but they sure as hell never mentioned any of it in their mailings. Meanwhile they've let a lot of employees go. Their forum is as dead as anything I've seen in recent memory.

Normally this would be a sad thing, but we aren't even losing a fictional world since the landscape is made from satellite maps. It's a shame most of the PvP areas never saw action. The ones I saw were interesting and nicely put together, so it's a shame those will be lost. I'm tempted to go back, but the dealbreaker for me was censorship on the chat channels - not of language but of subject matter - along with pushy attitudes exhibited by the GMs, plus the fact that a working global chat was taken down just to end discussion someone clearly thought was out of control. Mind you this was when the game was buzzing and everyone was upbeat about its future.

The music is pretty good. Do yourself a favor and explore all you can. I have a sneaking suspicion that when the game dies, these guys are going to stop you from hosting it yourself in hopes that they can get a few bucks for the rights someday.

Please report back if things are looking up.

What does this have to do with orcs? I never said anything about loosing the Ettenmoors upon Eriador. I'm talking about brigands. I'm talking about just plain disagreeable people.

If you can go to the shire, the Blackwolds can manage it too. If the Blackwolds can attack me, you should be able to attack me also. Making it so players can opt out of this is standard MMO practice and need not disrupt anyone, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with lore. In fact there is nothing in Tolkien to suggest everyday adventurers are protected from one another by some artificial forcefield.

But you didn't address my premise at all, which is that flagging PK-legal is disallowed because it would make other players feel less heroic or less important.

Originally posted by Rocketeer

Originally posted by Ragana

Originally posted by Rocketeer

Sorry not buying it. PvE Servers are just as popular in WoW as PvP Servers, so its certainly not the open world pvp missing. Also Warhammer proved that focus on pvp != success. Furthermore they would totally have to butcher the balance between classes to be made pvp viable.

Please tell me you were not being serious with that statement.

 

Please tell me what your are talking about. There are several rather controversial points in my post.

You're working with a modern defenition of PvP. Originally we used it synonymously with "PK-legal," and it strictly referred to player-on-player action in a PvE game. The word "legal" was used because on many MUDs it had to be enforced by hand.

So it is really a misnomer to call Warhammer a PvP game. PK is essentially a banned activity in Warhammer, insofar as actions against players who are focused on PvE range between irrelevant and impossible. It's really no more a PvP game than Checkers or Blackjack. It is a competitive match game, with a half-interested swipe at PvE serving for a game lobby.

Turbine long ago solved the problem of non-disruptive world PvP with an opt-in system that involved a semi-permanent decision for your character. People who wanted nothing to do with it never became involved. Those who did could not enter into it lightly. Going PK in Asheron's Call was as serious a choice as we will likely ever make in an MMO.

Turbine could have done this in LotRO. They lied about its appropriateness to the source material. But why?

To have world PvP happening around you, even when - especially when - you're not involved, takes away from the main thing LotRO is selling, which is: You're not just some slob, you're the big hero. For just $9.99/mo* even you can experience the thrill of mattering to the world. Of being respected by someone - please God, anyone.

Games like LotRO are based around a carefully designed regimen of flattery, and this is utterly ruined if you allow people in the same space to contend with opponents who can think and plan, whose abilities haven't been painstakingly hamstringed by game designers so as to detract from the thrill of killing and killing and killing only enough to whet the player's appetite for more.

This is the central strategy for selling the dedicated PvE game. It is not an accident, and the people who rely on it are terrified of giving it up.

If I remember right, they did this last summer and then again in the fall, but haven't done one this year until now. There may have even been three of them last year.

It may be that the game is failing, but it's also effective. I stuck around for two months after the first 2009 beg-back. I kept my Age of Conan sub active for half a year after theirs. I probably would have subbed to Darkfall last month but that game is just too quiet for me.

It's a shame they don't do this with Ryzom. They've got a nice three-week trial but you can't use it if you've ever had an account, even from while it was F2P.

It doesn't meet most of your criteria, but I feel like tossing this one at you anyway.

Ryzom.

It's kind of old, and it can get grindy. If you try to solo you'll find yourself doing the same crap over and over again. But the community is very strong and very helpful, and if you manage to find some good people to roll with there's a strong feeling of adventure to be had.

The world is very alien with good variety and a sense of hugeness & distance. There are seasons, each lasting several days. Monsters have migration patterns, and some of them are very vicious. I'm particularly fond of the wild dogs that roam around the eastern province and set on you right when you've found your rhythm. The game has been adopted by a company that seems to care deeply about it, and they do live events when they can manage it. (The game also went open source a week ago.)

The free trial lasts three weeks, and afaik is no longer restricted to the starter island. Time enough, probably, to know if you're going to get along with the locals. To be frank, I often don't, but in my time there I fell in with a couple of good guilds, and really enjoyed myself until they self-destructed. If you have no one to play with, the game can be pretty lonesome. One thing it doesn't do well is present strangers with immediately apparent reasons to play together.

If you are allowed two characters, keep one in the newbie area to play the excellent tutorial campaign, but send another to the mainland right away and ask on Universal chat if someone would mind showing you around. (They love doing this, no joke.)

I have a soft spot for this game, in no small part because of the atmosphere and music. Writing about it makes me want very badly to reopen my account.

More here.

Depending on how you define it, AA probably began with Shadows of Luclin - but Anarchy Online had a form of guild renown early on, though it depended on PvP achievements and could be lost. Does it really matter, when none of these games would be around without EverQuest? Modern MMOs would probably all either be shooters or look like Fat Princess. (God I wish.)

Really, AA dates back at least to D&D 3rd Ed. and who knows what before that.

In any case, it's funny to see some of you getting upset about it, as if they stole an idea from a game YOU made. You didn't make a game, so rest assured your honor is free from any such stain, and you can all put your Super Soakers away. The only thing we should be worried about is these games becoming too much alike, and if you don't see most of them bending over backwards to avoid that then you aren't looking.

I went back to Warhammer for a couple months earlier this year. It was indeed nonstop PvP to a point. Once I got past level 20 the action started to fall off. Warbands were less common and I found it excruciating to do the PvE necessary just to cover the travel costs. Soloing is pretty boring in that game and it's difficult to find anyone else who is up for it. If you enjoy it at all, the travel costs won't be a problem for you, but I personally could not stand it.

If by "adventure feeling of WoW" you mean good quest design, Age of Conan has some of that. Specifically it has goals which are not the combat itself, but for which combat is sometimes necessary. I have never liked kill quests, because the traditional hero of high fantasy is always set on a distant goal and avoids a fight when he can. There's plenty of fighting in AoC, but it often comes with a feeling that it was necessary and important. This game is widely disliked so do your research before taking my recommendation. I canceled my subscription because I found myself playing alone more than I liked.

If what you mean by adventure is a sense of vastness, travel, and exploration, LotRO is a good recommendation. You will spend much of your time leveling by yourself, but the overworld is beautfully done and limited fast-travel options help to preserve its sense of enormous spaces. However it is an entirely humorless and sexless game, about as whitebread as you can get without a wrist strap. On a positive note, you can get a pet man who runs around with a picket sign shouting.

If what you want is to group regularly, absolutely Anarchy Online. It's old & ugly, the quests are a pain to track down & follow, and the stat & crafting systems are pretty impenetrable - but it's got a healthy population of alts xp-locked in different level brackets, and it's pretty easy to find a group for low level activities. The world is also very large, and difficult to explore in a number of ways. This is my favorite MMO, so you can take any of this with a grain of salt, but the bulk of the game is free so no harm giving it a shot unless you have to deal with a bandwidth meter or cap.

A lot of people still play Guild Wars. I have a friend on Steam who fired the game up while I was typing this. Most players will know the content well by now, and you'll likely be forced to rush through anything you'd want to do as a group - but it's a lovely game with excellent, often harrowing action and IMO the greatest soundtrack ever put together. If you forgo the trilogy to start with just one of the games, go with Factions.

EVE Online is a phenomenal game. Try it at your peril. What WoW does to some people with addictive personalities, EVE does to anyone who can stand it. Do yourself an enormous favor and just put it out of your mind.

Final answer: Take a break, then go back to WoW and roll on a new server.

There is simply no way to start out in this game and hope to play it with other people. Communication is impossible at low levels, and while the grinding is fun it (for most people) can't sustain many long solo sessions in a row.

If you don't care about that, the monster slaying is great and the game is a lot of fun to look at and listen to. The animations and sound effects give the fighting a tremendous sense of energy and force. Whenever I hear something that reminds me of the music, I check to see how the game is doing, and I get a little yearning for how it gets your blood racing. But it's still just a Lineage 2 clone, designed as an excuse to hang out in a cafe.

If you want a nice F2P grinder that you can actually play with other people from the start, give Shaiya a try. The player base there is very friendly for some reason, to the point that I have numerous times found myself in groups killing monsters for no reason at all. Folks in Shaiya just like fighting monsters. (Mind the BTDNA program it may leave running on your machine as a startup service, easily removed though and not intentionally malicious.)