All Posts by bobfish

The OP is right, none of them are good, none of them are triple A titles, but then most MMOs aren't, whether they are sub based or item shop based or other.

What most are though, is passable time wasters, which is what most of us are looking for. If it keeps me occupied for a few days then it was worth the 30 minute download, better than shelling out fifty bucks on a new game that lasts just as long but leaves me out of pocket.

But consider this.. for every 1 MMO made by a western company, there are 100 made by an Asian company, yet they don't have more development studios than us, they just don't spend as much time or money on them. In 2006 for example, Chinese MMO developers released over 200 new MMOs, quantity over quality in Asia.

Class balance isn't a general issue in all MMOs, it only applies to the ones with classes and their rock paper scissor mentality.

Two things...

1) MMOs attract and are designed for achievers. Other personality types that could be interested in this genre are ignored, though the new fad for casual MMOs is a step in the right direction they still suffer from design flaws aimed at achievers, ie levels and clear objective orientated gameplay.

2) MMOs suffer from repetative content or the need to repeat content. There is no excuse for this, if a single player game had the same model for a bad guy from start to finish only slightly bigger or a different color pigment, they would get absolutely slated. And no, MMOs don't have more content, they just have more people using it.

DNS error, I'm connecting from the UK so maybe it hasn't populated completely yet.

This is nothing new, travel time is an issue in literature, visual media and games. In a book you just don't write about the long boring time they were traveling, in films you can skip it and advance time, and tv shows too, though creative writers have always tried to think of ways to make travelling faster and believeable to ensure you remain immersed in their world.

Stargate just happened to be what people wanted to watch, a sci-fi show with strong connections to the real world, much like how Smallville, Lost and Heroes have all been popular, people can relate to them. The writer designed the Stargate purposely to cut down on travel time and allow a way for his stars to travel amongst the stars without any of that boring travel time.

Stargate Worlds though is shaping up to be a sci-fi version of Guild Wars, with over the top useage of instances, so regardless of the setting, the MMO will be judged solely on it's gameplay. And personally I don't think it's going to be as good as people want it to be.

1. Your domain doesn't work.

2. The 29th is a Friday not Wednesday.

Originally posted by Xris375

I think it is the producers fault when they design their game to be HUGE timesinks and "just another level or mob". A game where the best items only accessible to people on welfare or people risking RL relationships or committments, ain't good for you. 

The old RPG designers of D&D put in a rule that you couldn't level more than one level pr. session. Maybe the MMO industry should make the same limitation, so that the game creates more fun and less RL loosers.

In Asia they take it very seriously now, China has implemented laws preventing minors from playing more than five hours a day, and China, Korea and Japan all have laws that can be invoked if the game is deemed to be not taking the welfare of the players seriously. In Europe you could even get the Human Rights act invoked to challenge the attitude and nature of some MMO companies, but in the US.. well the players will prevent anything ever happening because they value their freedoms too much.

However, timesinks aren't addictive, in fact for your average gamer MMOs aren't fun beyond the social interaction, they aren't as good as a single player game in any aspect except the interaction with other people. Combat, story, level design, etc, all are usually simplified to cater to more people trying to do it at the same time. So you can't blame the game, they appeal to a type of person though, and that's no different to how GTA appeals to a certain type of person or Barbie Horse Adventure appeals to another type. You can't blame a game for providing what the players want.

What makes you think his friends in WoW are any less real that his friends who come round his house? Maybe they are even the same people?

Games are addictive, it's not just MMOs, and the thing the developers are exploiting are the player's need to be someone, not any magic thing that is known to be addictive. A market research poll last year showed that the majority of MMO gamers are achievers, they want to get something back for the time they put in, they want that extra level, they want that cool item, they want to be the best.

Developers do exploit the behavioural pattern of the average MMO player, but they do not exploit some mythical addiction attribute.

As I have said previously, I have known people who have been addicted to single player games and non-MMO games, usually they are console gamers too. It's not an MMO specific thing.

I'm not disputing that games are addictive, just that those who get addictive are physically or mentally ill / disabled. They aren't, there is nothing wrong with them, they are normal people who happen to have low will power, that isn't WRONG, that is just different.

And any pleasure activity causes chemicals to be released in the brain and heightened brain activity, it's not unique to gaming or MMOs. I know a person who played Halo 8 hours a day seven days a week, but he finds MMOs boring as hell. Addiction to an MMO is the same as any other addiction to something you enjoy doing.

Originally posted by Odysses

Originally posted by Vincenz

I think claiming to have an addiction that the AMA has said doesn't exist, pretty much sums it up.  It's the player's fault for having no self control...at all...but who wants to admit that, when you can blame the world for it by calling it an addiction, syndrome, or some other term that makes it "not your fault"?

I think the AMA is absolutely wrong.   There is a segment of the population that is wired this way.  The same underlying symptoms are exactly the same for gambling addicts.   It is a combination of company's supplying the product to a niche market that can tend to get addicted.

You just want another excuse to dish out drugs to sane people and make shrinks more money.

Originally posted by Torak

 

Originally posted by bobfish

Anyone who hasn't played Vanguard in the last three months is working off a false judgement, it's nothing like it was at release.

So encourage people who probably paid top dollar at launch who were disappointed to keep feeding 14.95 occasionally "just to see" if it has improved to a satisfactory level? Rewarding the makers of the game over and over just for working on it to bring it to an acceptable and playable state?

 

You know when Vanguard launched it shot up to close to 200k people playing then it quickly crashed to about 40k within a few months. What about all those people who wasted their money on the "false judgment" that the game they just dropped 50 bucks on was going to at least work? They should continue to feed them a sub fee in good faith it will come along eventually?

Yeah, I tried it in Dec / Jan when they gave out the free 2 or 3 weeks and the improvements were modest at best. Not nearly enough for the year its been, most of the technical issues like falling through the world mesh have not been resolved and to add insult to injury, the last 4 servers are "lightly populated" at best, the gameplay is brain dead grinding on "kill 10 rats", diplomacy is all but forgotten and crafting is better suited to people without a pulse. The devs are now altering the original ideas and making more and more like every other MMO racing you through the levels and adding a bunch of raids for an "endgame". Its a completely pointless exersize in level grinding.

This turkey died the death it deserved.  MMOs get one shot at launch, screw that up and they never recover.

I played through a year of beta, three months at launch and then quit. I came back in September and stayed again until December. It was good for those last three months, prior to that I agree the game was not what was promised and never good enough to be released.

But for someone who's never played it before, it's stable, there aren't many bugs left, the classes have mostly been fixed, PvE combat is fun, dungeon crawling is fun, quests are well written, the content is good, albeit too spread out imo. It will never get over it's bad release, and the servers are top heavy, but it is a good PvE experience now.

It is infinitely more enjoyable PvE experience than Lineage 2 that's for sure. If you had technical issues I suggest you look closer to home, I never fell through the world once in VG, I never had any quest bugs, framerate problems (since the last update) or other technical issues. As for world population, yes it is light at level 1, but any game that is a year or more older is going to have a mature playerbase, Lineage 2 is worst, the only reason you see more people around is cause they are bots.

Seriously, stop condemning it cause you don't like it, other people do like it. And I never recommended anyone stay with it for the whole year, not even I'm daft enough to pay for something that is broken, but it's not broken any more.

Anything can be addictive, but you have to remember that in America it's the psychiatric industry that decides whether something is a mental disorder addiction or not (like gambling), and as gaming is generally not taken seriously in America it's unlikely that the psychiatric industry is going to take addiction to it seriously either. They'll come around eventually though, but it's not really something you should be hoping for.

Then you'll not just get people wasting their lives away on WoW, you'll get them wasting half their lives away on WoW and the other half doped up mind-drugs like Prozac.

In Amsterdam there is a rehad clinic for gaming addiction, but I don't know what they do there, I think they best way to deal with it is to get the people out into the world. Adventure weekends, charity work, sports, team activities that basically force the person out of the house and away from the computer/console.

Like I said before, drugs won't solve a problem that has arisen from a lack of will power, and that is what they give to people who have a gambling addiction, therapy and drugs, it's not solving their gambling addiction, it's just giving them a new one to replace it with.

But the ball remains in the player's half of the court, whether they seek psychiatric help or something else, only they can ever resolve the problem, producers can't make games unaddictive.

Anyone who hasn't played Vanguard in the last three months is working off a false judgement, it's nothing like it was at release.

The OP stated a good PvP experience, not something you will find in L2, maybe in DAoC, and definitely not in a Sword of the New World. And SotNW does have a forum here, http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/forum/721

Gaming addiction is a recognised problem in Asia and Europe, just because America doesn't think it is, doesn't mean it's not.

However how you can call addiction to a non-addictive substance/thing a disease is beyond me, it's not a disease it's the person has a lack of will power to stop themselves from doing it, and I wouldn't say a lack of will power constitutes a disease, it's not something that can be cured with medicine or surgery.

Seriously that's just Pyschiatrists trying to invent problems with the mind to sell more drugs, therapy sessions and keep them in business. Not everyone is the same and you shouldn't be trying to make everyone the same.

L2 was good in it's day, I'm waiting for L3 whenever it will be, but I wouldn't recommend new people starting on it now, it's just too dependant on levels and getting up there is tough, not because of the time, but because of jerks killing you or your mobs.

Anyways, OP, Vanguard is a very good choice for PvE these days, or EQ2, though I prefer VG. Just don't race through it, there is plenty of content though you can't do it all before you out level it, and once you do hit 50 the raids are good, but there is no sign of more content on the horizon. So make it last!

Addiction to anything other than a drug that physically affects the body or mind is purely down to the user. You can blame addiction to narcotics on the drugs themselves because of how they affect you, but a game is something that doesn't physically affect you, you just enjoy doing it, like you enjoy sex or driving.

Get some will power, sort out your life priorities, whatever, but addiction to a game is a sad state of affairs.

From what they've said it's not a true FPS, that might mean something like Tabula Rasa, but everyone on their forums has made it clear that it needs to be better than TR if it's not real twitch combat.