... as usual,the devs are vastly underestimating the griefers,and as usual they will have their asses bitten off for doing so.........

Looks like empty hype to me........

Now if they had said "We are putting an enormous amount of content based on the underdark into ddo.Players will be able to start OUT IN, and play ENTIRELY from level 1 to max in the underdark,experiencing a truely dark and dangerous world as its been presented in years of pnp content"

I probably would have said  "Okay, thats at least a good sales pitch,now lets see what they actually deliver"

But instead,all theyve really said is "Visit  our railed themepark version of the underdark in a small series of  adventures at some point during your chars badly done trip thru d&d's worst setting (ebberon),and experience "darkness" the equavilant to hello kitty online,from the dangerous and thrilling seat of our 'your char cant reaaly die or even suffer any measureable Inconvenience'  tour, as you wander from knocking on this door to the next  "

Nonsense.

Players "ruin" an atmosphere of a game becuase the game lets them.The solution is ungodly simple,create the game that doesnt let them.

childish names -easily handled.Game auto assigned names.

childish behavior-again easily handled.

* limited actions adjusted by  char status

* limited text "talk" options,again adjusted by char status.No different than when players talk to npcs.

etc...

Holding the piss poor designs of the current mmo industry as the "be all and end all" of what can and cant be done in mmos is beyond silly.

You want strong emotions and "fear" to be felt by the player ?Give the player the sureness that he will lose something important when things go bad.Item loss,permanent char injury,and permanent  char death are enough to scare most players with just talk of implementing such.

Right, be sure to listen to paid spokespeople about  products !

And be sure to listen to paid analysts about profits !

And of course never doubt a politician !

They of course ALL know better than anyone else,and the results always show it :P

After all, ALL those happy owners of enron stock who listened to the industry geniuses,the companies spokespersons, etc...  all "blessing"  the day they did so cant be wrong :P

And all those who invested in failcom,becuase their conan MMO was gonna make a mint,and those "in the know" told them so....

And of course lets not forget all the other MMOs predicted to set the world on fire with their outstanding sales and profits :P

This whole free to play scheme is very funny.

Is shows when you cant make a product customers will actually pay for,the next step is to find someone else to pay ,thereby lowering the bar of "acceptable" that much more .

It too will fail in the long run,just as the vast majority of the pay to play games have.

Found it, theres a bit more abimquiity there ,but its pretty damn cose.

"Retain nearly everything you already purchased or unlocked, including Super Boosters, expansions, and directly purchased character slots."

So, since i bought both CoH and CoV seperately,would i have access to the chars i built during that time under those purchases ?Or are they purposely trying to mislead people,and in fact the only things id have access to from the past were "cyptic shop" bought "items" .....

Hmm, i could have sworn i read "returning players would be able to keep and access everything they had from their previously active account" .....Is this not so ?

How is this different than DAoC ?

IF there was a dev team smart enough to make one,and IF said dev team actually had talent in game design,instead of simply being a bunch of programmers given titles proclaiming them designers,a mmofps with a zombie survival based theme would blow away almost all of the  mmos we are plaqued with in todays market.

Housing ?Heck yes !Customizable safehouses ,in which the player can add and task rooms.Housing that gets attacked on occasion,and takes damage,AND has to defended and reppaired.

Crafting ?Again,heck yes!.Its pretty much mandatory in such a setting.

Professions,skills,and skill based advancement ?Yup.

Vehicles and various travel methods? Again pretty much required.

NPC hencemen ?Again,its zombie survival...and there has to be some stranglers out there who need a place to live and protection such a place affords.

NPC interactions ?Of course,and of course even among themselves.

Foraging ?Forget the standard sillyness of mmo foraging,leave it far behind.Think fort zombie,WotLD,Zombie Pandemic,etc,, foraging instead.Search entire buildings and their components,vehicles,etc...

No, other than the lack of intelligence and skill of the current dev teams,theres NO reason why we dont already have a mmofps that overwhelmingly blows away the current crop of crap mmos.

The Undead labs one is a console game,and its a not what they are putting out first.First is a single player version,that they will use to help them make the mmo.

Then from what ive seen, the team making it is devs who have wandered in and formed up ater their last disasters..like almost all mmo dev teams.

Not highly encouraging....Though it IS the best on the horizen at the moment.So sadly,yes its the best hope at the moment.

BUT i would very much rather see a completely new dev team form up,people who have zero ties to the industry,and take a shot at putting out a damn good zombie survival realistic fps multi player.Id even be happy if it was designed to be home server run,and only handle about 40 to 100 players.

Its highly unlikely we will see a qaulity dev team,turn out the one MMO game the industry really needs ( a zombie survival mmo),and do a good job.IE turn it out as a complete well made product....

BUT should that most unlikely event ever take place,it has realistic shooter written all over it.

Too funny be far.

If your silly enough to listen to the defenders,the devs meant all along for the game to be unable to hold players.They spent all that cash, and time,and even put some work into the game all so they could slowly sink into a free to play disaster.....

And low and behold,this particular massive failure ,isnt really a failure,becuase other mmo dev teams have done just as badly.....

the amount of failure here is funny as heck....

Talk about a better rat trap.Here you have a sinking ship,and the rats are convincing some people to board it for the "fun" of bailing water..........

sheesh, you people are scary.....

Now, EA has reported that its total investment in the "Star Wars" MMO has reached $80 million in development alone.

So its put a hell of a lot more than $80 into this product so far....And then thinking a box that sells for $50 gets EA $50........

What id rather, is that they didnt hold out "what the game could be" to try and sell what the game is.Enron based marketing is not a good thing....

Soooooo, "free fly" space combat.....Lets see if i got the gist of their line on this.....

IF you buy the game and give them a ton of feedback,they will  listen and it could get added...

BUT since there was already huge feedback before the release asking for it,and many many forum posts saying the "tunnel " implementation was a major drawback in the posters opion,and that didnt manage to change their minds yet.....

It sure comes off as a "buy our product and we will surely listen to you, even though we havent in the past" kind of sales pitch.Which suggests they understand this is considered a weak point in their game, but that they are NOT quite willing to change it yet,or ever.

BUT are more than happy to give the impression they might, as long as it drives sales.....

I really like the way the rifts work, while far from perfect they were at least fun.BUT the size and spread was too small i thought.

I like large choatic battles,and even in the case of the multiple rifts and rift bosses,the numbers of invaders were just too small to satisfy.Now someone told me they upped the spawn per stage at the rifts since the beta,im curious if this is accurate.....

I havent had a bad rift experience yet.The times that 6 or more rifts open and all send out mob groups that try to converge on one location are very fun infact.The more that manage to converge,the more fun.

They could make it better,by spawning larger mob groups.And make the mobs a bit more independant,so the battles are more chaotic,instead of the mob groups running as one to the target of the moment.If as i said, they made the mobs more indepedant ,so they spread out and attacked more players at a given time at a given location,instead of focusing on one or two players,it would be even more fun.

That level 20 town quest hub gets attacked by multiple rifts alot.

Theres a huge potential for amazingly fun chaotic battles here,they are sooooooo close to getting this to where it should be......

So basically they took the old shadowbane "npcs do your crafting for you", and expanded it .....

This growing trend to have the computer play parts of the game for the player is fairly funny to me,And its not just in mmos.Its hard for me to decide if its just a case of the games (or parts of) being just that bad by the players perspective that they choose not to play them,but still want the "rewards" of  having done so,or a case of just how incredibly lazy the people are becoming.

Following standard mmo industry  practices,the final stage of the  pay to play beta will begin sometime after the game goes retail.