All Posts by gestalt11

Originally posted by Arthousesig

Originally posted by silkworm

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Regards

Tahi

 

LOL

How many times have we seen that one on the EU forums, every thread with any criticism has that at the end of it (unless the whole thread just disappears)

And if you ask them anything via PM you either get ignored or get an infraction

XD

Well that way the troublemakers identify themselves.  And who are the troublemakers?  Anyone who asks questions.  Afterall; Ignorance is Strength and Freedom is Slavery.

Originally posted by Kunou

Figured I'd jump in here and make a couple points...

...

B. When Famine registered at the site, as with any game studio Dev, he was given the same title he has for his product at his company, which is Community Coordinator. In the Community Relations field of the game industry that is NOT an unusual title. It has nothing to do with this site or what we chose to call him, the same policy applies to any Dev who signs up on these forums in an official capacity, they get their normal title.

...

VI. You may now continue your regularly scheduled thread.

People complaining about famine need to get a grip.  He is using the same name as used on the AoC forums, is identified as a Funcom employee with the correct title and signs his posts with his real name.

Just because MMORPG.com put his job title in does not mean he is associated with MMORPG.com even if they use the his sobriquet.  In fact they made every effort to properly and honest identify him.  If they were compliciti in hiding his identity that would be different, but they have done the complete opposite.

Now having possibly the biggest AoC fanboy on these boards be one of MMORPG.com's AoC correspondents (and i am NOT talking about Dom) that is quite problematic.  And frankly MMORPG.com dropped the ball on that one.

But MMORPG.com has always had properly identified gaming professionals posting on relevant forums forums.

Raid items just shouldn't be better than group items. 

A) raiding is not harder so it does not deserve "better".

b) grouping is usually the bedrock of most MMO games so making items that mess with it is flat out stupid.

c) the only reason raiders "require" the uberest of the uber is to feed their e-peen.  You can certainly make raids that are doable with items from grouping.

The whole raid item issue is just layers and layers of BS laid upon each other to justify that they should be uber in spite of everything else.

Raiders and FFA PvPers display almost exactly the same Locust like mentality of getting the fix they need no matter how destructive it is to the rest of the game and then when they have mess up a game they move on to the next one and agitate for the same destructive mechanics leave nothing but ruination behind.  And they will spout out whatever BS they can come up with to maintain their fix.

Having stuff to do at "endgame" is fine and good etc.  I do not like the idea of endgame but whatever some of these games are made that way.  But doing what raiders advocate and sabotaging the bed rock of your game for silly and arbitrary reasons that have no merit is just retarded.

Originally posted by Meltdown

Time time time time.... Forced grouping and forced raiding equal one thing... thyme er time. When you have the time it's great. It's fun, it's exciting, and it's social. When you don't have time, as most people don't, the appeal of smaller and smaller raids, less forced grouping/raiding and any other eases on time constraint (faster travel, faster leveling, simple quests) the more appealing it is.

So imo Forced-grouping and Forced-Raiding are the shining, appealing golden egg of MMOs... if you have time for it.

Yes time is very important to this but I do not agree that when you have time they are great.  That is true for some people and then when they have no time they realize its a pain in the ass.

But for me even when I have time it pisses me and makes me want to punch the devs in the face and cancel their game.  And generally I do wind up canceling.  The coercive nature of it is completely obvious to me and the restrictive nature of it is depressing and confining.  I just do not like.

I have canceled DDO twice when i get a character to about level 6 or 7 precisely because of this even though I had the time and for the most part like the gameplay.  I start feeling confined and lose interest in subjecting myself to the game.

I do not care about player housing in anyway and never have.  However some people like it a lot.

The thing I do not get is that a lot of people seem to think player housing is simple.  I suggest you go read the regulations for real estate and zoning and possibly whatever home owners assoication you belong to or whatever lease you have signed  that exist wherever you happen to live.

Then in a couple years when you have finished that you can come back here and suggest how the developers can implement a true "world-like" housing system that has meaning.

Or in others words real-estate and owning land is a fundamental and extremely important aspect of real life.  Something that billions and billions of humans have killed each other for thousands of years.  Its not a simple matter.  Just creating a game that simulated this to even modest degree would be a huge undertaking.  Even what exists in Eve with POS and stations and systems and travel/scale is barely a skeleton of the underlying stuff.

There isn't more of it, because it takes a fundamental aspect of life, trivializes it into virtual meaninglessness and doing anything past that is a huge and complex undertaking that would require a design that strated with the idea from the ground up.  And even when you trivialize to a lesser extent like in UO or SWG you still run into all kinds of problems because the issue to complex and fundamental to really do that.

Its easier to force people to do things it only takes a big stick.

Its much harder to encourage a large number of people to do something, especially since people have different tastes.

Its natural for most people to try to solve a problem by "getting a bigger hammer".

Unfortunately for those of us who like MMORPG it is going to take a long time for the Devs to fully realize that the "bigger hammer" approach is simply not sustainable.  It works for a while but then people get tired and  depressed and lose all motivation.

They need elegant solutions that provide positive reasons to have truly successful MMO.  Everyone on some level knows the way many of these games currently are is just not sustainable.  They are essenitally do a slash and burn model, but they burn through people rather than trees and get the next crop.

But elegant solutions take a lot of deep thought and solid analysis.  When you have a deadline and don't start with a real inspiration you tend to go for the "bigger hammer".

Its been this way for a long time.  It started in MUDs and has slowly been lessening more and more.  Eventually they will realize punishing people in a game is cutting off your nose to spite your face.  Restrictions are fine, but punishing players with restrictive mechanics that seem arbitrary or contradictory to other parts of the game.  Punishing  soloers because grouping is better or punishing groupers because raiding is better or forcing people to play a certain way because you can't figure out a way to make grouping interesting or putting in long travel times but making your content static.  These are just types of "hammers".  Everything is negative.  There is no reward for long travel times in EQ its just a pain in the ass,  there is in Eve.  The reward in Eve is safety and restricting your enemies.  EQ wanted one conequence of travel, immersion, so they jammed it into their game and beat on it over and over with bigger and bigger hammers to make it fit while ignoring most other implications of travel. 

Travel is fundamental thing.  So are other things like realestate (ie. affects player housing).  They have many and varied  far reaching consequences.  You only need to look at real life to see that.  This is why they are often problematic and/or left out of games.  You really have to take a lot of time with the basic underlying idea of your game you wind up pounding on them with bigger and bigger hammers until they are barely what they were.  They are often implemented in a half assed way because the devs only wanted one aspect of them.  But they are such fundamental parts of life that they cannot be partial created because you get cascading consequences that affects almost the entire game.

If you want something like travel or realestate usage you must start with an elegant idea that puts it as part of the fundamental design of the game.  That is why travel works in Eve and did not in EQ.  CCP recognized that these it was a fundamental but powerful thing that affects everything.  Afterall, what is the point of a spaceship?  Traveling through the stars.  The point of travel in Eve is well to travel.  The point of travel in EQ was immersion.  Right there they made a terrible mistake.  They implemented a 3D concept into being 1 dimensional and failed to consider that travel will determine how every single thing in the game will associate with each other because it is a fundamental, atmoic characteristic.  Its not a feature that you can just shoehorn in and beat on with a hammer until it fits with your game design.  Its the other way around, your game design has to fit travel.

The same thing is true of forced/coercive grouping (ie. EQ or DDO or WoW) versus positive grouping (City of Heroes) but instead it about the social aspects. 

Roles are a way to make content consumption predicatable, this is a hammer.  Its a way to make it so that they do not need come up with an elegant solution to balance content.  They can simply have a tightly controlled equation they force everyone to obey. 

Roles are a way to ensure that people group, person X can't survive without person Y.  And person Y cannot kill  stuff well enough without person X.  You create a dependency and give them the choice "Group or you get nothing!  You will obey my paradigm or misery ensues."  This is the very definition of a social "hammer"

Positive grouping in CoX instead lets anyone do almost anything whether the group size is 1 or 8.  Why group? 

Well each change is group size changes the spawns.  You get different and possibly more interesting game play.

Also each addition to your group gives you additional power.  Even if you add in a second of the same power set.  Two force field defenders will stack their avoidance buffs.  A scrapper may  go from tough solo to really ahrd to kill with one FF defender to NIgh invulnerable with 2 FF defenders.  That is fun. 

Being say a resistance based scrapper and getting a FF defender to join you and add avoidance over your resistance is really nice.   Everytime you add someone you get something cool added to what is going on or to your capabilities.  If you are a decent scrapper you never really NEED any of these people.  But having them makes able perform really well and tear through stuff.  Its more fun and generally things go faster as well.

CoX says to people "Hey, look at those people over there, think of what you could do with them.  You know you want that FF defender to be in your group then you can flip out and kill things like a ninja on crack.  Come one you know you want to... "

So what happens in CoX instead?  Well in some ways you can say what is the difference?  Afterall in both games you get a group to reach your full potential and some people keep others alive and some people buff you and some people do damage.

Well the difference is the mentality.  You do not feel like you are grouping because you HAVE to.  You don't have to.  Instead when you aren't in a group, even if you are playing a Scrapper that can solo archvillians, you are still thinking to yourself  "Man what if I had a Kinetics or FF around. " or "Man I could really blast  things fast with AoE if I had a tank to pull them nice and tight, I am getting tired of the setup time."

And there is no tightly controlled hammer forcing everyone to play essentially the same way.  Pounding everyone into the same mold.  Groups are easier to form, because they can start from 1 move to 2 then move to 4 or 6 or 8.  Its not 1, 5 or nothing.  And at each increment they can do almost whatever they feel like.  Each group winds up being a little different and working a little different.   Grouping is far more dynamic both in size and makeup, the principles are still similar.  You need  damage, you need to stay alive.  But how  exactly that is happening tends to vary qutie a bit due to powerset differences and due to group size.

There are no hammers pounding on people to stay.  You can always get someone else.  There are no hammers pounding on people to wait around until you form the  correct group makeup.  Do whatever you want and keep adding people.  Sure there are certain more powerful group makeups but most any group can tackle anything if its set at the right difficulty.  Therefore there is no real reason for most soloers to refuse an invite into the group.  Because many people solo to be free of burdens.  When you take away the hammers pounding on people to act a certain way there are suddenly no burdens and solo and group play is no longer in conflict.  And suddenly except for rare expceptions there are no groupers or soloers.  Just people doing whatever seems fun at the time.

You have someone who has to leave an instance in WoW or EQ people get pissed because they ahve to wait around and fill up that slot and no only fill it but fill it with the right class.  Someone leaves in CoX they say "Have a good day" and then the rest of group either continues or resets the instance so that it fits their current group.

That kind of social lubrication is very badly overlooked in the current MMO market.  It requires a from the ground up idea about how the content of the game should work.  It would be impossible for WoW to have as good of grouping as CoX they would have to re-implement their entire game.  And because of this people seem to believe there are tensions that really do not exist.

In the end all this forced this or that is not necessary and there are not real tensions between solers and groupers or whatever.  Its just a manifestation of the hammer principle being applied to fundamental aspects of games.  It is the hammer principle that causes these problems.  It is the pounding of features into forms that do not really fit what they actually do that causes these fake tensions.

But people tend to think in terms of hammers and tightly controlled rules.  They won't see the forest for the trees.

Originally posted by FC-Famine

Originally posted by AranStormah
....

 

Heya,

....

Overall we do moderate the forums and we do empower the community to help out with being apart of the community. This is why we have the moderation program in place much like MMORPG.COM encourages the community to write blogs, moderate or anything else in between to offer upcoming members to be apart of something bigger with such a great site. Sometimes things happen and sometimes changes need to be made in order to keep moving on the right track. I think we are seeing that with our current moderation policies and of course our guidelines we have followed before the launch of the Age of Conan forums. I think it's perfectly normal myself to have those concerns and it should be up to the community team as a whole to address those concerns to better fit it to the community.

.....

Nice one Famine, I didn't realize that having Lufkin actively troll and condecend to your own customers was "empowering" them.

Is that like "whatever does not kill me makes me stronger"?  A sort of Nietzschian approach to community building?  Man AoC is even more "innovative" than I realized.  Soon the forum will be full of Uber-mensch.

Originally posted by Imjin

Famine I just noticed you've posted here.

Want to make some points?

Give this community 1 or 2 good reasons why they should even bother with a game who has people like Lufkin as moderators and does nothing with them.

And "becasue he does a good job" is out the window.  He doesnt. A payed or non payed employee acting or talking like that to paying customers is OK?

As I posted somewhere else, that is the nail in the coffin for myself and FC. If you let tools like that represent your company then I have zero respect for said company. Makes things pretty equal since apparently by letting someone like him stay around shows a lack of respect for the customer.

 And know I am not expecting you to give a detailed response about the inner working of the mods but all I have to do is go over to your forums and see his name and I know that FC just doesnt care in the least.

Lufkin is possibly the worst moderator I have ever seen, but Famine would be a fool to respond to you.

Originally posted by Order66

Wow. AmazingAvery seems really desperate to prove this dying game is not dying.

It doesn't matter how many times you say the world is flat, it still is not flat.

 

I can't believe he is made correspondent and this is the way he spends his mandate?? Like a kid's post: "haha I told you". And on top of that he spreads lies and misinformation, knowing how things are.

And old graphs.

 

Fury server is full is an artificial thing that can be tampered with. Plus you have to take into account that Fury was the first server released in EA before the rest. Shouldn't a triple A mmo have more full servers? And aren't people going to the most popular server often?

 

So AmazingAvery - tell us why you want to spread Funcom propaganda! Why? You do it in post after post after post. You are now not just the number one fanboy, but also correspondent. How far will you take this? Defending a company that misleads and lies to its customer base.

Are you proud of yourself? Looked in the mirror lately?

 

Oh heh they made Avery a correspondent I never noticed that, but I tend to tune out BS artists.  Huh, maybe I shouldn't have poo pooed the conspiracy theorists.

A site like MMORPG.com should try to get impartial correspondents.  Avery has always been anything but impartial and that should have been very very obvious from as far back as over a year ago.  Very poor choice guys, seriously.  Avery is an OK guy but he is someone who essentially runs a fan site not a correspondent for a site that gives reviews and hopefully honest information. 

Heh maybe what MMORPG.com should do instead is make Avery their official AoC advocate and pick someone else to be the official AoC prosecutor and make it like a court room.  Isn't that what these forums basically become anyway?  Just make it official.

Originally posted by Chill_Factor

Originally posted by Azrile

I think this site is doing a good job.

I wouldn't want them to censor Avery any more than I would want them to censor the 99% of players that hate AoC  :)

I think a couple things are coming into play, and you can see this starting to happen on the official AoC boards as well... simply put.. the haters have moved on.

If you are playing AoC at this point, and you hate they way they lied at launch... um.. all I can say is it is your fault now.    Most players have moved on.. either back to wow or warhammer beta.  The only people left playing AoC are the diehards..who will probably be more silent as they cancel their accounts.  It's not like Avery or Proteus are going to make big " I hate funcom" posts when they finally realize the game is garbage, and will continue to be garbage for a long time.

Yeah, if you quit AoC and have a bitter taste in your mouth, you might come here and post occassionally.. but as time goes on, the only people left here will be the fanbois.

I personally can see why Avery is so invested in this game.  He had very early access to the game, he had personal meetings and partied with the devs and is basically an insider.   Every single terrible game has people like this.  They almost feel like they are betraying a friend if they say something bad about the game.

My personal mission is to make sure AoC crashes and burns.. not because of my hate for funcom,but because we all need to send a message to other MMORPG makers that people will retailate against unethical business practices (lying about your game's features).  We want other companies to know that a very limited beta is not going to fly any more.  It's more just a warning " see what will happen to you if you try to do what funcom did".   I think maybe Warhammer got the message when they announced class/city cuts two months before launch... who knows, we might not have known about that until we tried to make those classes on a live server.

But yeah.. I don't think we should blame MMORPG.Com for people like Avery.    There will always be people like that and it has nothing to do with advertising on this site.

Nice post, but I will say, the biggest fans can end up being your biggest haters. People that feel scorned will react differently, either leave quietly, or completely go on a rampage. I've seen flashes of hate from Protus lately, but he seems to be fighting it back.

Don't worry he will soon know the power of the dark side.

Originally posted by Buccaneer

Originally posted by Xasapis

I really don't see what the OP is talking about. Am I blind or he sees things that are not there?

What I'm trying to say is that I haven't noticed a change in how these forums operate. The only visible difference is the name of the game that is smacked the most. It seems that the game is currently AoC. Give it a couple months and the tides of hate will shift to a fresh target.

 

I have to agree.  The only thing I've seen recently is two locked threads.  One turned into a flamefest and needed locking and the other was an I'm sorry post for the original locked thread.  Amazing how the conspiracy theories come out just because a FC employee posts here.

Look its logically impossible to prove a negative statement.

So there is no reason not to believe this isn't a conspiracy ...

Originally posted by Chill_Factor

And the only "real time combat" is the directional white attacks. Combos and spells are on cooldowns, and all mmo's have instant attacks so that doesn't count. But this combat is revolutionary because you click arrow keys like Dance Dance Revolution right?  Alrighty then....

DDO is more realtime than AoC and has been out for years.

Originally posted by Die_Scream

Originally posted by Antarious

Originally posted by Nadril

 

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Originally posted by Die_Scream

 
I think a more important point is that months ahead of release Mythic had the integrity to come out and admit they just couldn't get it done and polished in time for release. I'm disappointed, sure, but I'll give them some credit for being upfront about it.
Fc just flat out lied right up top release and  enforced the NDA to conceal the glaring short comings of the game.
Mythic have already out classed FC IMO.

---

 

Funcom still says the game is optimized for DX10 on their game boxes, yet 3 months into release and they still don't support it. Isn't this something that, you know, should be built up on at the start?
 

 

I'm gonna say that I personally think Mythic has run their beta in a professional manner.. I never felt that way about AoC beta.

Yet.. I'm also going to freely state that I bought AoC because I have absolutely no interest in having anything to do with WAR after beta is over.

That's something that is going to have to come down to a personal choice and as such I can only state my opinion.  In fact.. I'll also say..

I don't really care how professional or polished your product is.. when its the same regergitated BS I've seen in every other game in the last fews years..   It becomes a very difficult pill to swallow (for me).

If other people love the stuff.. then YAY for them.

But ya.. Mythic has been very professional in every step I've seen... if you want to compare things on that level.  /shrug

Personally I'd rather have every game be awesome.. it really doesn't do anything for me.. to see these epic failures... to be honest.  It would just be really nice to have this big market of great choices.. to play... instead of what we actually have...

Obviously, good game play and a professional dev team is the brass ring, but if there has to be a choice, i'll take a professional dev team who will fix the game and communicate.

IMO, couple examples of a good dev team and a well made game, NCSoft's CoX and Turbine's LOTRO. Say what you will about the games themselves, the dev teams on both are top notch, and they have both have stable fun games.

FC failed in communication, fixes, ideas, patches (and notes), and even the official forums are garbage.

Even in a poor state at release, WAR will crush AoC, at least at first. WAR forums will be filled with the usual whining, but at least it won't be because they are treated like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed BS.

The devs at Funcom are in general the type of devs who half-ass things and do not fully think through their ideas.  They just come up with things that look good and believe the looks.

CoX did not always have a good dev team, its just that they finally settled on a good dev team.  Also CoX had/has a set of players/forum posters who actually reversed engineered the math behind the game and proved beyohd any doubt various aspects of the game and  essentially forced the old not-so hot devs to admit they were right about certain problems.

Interestingly arguements about balance on the CoX forum are far more heavily based around metrics, actual real numbers, testing, and calculations than almost any other game i have seen except perhaps Eve and I would say even then CoX players have more bases covered.  This may also be because there are so many powerset combinations so arguements eventually need more data and real metrics or it just becomes a "yeah huh, not unh" arguement.

Originally posted by iZakaroN

As much the game is single play friendly as much worst is the community. :(

Wrong and provably so.  The most solo friendly MMORPG in existence is City of Heroes and it has one of the best communities.

This is not an opinion it is a provable fact since I have provided a dis-proof by counter example and you have provided a universal statement.

Seriously people take off the tinfoil hats.  Yeah people like Avery have recently redoubled their efforts.  But anyone with half a brain knew what they were doing over a year before AoC was released.

Beyond that the whole AoC thing has simply inflamed people and that is all you are seeing.  That and some trouble makers necroing threads for no reason.

This is coming from someone who received 2 of his 3 bans from this site in the last 2 months from posts in the AoC forum.  One of which was pure sarcasm and was a completely unjustiified and frankly stupid action by whatever moderator did it.  And from someone who has definitely been critical of AoC even before the release.

Emotions have clearly run high and lines have been drawn in the conflict.  MMORPG.com may not be completely impartial and does need to keep a relationship with the various dev and publishing houses but anyone who thinks they have been heavily or seriously quashing discontent or dissent is being flat out loony.  They are simply trying not to let these forums turn into a complete cess-pit.

This board is nothing like the AoC official boards.

Originally posted by Arthousesig

Basically Tahitoa, Famine and Lufkin are just deleting, moving, locking and censoring criticism left right and center all over the EU and US forum boards for AOC

It's actually interesting to watch the posts disappear after you've read them when you refresh the page.

Next thread about to get locked:

New Game Director Please ( 1 2) Hyperion

Today 07:36 PM by Pheebau

23

383

Down the memory hole with you!