Originally posted by Yamota

One suit down, houndreds left who will take his spot.

EA is the symbol of big corps who favour profits over good games so this will most likely not change anything. They will continue to buy up, and destroy, good gaming companies to make a profit. They are the vulture capitalists of gaming.

Sorry, but this is just really really misguided.   If a game is very popular, it will make lots of profits.   Equating good games with low profits is just silly.  Low profit because the games are bad.  You seem to have it backwards.

EA certainly thought, as did many companies, that copying the success of WoW (which is very profitable because it was/is a good game), would make them lots of money.  Instead, they found out that it was either really hard to copy WoW or just too expensive (e.g., SWTOR and voice acting).  Once they spent $100m, $200m or so, they had to eventually release it.  How much would you prefer they spend? 

Going forward, companies are looking to copy Eve Online, where the development expense is low and the players make the content, which is of course quite profitable.  

Under your analysis, game companies should just make games and lose money.  Yeah, that's gonna work.

First, in CU you have to remember that there are no levels, so you aren't "ganking" lowbies or anything.  So all that fear of a stealther ganking you is just that, a fear from the past.  A relic of past games that is gone.

Second, stealthers in general are weaker than visible classes (otherwise, everyone would invite stealthers into their groups).  Their advantage is stealth, allowing them to target at the optimal time. 

Thus, a stealther using no tactics whatsoever and just willy-nilly attacks anyone anytime is going to lose the majority of the time, simply because their class is weaker.  A stealther who uses tactics to select the right target and the right time to attack will usually win.   So now you want to nerf tactics?

Finally, on the front of realism.  First, you could argue that they should have to hide behind stuff.  Well, okay, but the graphics required to put tall grass, bushes and all the other things needed to make it realistic would slow down FPS to an insanely low level.  Second, if you didn't have a bunch of this stuff, then you'd make stealth worthless.   So, the compromise is to make stealth a bit unrealistic by allowing them to be invisible, where you assume they are hiding behind stuff that the game just doesn't render.

Or, you could argue that they learn a secret magic of invisibility that most wizards never learn, and that rogues hold this secret tightly and share it only with others in their guild.  

Either way, stealth isn't overpowered if not combined with decent tactics and it's not unrealistic for a fantasy game. It is a game after all, not real life.

Well, the "end game" is now "the game".   What's interesting about it is that I probably spent about 5% of my total time playing the pre-game, and 95% of my time playing the end game.   Yet, the costs of the pre-game make up about 95% of the budget and about 5% of the budget was typically devoted to the end game.  It seems to work well in EvE.

So, we shall see if having 95% of the budget dedicated to the end game in an MMO works again or is EvE just an annomoly like WoW was an annomoly for PvE focused MMOs.   Funny how people went from trying to copy WoW to now trying to copy EvE.

King Arthur's Realm Wars

Simple: You keep the focus on the "camelot" without mentioning camelot.

Focus: You focus that the game is based on realm wars, not PvE

Short: The title can't be very long and you can make the acronym KARW.

To me, Kickstarter funding is a bit shady.   You put money into it and hope that you get some additional access to the game and beta......that's it.  You have no basic rights like a shareholder.  You don't get a return on your investment should the game be a success.   

So, you pay for beta, which may or may not happen.  

Hmmm, i'd rather just be an investor in the company than somebody who funds a kickstarter campaign.  But, to each their own.

Originally posted by ktanner3

Originally posted by tiefighter25

Originally posted by Gdemami

 

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Originally posted by Karteli

Anyone can recognize bad engines when they see them, it doesn't take knowledge of coding.

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When you play SWTOR, you do not "play" the engine.

Unless you work with the engine yourself(on code level), you have no idea about engine characteristics.

 

Well that's an interesting statement.

It's true. If a game is running like sh*t, you have no way of knowing if that is the fault of the engine or the peope that wrote the code on top of it. Since this the only released game using that engine, how can you accurately blame the engine for anything?

Well, if you have Bioware fanbois saying they are the greatest game developers EVAH prior to the game's release, then obviously it can't be the Bioware code, it must be the engine.  Duh.

I mean, all you have to do is look at all the other MMORPGs developed by Bioware that can easily render large groups of players on the screen at the same time.....oh wait, nm.   

I have an answer for you:  You pretty much cannot use an MMO to communicate, for the following reasons:

Assume you have access to classified information via a clearance.....all your purchases will be examined as part of your clearance.  Say you purchase an MMO game, then your personal computer will likely be monitored occassionally, including a keylog program.  This is similar to your phone being monitored occassionally. The more suspicious your activity, the more monitoring you get.

Hence, you have to find a way to communicate "off the grind", which is why drop points for information remains the best way to pass information between a spy and their handler. 

Okay Marc, I'm going to to be a grown up. First, I admit I've been very frustrated with DAOC's ToA  expansion (ARG!) and the grossly unbalanced structure of Warhammer, but I'll let it go. Second, I can say that I've been very passionate about your previous games, so you do tend to make good games, I'll give you that much. So with that, I hope you read this: invite some dedicated PvP players to beta early in the process rather than late in the process, let them pound it out and find out how to break it, and then listen and ignore the "math" your quant guys give you about how it truly is balanced because of such-and-such.  All I keep thinking about is remembering the talk about all the class balancing tools you had prior to the launch of Warhammer....and then seeing the results of the unique combination of classes that could decimate waves of players. 

My PvP guild fooled around in Warhammer when it first launched, figured out in about 2-3 weeks how to build the ultimate group, leveled that group up and absolutely destroyed folks.  It wasn't because we were "l33wt awesome PvP players" or anything, we just quickly figured out certain combinations resulted in massive damage from bright wizards while limiting incoming damage.  We didn't have DPS meter tools or anything, we just used our PvP experience to break the game.  We laughed about how balance tools must have been created, when it was obviously so grossly unbalanced.  It also reminded me when DAOC first launched realm abilities and someone's idea of a great realm ability would be to swim faster (in a time when Old Frontiers had almost no water).  That proved to me that while they might be decent at playing a game and coding a game, they really had no clue what PvP players wanted or needed.

So, the moral of the story is that the quant aspects of balancing classes is important, you can't recreate the combinations that players can create to find the imbalances.  Furthermore, you can't rely on PvE focused players to figure it out either.  Finally, get the PvP folks in earlier in the game so that when you need to rebalance the classes, you can do it sooner rather than later in the process so PvE can be adjusted if needed.  It always seems to me that the game does the PvE first, then PvP last, and trying to rebalance the PvP screws up the PvE, then all chaos breaks out and people get really upset about having to redo so much stuff.

I understand making MMO games, er, successful MMO games, is really hard work. I certainly wish you the best in your upcoming venture and hope for a 3-way balanced PvP game that allows me to continue to grow my characters via PvP points that also never releases an expasion that requires massive PvE investment to be competitive in PvP (cough ToA cough).

Good luck.  Seriously.  

Just wondering if this is being reviewed by someone who doesn't like PvP.  Most of the staff at MMORPG usually professes in their reviews that they don't like PvP, and then they go on to review the PvP aspect of the game which (no surprise) they didn't like.   If it's a PvP centric game, can we PLEASE have someone who likes to PvP actually review the game for a change?

As a former stock analyst, I can say with some certainty some truths about conference calls:

1) If it is going well, the company will make a big deal about it.

2) If it is not going well, they hedge and say things like "too early to tell".

Trust me, if the F2P model was doing very well, it would have been highlighted.  Furthermore, you can't really read into the fact that they mentioned it this time but not last time. The key is that they have to comment on the switch to F2P, and saying something like it's too early to tell translates into "not doing well" to a savy wall street investor. When you combine it with how bad console game sales have been lately as people switch to mobile, it's a really tough business.

Finally, it is true that with some subs and reduced staff they can make it profitable, which is good for current subs since the game isn't likely to close in the near future. However, they will never make the $$ needed to recoup their investment. 

Trials of Atlantis expansion was one of the worst expansion in the history of MMOs and probably led to the destruction of DAOC, and Marc Jacobs was primarily responsible for it. It's not like he didn't have plenty of feedback about how bad it was going to be and how it would ruin PvP....Oh no, they were going with it regardless.....well congrats.

Then of course, we have the wonderful hit known as Warhammer.  Oh, you say you have tons of tools this time around to help with class balance in PvP......and then you see the army of Bright Wizards approaching and everyone runs and quits the server.  Yeah, wonderful job there. Those must have been some great class balancing tools you developed. 

Laugh. 

How you keep getting employeed in this industry is amazing.

Several problems with your column. 

1) You cannot have large scale open world PvP with the current Hero engine.  It reduces too many players to unacceptably low FPS, creating a slide-show and it's not fun for anyone. Furthermore, they have to have objectives to fight over that can't be done by 1 person in 10 seconds and finally they would have to address the swapping of kills that was common.  It's way too much for this slimmed down development team to tackle.  

2) They've added faction grinding and same-gender romances on a new planet for $10 charge.  Color me unimpressed.  Expanding the class stories would require MASSIVE expenditures because of the voice acting. They bet the farm on voice acting, and it's proving not to be worth it in a theme-park setting.  Perhaps in a sandbox version it might have paid off.

3) The game is, and will remain, a single-player theme-park game that has some multi-player aspects such as warzones and some raids.  

Finally, when was the last time a game closed about 90% of its servers, suffered this much reduction in players, gone F2P within 6 months of launch, and came back to "win"?  

I'll just wait for a decent sand-box game to come around.  I think developers have learned that WoW was a 1-time kind of thing and that the best models are something similar to EvE because they require much less on-going funding and players stick around longer.

If you have asymetrical PvP, players will quickly figure out which one is overpowered FOTM and then the nerfs start.  And then they jump to the next FOTM, and they get nerfed, and then the community devolves into calling another class/race/faction overpowered and begging for nerfs.

Mythic games have been horribly unbalanced.  Fun?  Sure, if you had the right class or were in the preferred faction. Terrible if you were in the wrong class or faction.  With 3 factions, it can be masked for a while with population, but with just 2 factions you can't mask the imbalance, as shown with Warhammer. 

It is nearly impossible to balance asymetrical PvP.

Given the massive amount of time involved in making this game, you have to remember that when it was in development the "goal" was to make it just like WoW but with more story and voice acting.  Since WoW was the best selling MMO ever, it made sense to try to copy it with something as powerful as the Star Wars brand.  

The truth is, it took so much money to do the voiceovers and so much time to develop the "story" aspect that many other MMO basics had to be left out.  Plus, they figured you didn't really want 3D open space missions since "story" was the main attraction, and you can't write a story about an open 3D space adventure.

Personally, I just wish we could get DAOC 2.  Oh well.