All Posts by x_rast_x

Originally posted by Mark701

Originally posted by LeJohn

RE is the only thing that would pull me back to EVE, it is why I rejoined the last tu updates. As mentioned above RE is listed in the data base but never implemented.  It is one of the favorite carrots CCP likes to dangle but will most likely never be implemented.

 

 

If RE requires lab research, good luck. Seems like all the labs are completely full and always in use.

Use POS labs.  The public lab slots are backed up for weeks.  A lot of people will camp a slot that might be free sometime soon just to discourage other people from doing research.

What he said.

I work offshore so I can only log on a couple days a week.  Despite the occasional cash crunch I don't really have any problems - my alliance is based out in 0.0 but they're pretty laid back.

Eve is a lot more about how you use the gray matter in your head than how many hours you can pound away in front of the keyboard.

Value of the dollar aside, I have a hard time believing any suit at EA would be stupid enough to scare away a huge portion of their sales by charging a high sub fee out of the gate.

What I can see them trying to do is charging like $19.99 a month if you pay by the month, and then back to $14.99 if you pay every 3 months or some such.  That way they can convince people to sub for longer periods (and thus lessen the chance of them going back to WoW or quitting)

Of course, this is all conjecture at this point, nothing official has been announced.

I've been playing Eve while I wait for Warhammer (I finally gave up WoW for the last time about six months ago).

Despite the lack of dragons and fireballs it's actually a really good game.  Well, once you get over the initial "wtf am I doing?" hump (which takes a couple weeks, people aren't kidding when they say it has a steep learning curve).  It's not for everyone, but it doesn't try to be, which is a breath of fresh air in itself.

Isn't EA Mythic based out of the UK?

Hasn't the dollar fallen about 50% against the euro in the last year or so?

This would be/is a great site for an MMO developer, especially one of the smaller ones, to advertise on.  Every game's audience is represented here, and the people who post here tend to be more involved in their games (hence, more influential) than the usual MMO'er.

From what I understand each server has a certain set of nodes assigned to it, and the main direction they are going in to reduce lag in busy systems is to be able to dedicate more than one node to a single system, and generally make the whole thing more dynamic.  Of course, once this happens people will just keep piling into Jita and wherever today's fleet battle is until it lags again.   The dev blogs have also said that the main source of lag is inventory operations, of all things.  There's plenty of bandwidth to go around these days.

Given Eve's server architecture though there's no reason why it can't scale to infinity.  Since everything out of the ship doesn't happen on the same nodes as the space game I can't see how it would add to lag.

Remember, Eve is not one server.  Eve is one shard, made of a great many networked servers.  I think the hardware is OK (the great majority of systems have no lag even during peak times), they just need to optimize their software some more.

As for personalized ships, I don't get it either - it's just some numbers that'd only need to be transmitted once, along with all the other data about their ship, wouldn't add anything significant to the lag and the server wouldn't need to deal with it at all (aside from pass along said numbers) since it's all cosmetic but it's still not implemented.  Seems to mostly be for immersion reasons - people seems to not like the idea of hot pink carriers flying around.

Originally posted by Zorvan

Thanks for the clarification. That quells my reservations a bit, now. Still think ambulation as proposed is a waste of time, though.

People keep saying this, I have a sneaky feeling that ambulation is the first step toward a whole new station and ground-based game though.  Once we can get out of our pods there's countless new directions the game can go in.

Originally posted by Vantras
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t-since its release-have just taken the "easy and accessible" parts and put them on steroids.

As long as the MMO market continues to spend 10's of millions of dollars on every release in an attempt to make the next WOW I believe we will see less immersion and more failures.  As this continues I think we will see companies wise up, lower thier expectations, focus a bit more intensely on specific niches and build games around a success model of 25,000-300,000 sub's rather then millions.  When this occurs immersion, in some form, should re-appear.

I sorta liken it to the movie business.  Right now most game companies are trying to make the next Titanic.  Nobody is out there trying to make the next Pulp Fiction.  Once the market regains its sanity-and more game failures (Pirates of the Burning Sea for example) add fuel to sanity fire I think we'll see real games, with real content, real depth and real immersion show up.

...

This is why I keep saying WoW will probably be the last game for a long time to reach the sub levels it does.  Everyone wants different things from an MMO (see the endless debates about what skill actually is or isn't) and no one game is going to make everyone happy, and any game that does is just going to fail miserably.

The threads popping up lately are different from the 'skill' threads but the same in a way - do people want a game that feels like a game, or a game that feels like a virtual world?  The answer is both of course and no one game can do both at the same time, at least not very well.

Personally, I never rig frigs that I use for any useful purpose except for exploration frigs which I'll put grav capacitor upgrades on - the rigs cost 20 times as much as any t1 frig pretty easily, it's just not worth it 99% of the time.  Honestly, the only combat frig I've ever rigged out is a Gallente Navy Comet, and it's a toy ship, not anything really useful (in other words, I'll never commit a 150m ISK frig to a fight it might actually lose)

Battlecruisers, T2 cruisers and up are the only ships you really see rigged routinely.

Isn't Mythic based in Europe?  You people do realize the dollar has fallen ~50% against the Euro since the economic problems in the US started - they have to make their money somehow.

Originally posted by oakae

To me both get boring which is why a game needs both PvE and PvP.

My only real issue with games that advertise themselves as pvp games (espeically FFA pvp games) is that they tend to attract a certain kind of gamer that I find almost unbearable.  Fortunately if they irritate me too much I can usually kill them.

I always see Vanguard sitting on the shelf looking lonely at the store.. I hear most of it's big launch problems have been resolved, but what's 'special' about this game that makes it worth paying money for, since as I understand it there's still no free trial?

Thanks!

It depends.. no one game is going to have PvP that satisfies everyone simply because people have wildly different tastes in what they want.

Some people just want to dual their buddies when they're bored or have some downtime.
Some people want to fight in a huge factional wars with clearly defined objectives and scenarios.
Some people want to be highwaymen and ambush and steal from their victims.
Some people want to form large guilds and alliances, take over territory, build it up, and conquer other people.

I could go on but you get the idea. 

If I was Sony I would be willing to have a 'loser' console and throw heaps of money at movie studios if that's what it took to make Blu-Ray the standard.

They did the former by deliberately sabotaging their own console to put out a bunch of Blu-Ray players.  It went further than they expected, but it still worked.  Now it seems they're doing the latter - if you don't there's a lot of behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing you need to pull your head out of the sand.

If Blu-Ray becomes the standard (which is now a very real possibility), prices are sure to come down as everyone who's been waiting to see who wins the war starts buying HD media, and as more and more people upgrade their sets (most TVs sold now are HD) that's more people buying Blu-Ray.

And Sony collects a royalty on each player and each disc that's sold.  And that will make them a lot more money in the long term than they lost setting themselves up to succeed.

Whether or not it will all work remains to be seen but unless Toshiba and MS can come up with something quick this defection might be the break in the dam.  I don't think at the end of the day MS really cares but it could really hurt Toshiba.

Wow.  That was awesome!

If WoW's pvp was actually balanced like that (where lots of low levels could take on someone many levels higher than them) I might even still be playing.

I think as long as WAR steers clear of the launch issues that have doomed a lot of recent games they should take the top spot in US and Europe pretty easily.  WAR vs WoW now is in a very similar position to WoW vs EQ a few years ago, and I'll be surprised if it doesn't turn out the same way.

However, every independent metric of subs (mostly WoW Census) seems to indicate that a large majority of WoW's subs are now in Asia, and I don't really expect WAR to go anywhere there.

When all is said and done at the end of this year I expect WoW to be moving toward being the king of Asian grinders and still trumpeting that they have the most subs, which will still be technically true.

Even though I'm having a blast playing Eve I've always been more of a fantasy fan and I'd like to get my preorder in.  I know the release has been pushed back a couple of times already but last I heard it was supposed to be Q1 this year.

More 'movements'?  I'm afraid I don't understand.. can you elaborate please?

I think a hybrid game could be done, there are already a few games that are close or trying to go that way.

You could segregate sandbox and linear content, perhaps with an RvR-style pvp area that incorporates some scripted objectives that can be accomplished in a freeform manner as a buffer in the middle, and outside of this a large area that's completely sandboxed.  Sorta like WAR meets EvE.

I think a hybrid game would really only *need* two key design elements to succeed.  First being skill-based instead of class-based, as classes and levels segregate your playerbase which is usually really bad for sandbox type games.

The second being that the devs have ot understand the griefer mentality.  Every good sandbox game that's come out has also been a griefer haven, which really contributes to their relative unpopularity.  Any mechanic that can be abused will be.  Any place where people can grief other people they will.  So you have to carefully create mechanics when designing the game that will discourage griefing by making it an activity that can not be sustained for long periods of time, by making it waste all your money, making the entire gameworld hostile to you, or something else, it doesn't really matter.