What size monitor do you have? With the $650 budget, if you have a smaller monitor (<20inch), you can save money on the vid card and buy an I5 based system that will leave all the AMD systems being recommended in the dust. I think it's silly to go with an AMD or Core 2 system anymore in the mid-range (which is where you are with $650 budget).

Newegg has a nice i5 combo deal going right now for $578 which includes everything except the vid card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.293841

Personally, I'd go with something like this on a $650 budget though:

Intel I5-750: $200

4GB DDR3: $80

Gigabyte GA-P55-UD3R: $140 (could save $35 and go with the Micro-ATX GA-P55M-UD2 though)

Antec 300 Illusion / Antec EA430: $110 http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.288426

This leaves $120 for the hard drive and vid card. There aren't many appealing options here if you stick to the budget strictly. If you jump up to $700 you can get a $50 HD and maybe find a cheap 4850. If you have a smaller monitor though, I wouldn't worry too much about the higher end cards. Maybe a 4650 for $65 and spend the extra money on the nicer Caviar Black HD which gets you to $670. Right now is a bad time to buy a vid card. AMD and NVidia are having issues with their new cards, and the previous generation cards haven't dropped in price yet. Check back in 2 months and vid cards are going to drop drastically. Buy a cheap card now, and upgrade the card in 6 months.

As for where to buy. Newegg or Amazon are my first choices.

EQ2 is the new hardcore.  ROFL.

This is what we get for letting stupid people on the Internet. Thanks AOL!

/me goes back to playing his MUD

Originally posted by Karahandras

but i do hear the love/hate for EQ2 in equal measure so i'm guessing it's slowly going the same way

I know this isn't an EQ2 thread, but just wanted to say that it doesn't surprise me that a non-EQ2 player is seeing conflicting opinions right now about the game. The newest EQ2 expansion is a very group and raiding  focused right after a very solo focused expansion. So the casuals might not be as happy with EQ2 right now (esp with WotLK just released), and the more hard-core players are digging into the new content.

I think EQ2 is officially a mature MMO now and has at least another 5 years of good gaming to go before it gets to the life support stage.

Excellent  guide so far. Running a successful corp in Eve is one of the most ambitious things anyone can do in all MMOdom.

Looking forward to the rest of the series.

"If you want to see some progression, then you must make raid attendance something of a priority". This is one of the biggest problems with WoW.

The casual raid guild that only raids whenever enough people are on is non-existent in WoW in my experience. The problem is that Blizzard's constant nerfing of older content, and massive gear inflation makes it difficult to raid without a schedule. If you don't consistently raid, by the time your guild gets a few bosses down, all the rewards are outdated because a new Arena season started, or they rolled out a new easier 5 or 10 man instance with better rewards.

Contrast this with EQ1 (before they screwed it up post Gates of Discord) where you were expected to progress through the content in a logical way like every previous player to come before you. Rewards weren't changed, and when there was a max-level increase it didn't drastically affect the raid progression. Guilds could take as much time as they wanted at any particular "tier".

EQ1 raiding was actually more casual friendly than WoW raiding despite the actual content being harder and requiring more time.

I am very interested in this game, but what I wonder if they have the technical know-how to do an MMO right. They could pull a CCP or a Funcom and take 3 years after launch to make their game playable. There have been a lot of great game developers (Croteam, People Can Fly, and the STALKER guys come to mind) to come out of the eastern european/former soviet bloc countries though so who knows.

http://www.wanderinggoblin.com/component/content/article/11-news/575-this-confirms-every-suspicion-ive-ever-had-about-you-gnomes.html

This thread is way off topic, but I am rather impressed at the level of discourse in here. The tactical face palm picture was a nice touch even.

Everything is opinion on the internet. Absolutes are always wrong. The sky is not necessarily blue...if it's nighttime...or you have sunglasses on.

As with everything in Eve, there is no simple answer to your question. Check it out, if you liked the trial, you will probably like the game. There are little corps and big corps.

I can respond better to your paragraph though. Eve is a game that it attracts the type A personality that likes to run things. There are always new corps starting up with big dreams, and just like the real world, the vast majority of them fail. One of the biggest paradoxes in Eve is that while the game does not require a large time investment to progress individually, running a successful corp requires a huge time investment. It's not like other games where the guild leader can sit back and just point the guild in the right direction. The point is...most corps suck, and can totally take every bit of fun out of the game if you get stuck in a bad one. My advice would be to shun completely any newer smaller corps, and be very picky when talking to a player corp about joining.

Eve is also a very international game. If you are from the US I'd suggest sticking with US/UK/AU/CA corps at first. I enjoy learning about other cultures, but this is an EU dominated game, and they approach it differently than your average Westerner.

No option for AOE combat? I prefer a system where my enemies die simply from getting to close to the aura of pure evil that surrounds me.

So...we need a non-profit MMO? A Mozilla.org of MMOs. Sounds like a good idea to me.

A couple things need to change before that can become a reality though. The biggest is 3D art has to become essentially free. There are a lot of artists in the world, but so very few talented 3D modelers, and animators. That isn't going to change, so stuff like procedural art tech needs to progress further.

The other issue is bandwidth. Bandwidth is way too expensive right now unless you are lucky and live in Japan or Scandanavia.

Processing power, and programming have begun to reach the point where they are essentially free though, so we are half-way there. Both the other issues are being worked on, but still are years away.

Originally posted by Waterlily

I wanted to write this, because in every new MMO it is becoming more apparent.

<snip/>

So how does this matter to you, you ask? Can't you play your own game and not worry about how someone else plays theirs? Well, if I can have a choice what environment I can be in, it would be in one where I feel comfortable around others and where I get treated alike, not like someone inferior against every mob because I choose not to raid or do power gaming, where you get invited to a group based on the person you are, not on the items you carry.

What is apparent to me is that almost every MMO today is catering to people who want an MMO to make them feel better just by logging in, which is exactly what you are asking for. What kind of "game" do you want? Let's take the idea to it's logical conclusion. I'd love to know what you want, as your kind of MMO gamer has obviously become the majority these days. Sounds like to me you want a massively multiplayer hug simulator.

I don't need nor desire validation, fulfillment, acceptance or any such emotional claptrap from playing a game. I get all that by winning the game. I want to be tested by games. I want to be really annoyed if I don't succeed in passing a test the game (or another player) puts before me. When I do succeed, I want the game to give me a reward. If other people are envious of those rewards, that is their issue. The 10th commandment...envy etc. etc.

I enjoy a stroll through the park as much as the next guy, but when I want that...I take a stroll through the park. I don't play a video game.

Well I reached 10, and did that dungeon with a full group...was still easy, but I did need to put clothes on my psi sadly :P

I am sticking with VG for sure though, it's the first MMO in ages I've actually wanted to keep playing and go into work a bit late for. I am on the Seradon server too, i'll look them up.

Thanks for the quick responses. Heading to ebay to find one of those mythical $5 copies now then :)

If so, by how much?

I got a warrior up to level 5 and was pretty bored. I rarely got to use any other attack than the autoattack before the mob died. So I created a psionicist and took off all her armor and run around naked in order to get any challenge. If I get attacked by more than 5 mobs or so there is actually a good chance I will die. So far Vanguard 1-7 on the trial island is easier than WoW 1-7.

Other than it being so easy, and no sign of group content, so far the game is great. I'm very tempted to buy it, but if I am going to get to max level in a month, naked...I'm not even going to waste my time.

Originally posted by kinky10

Originally posted by redavni

I only got to play for about 10 minutes before work today, but the damn fonts and everything looking like plastic really bugged me. This is 2008 and they don't have anti-aliased fonts?

 

Glad it's not just me, I've trawled the web for this and it appears it really can't be done.

Its such a shame as you say it is "plastic" I know its only a small thing but sometimes they still count

I finally got to play a bit more right after I posted that, and once I got away from the buildings and tree stumps the plastic models weren't so prevalent and I really started to enjoy the feel of Telon. It really is the first MMO I have played in years that actually feels like an MMO. Then I got to the second city... more plastic. Then I ran into a quest npc that wasn't textured, an obvious bug, but altogether it killed my immersion dead. I logged out shaking my head. It's a damn shame.

I only got to play for about 10 minutes before work today, but the damn fonts and everything looking like plastic really bugged me. This is 2008 and they don't have anti-aliased fonts?

Originally posted by PapaLazarou

lol all EVE requires is lots of time to be good at it and tbh the whole thing of saying a noob can come in and kill a veteran if he picks a route is wrong because it takes like a year to train all the skills that give you the max damage and speed etc etc that the veterans already have not to mention you need 20 ALT accounts aswel to compete with their gangs of ALTs.

Another thing I hate is how repetive the game is....

Repetitive backgrounds
Repetitive jumping everywhere
Stations
missions
mining

etc etc.

To get anywhere in EVE you have to not play it while your skills train and to get money in EVE you just have to do the most BORING tasks ever its like grinding on SWG mission terms......... YAWN.

Like Yahtzee they made space BORING.

The whole intelligence doesn't come into play too because its fact that an intelligent mind wants to discover and keep on doing new things because they're curious. In EVE however its geared towards the stupid side of the spectrum because its just about doing the same thing over and over which would bore and intelligent person.

I'll grant you that Eve's gameplay is boring in and of itself. It's boring much the same way Risk or Chess is boring though. In fact, it's even more boring than those games because the game does not even set victory conditions other than for meaningless objectives like missions, factional warfare, etc..

If you think Eve is made for stupid people though, I think you need to get out of your house a bit more. The abilities necessary to understand Eve, much less excel at it are pretty damn rare in this world unfortunately.

The human mind is hard wired to emotionally reward novelty. Everyone seeks new things. The ability to ignore that impulse for something new is a test of willpower and I'd say a much better test for intelligence. Those continually driven to seek new things are behaving emotionally, not logically.

You will have to aim your shot in ER, so in that sense it's an FPS. It does have abilities that only work on some kind of target lock system though, so once you lock the ability automatically hits. From what I have gathered, I imagine it something like tabula rasa's system without the ability to lock your gun, but your  abilities still hit 100%. I think calling it a cross between AO and Planetside is about as close as anyone can get from the info available.

I also think that many people are over-estimating the PVP component in this game. It sounds exactly like a souped up version of the AO:Notum Wars PVP to me, just more meaningful. Which sounds great to me, but maybe not as hardcore as Eve/UO.  I'm more looking forward to the PVE stuff they have planned. Especially since it's will have a player driven economy, with everything craftable.

In any case, I loved AO...so I will probably love this game.

Finally discovered word wrap...lol so true. I tried the game, and it crashed on me almost right away, and I never touched it again. I have a well maintained e8400 based system, with nothing exotic attached. A 3 year old game shouldn't be crashing.

Nice post Sourajit :)