Originally posted by Crynn

Originally posted by LadyDanger

I am suprised Vanguard isn't on the list, had so much potential the vast scope of the game and vision. If it had only been finished who knows where it would be now? It's still a good game today but no one wants to go back to an old game.. I'd like to see how they do free to play though

seconded, Vanguard should be on that list imo. One of the biggest worlds out there :)

ER, Vanguard isn't dead like the others on the list are? Reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. 

Earth and Beyond, AC2 come to mind as always wondering what might of been.

A proper sequel to Ultima Online was started and failed a couple of times which is unfortunately.

Heck, I always wonder what would have happened if Mythic/EA had never occurred, nor had they obtained the Warhammer IP.

They might have gone forward with their "Romans in Space" project  (Imperator Online) which could have been interesting but was cancelled in 2005.

Originally posted by Amjoco

Originally posted by AudricMr

You can still be killed without flagging yourself.  The flagging is becoming a red/pk.  Since I have been playing I have been ganked maybe 4 times.  Doesn't happen all the time, and I haven't been camped or griefed.

Thank you! I will find out in a few days myself then! :) I'm excited to play...thinking of Berserker for now. :)

You will start off in the new player island, and for the first 11 levels be safe from any PVP.  (as far as I know)  I recommend you play 2 or 3 similar classes up to level 11 (takes about 2-4 hours for each) and get a feel for what you like best.

For example, if you try a Zerker, consider rolling a Lancer and Slayer as well.  All 3 melee carry large weapons, either block or dodge and you might find one preferable to another.  (Warriors are a horse of a different color really)

Welcome to TERA.

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by honoursword

I just don't get it.

From what I am hearing they are moving away from everything that made the single player game great.

I am going to keep an open mind and wait till I see more before but so far it just looks like another tank, heal and spank MMO.

Very disappointing. Is it just me?

It's not just you, but the entire bittervet subset of MMO gamers.

 Ultima Online would have instantly tanked with this crowd. Its lack of faithfulness to the storyline and quests of the Ultima series and the virtues concept would have been seen as blasphemy and been instantly rejected. And if they announced a particular level of graphic support, engine name or any other keyword that could be latched onto, the game would have been copmplete FAIL because of that, as well... whatever it may have been.

Heh.... in fact UO did tank at launch, which won it the "Coaster of the Year" from Computer Gaming World in 1997 and touched off such bad feelings the UO team even coded in a "jwilson slime" npc referencing the current editor Johnny Wilson.

This particular type of slime was named after Johnny Wilson, the Editor of Computer Gaming World magaizine, after Mr. Wilson declared Ultima Online "Coaster of the Year" for 1997.

http://uo.stratics.com/content/misc/odd.shtml

And its true, we BitterVets™ are becoming sort of a legion, ever increasing as each year of unimaginative MMO releases cause more players to flock to the cause.

I think it's a bit too early to tell how the game will really play out, best to wait for more information before tossing our hands up in despair and writing it off the list.

Of course it is going to follow some standard MMO gaming conventions, no one will ever invest big money in anything that deviates too far from standard, just not the safe way to bet.

Well, now that's some interesting revisionist history. So since CGW gave it a bad review, it tanked? Please tell me you're joking. :)

OK, tanked was an incorrect choice of words, less than enthusiastically received at launch by the greater gaming community  due to several key flaws, specifically heavy lag issues most notable.

And no, I don't put much stock in CGW's viewpoint, they pretty much hated every MMORPG that came out in the early days until City of Heroes came along and finally changed their minds.

But anyways, getting way off track from the thread

Originally posted by Loktofeit

Originally posted by honoursword

I just don't get it.

From what I am hearing they are moving away from everything that made the single player game great.

I am going to keep an open mind and wait till I see more before but so far it just looks like another tank, heal and spank MMO.

Very disappointing. Is it just me?

It's not just you, but the entire bittervet subset of MMO gamers.

 Ultima Online would have instantly tanked with this crowd. Its lack of faithfulness to the storyline and quests of the Ultima series and the virtues concept would have been seen as blasphemy and been instantly rejected. And if they announced a particular level of graphic support, engine name or any other keyword that could be latched onto, the game would have been copmplete FAIL because of that, as well... whatever it may have been.

Heh.... in fact UO did tank at launch, which won it the "Coaster of the Year" from Computer Gaming World in 1997 and touched off such bad feelings the UO team even coded in a "jwilson slime" npc referencing the current editor Johnny Wilson.

http://uo.stratics.com/content/misc/odd.shtml

And its true, we BitterVets™ are becoming sort of a legion, ever increasing as each year of unimaginative MMO releases cause more players to flock to the cause.

I think it's a bit too early to tell how the game will really play out, best to wait for more information before tossing our hands up in despair and writing it off the list.

Of course it is going to follow some standard MMO gaming conventions, no one will ever invest big money in anything that deviates too far from standard, just not the safe way to bet.

Originally posted by teakbois

Originally posted by Axehilt

But we do know.  The discrepancy between the hundreds of thousands of early MMORPG players and millions of current MMORPG players is not purely one of marketing and genre growth.  It's a matter of content density -- of enough new experiences sprinkled over the 100+ hours of gameplay to keep the game interesting.

 

Take World of Warcraft out of the picture for a minute.

 

Going by *sustained* subscriptions...whats the most popular MMORPG of all times in the west?

Everquest

 

Most popular MMORPG of all time in the East?

Lineage

 

And don't say there was no competition for EQ.  DAoC, AC, UO, AO...thats PLENTY of competition.

 

More people clearly try the newer MMOs, look at the huge first month spikes of Rift, AoC, WAR and SWTOR.  How many stay past those first few months?  3 of those games lost over the population in the first year and SWTOR is extremely likely to make it 4 for 4 if it hasnt already.  The last game that was able to sustain over 250k in the east for even two years was LOTRO.  The biggest post EQ success story in the east is EVE...which was released 9 years ago, before WoW.

 

Yes, there are more MMORPG players now.  And to attribute to anything but genre growth is absolutely ridiculous.  if the games were better, people would stick around more than 2 months.

Yeah, this is sort of how I feel about it, if today's games are so full of "experiences" why do players try them out then quickly flee in droves leaving them barren wastelands?

I think its due to the lack of challenge that sends them on their way, there's just nothing to hold their interest in the long term.

Originally posted by Teala

My gaming friend recently said the funniest thing regarding SWTOR.    He said, "you can polish a turd, but it is still a turd."  I think many people may feel this way about the game as well.   Sad when you think that the Star Wars Universe is one of the biggest IP's on the planet and yet because of how Bioware designed the game and implemented it they didn't make a better game.  

Playing it safe rarely results in remarkable results.

It shows in this case.

It's real, of course it's going to stick somewhat closely to traditional theme park conventions and borrow mostly from the lore of ES than anything else.

People aren't going to throw 100M or more at a new MMO title and not stick too closely to convention, could result in economic suicide.

Say what you want about SWTOR, at the end of the day it will cover its costs and return a decent profit, and in no way can you call it the death of Bioware.

I think DA2 and MA3 did more damage to the Bioware brand than SWTOR. (though it certainly didn't help either)

Originally posted by troublmaker

I absolutely hate it when people horribly mis-use the term "Darwinism."  Darwinism only refers to the selection process of animals and species.  The selection process of animals and species is too often compared to market economics.  The laws that guide these are different from those that guide natural selection.

Natural selection tells us that when there is too much of something that disease and starvation can kill off the species.  As well if there are TOO FEW of a species they can die off to predators.

This isn't how it works in economics.  In economics it is entirely based off of supply (how much of that quantity is there) and demand (how much people want it).  So having too many or too few of a genre only effects an "evolution" depending on the demand of it.

In first person shooters for example there is currently no need to "evolve" their concepts because the tried and tested Counter Strike and Modern Warfare 3 models are working fine.

The gaming world is not Darwinistic by any means.  The gaming world is paradigmatic.  Thomas Kuhn came up with paradigm theory because every single asshole stranger philosopher out there was trying to akin every single phenomon out there to evolution.

You saw social evolution which stated black people are inferior to white people, you saw economic evolution that saw the rise of the central bank ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE!), and you saw ideological evolution stating that how we think is based on a natural process of slowly changing how we think.

Thomas Kuhn came up with this brilliant idea that worked so much better than evolution.  His idea was so great that many people feel evolution might work like this (the introduction to X-Men was from Thomas Kuhn, not Darwin).

The idea is simple.  We exist in a current paradigm in which we have to work within a certain framework.  This means that in the existing paradigm you can only operate within the premises and set practices of the paradigm.  In science for example Dark Age scientists had to work within the premises set by Aristtotle because that was the paradigm.  However every now and then there is a paradigm shift.

A paradigm shift is a mold breaker.  It is when the old way of doing things is fully discovered and so utterly broken that a new paradigm is required to replace it.  After the new paradigm comes people look to discover the whole paradigm until it is broken again and a new one comes.

You can see this paradigm shift happen between something like Ultima Online which was the standard top down fighter to Everquest a third person perspective MMO.  You can see the shift again between Everquest and World of Warcraft that is a shift from an MMO being a game to an MMO being a social activity.

Please stop mis-using Darwinism.  Darwinism is not a tool to explain everything.  Darwinism is only a tool to explain evolution of species.

 

You wrote a very good post, and make some excellent points, however your use of the term refers strictly to the biological use of the term.

It has been bastardized if you will for quite some time and a quick internet search returned things such as Economic, Finanical Social, Universal, and Quantum Darwinism just to name a few.

You may not like what people have done to the original term, but like many words, there can be multiple meanings and this one is used rather broadly, even if it isn't quite accurate in how it's done.

The OP raised some good points, MMO's go through an evolutionary process where they either adapt (see EVE, WOW) and thrive or fail to adapt and wither away and die (see well, literally dozens of titles)

Just as in real evolution, there are far more failures and dead ends compared to the few yet very notable sucesses.

So the analogic comparison is not surprising, but again, perhaps not to your agreement or liking.

Originally posted by adam_nox

stopped reading at lineage 2, that should never be used as an example for anything.

 

and maybe he's been playing 20 hours a day.  did Tera have early access or anything?

Yes I know L2 is the extreme end of grind, but DAOC was a reasonable example had you kept reading a little further.

And yes, TERA did have a head start but no, I wasn't complaining about his level, or even how much he has played (I'm sure there's level 60s' already) but just the general attitude that he feels the leveling is too slow.

Believe me, it's not slow by any reasonable measure of the past, but perhaps compared to today's player expectations it's excessive?  I just don't see it, but then again, while I chase the carrot as much as the next guy I don't mind spending a reasonable amount of time enjoying the journey.

Also I wanted to note, this is not related to just TERA, I saw the same attitude with SWTOR, people just racing towards the finish and being disappointed at what they found at the end of the rainbow.

Great question, darned if I can see the appeal. 

I left long ago shortly before BC left because I could see the direction WOW was heading and nothing they've done has changed my reasons for leaving and not looking back.

OK, I did look back, the promise of reworked old worlds was interesting so I did return, only to find the leveling had been accelerated so much I basically shot past many of the new areas without getting a chance to do the content. (at least while they were still worth something)

So I found myself quickly (1.5 months) where I loath to be in WOW, at the raiding endgame.... so I promptly quit never to return.

Sure, I could have rerolled an alt and followed a different progression path, but that just isn't what I wanted to do.

So I guess there's something that draws folks back, but I don't hear the siren's call.

Originally posted by zymurgeist

Originally posted by Kyleran

Originally posted by mikahr

He he, even most avid fanbois are quitting :)

No they are not!  EA says subs are holding steady, so it must be true regardless of the actual evidence you have observed.

But seriously, I think that's how we have to look at MMO's these days, fun for a few months after lauch, then you take a break and come back after the next content expansion.

The era of long term play is probably long past.

 

 Subs holding steady doesn't mean people aren't quitting. All MMOs have turnover. Always have, always will. Until someone with at least two functioning brain cells builds a game where you can build something lasting and defend it again I can't see anything as being long term for me.

Well sure, I agree, look at WOW, I'll be more people have played WOW and quit then there are current subscribers, they always did a great job getting new blood to jump on the treadmill when others dropped in exhaustion.

The same thing might be happening here in sWTOR, but I think its more due to EA's tricks such as extending sub time and what not that's keeping the counts high.

But hey, still lots of people enjoying the game I'm sure.

So I'm playing TERA last evening (level 35, whoo hoo) and I see a guildmate bemoan how "slow" the leveling is going, now that he only has 14 to go until level 60.

I said, for heaven's sake, this is only day 3 of the release, and you're complaining about not being max level yet?

As a former Lineage 2 player, it made me laugh to think of the 1 to 1.5 year grind I faced to get to level 70 when it first came out.  i didn't make it by the way, stopped after 6 months of pretty solid gameplay at level 52. 

Even in a more reasonable title like DAOC it took me almost 5 months to get a character up to level 50, and some more time to get his realm ranks up to a respectable level (5)

Kids these days. 

Many folks just aren't interested in actually playing the game, they're rushing towards the end and in TERA's case we're not even sure there's  much of anything there right now.  Strange.

I know, none of this is news to you, but it just sort of got driven home once more to me last evening.

Well, in my own case, I'm enjoying my journey, and just completed a pretty cool story line quest last evening.  And people say TERA has no story....

Originally posted by mikahr

He he, even most avid fanbois are quitting :)

No they are not!  EA says subs are holding steady, so it must be true regardless of the actual evidence you have observed.

But seriously, I think that's how we have to look at MMO's these days, fun for a few months after lauch, then you take a break and come back after the next content expansion.

The era of long term play is probably long past.

Originally posted by Teala

Originally posted by C.L.O.U.D

Originally posted by Teala

One thing that always annoyed me about CCP is that one of the biggest aspects of the game, mining, is one of the least worked on or have content added for that aspect of the game.   Mining, despite what some people may say, could be a very cool aspect and less boring if CCP actually spent a little time, and effort, to make it more engaging.  

Things they could do to make it better are added different colored lasers for what ore you are mining.    This would allow miners to know what ore was being mined by another miner in the same belt by using color coding of the laser mining pulse. 

They could add a better ore gathering system that allowed the miner to see how much ore was left in an asteroid as they mined it in real time.  As it is now it is total guestimation on how much ore is left while you mine the asteroid.   Real time info would make it easier to know when to turn off your mining module for that asteroid and start mining a new one.

How about allowing us to go further in the mining skill system and allow us to increase our ability to mine more ore and to specialize in finding, gathering and refining said ores - and in doing so requires micro management of power input and output of the mining vessels power supplies and such.  

Also, why can't mining vessels have more defensive capabilites?  You'd think that if these people in this universe were so advanced that they would have ways of better defending themselves from induviduals whose only purpose it to blow up a mining vessel - yet as we all know that is not the case and mining barges are one of the easiest targets to suicide gank.   Come on CCP we can only suspend disbelief for so long before it becomes stupid silly.  

Also, how come this games star systems have no orbits?  The planets, moons and asteroid belts are all static.   They never move.   Wouldn't it be a bit more challenging and engaging if it required miners to scan down asteroid belts because their locations changed - or does Newtonian physics not exist in EVE?  For a game that is suppose to be ahrdcore sci-fi you completely miss the boat on many levels.  

How come miners get no new mining ships?

Speaking of ships, why are the only ships getting updgraded and new ships being built combat ships?  When will CCP add say, a mid-ranged freighter?  You have a choice between small and huge.   Do not bring up the Orca either.  The Orca is a specialized mining freighter and requires mining related skills.   How come CCP hasn't put into game a freighter that is around the 350k/m3 to 450k/m3 range?

New mining barges would be good as well.  

So I ask the question - when is CCP going to start working on the one aspect of the game that has been neglected for so long?

 

1. Why do you need colored lasers, you can just as easily click to see what they're mining.

2. The ore gathering system is fine right now, I would rather they not try and change something that is fine.

3.Mining vessels can be built to have a decent tank to them. The reason that they aren't that defensive is because plain and simple..They're mining vessels, they are made to mine and only mine. Do some mining ops with a corp, you should have people protecting you anyway.  You could always mine in a battleship :P which is what most people are doing during hulkageddon.

4.If all the systems weren't static, the entire bookmarking places in space would be useless. You would save a place in space...then the next time you go back it wouldn't be there anymore. If you want to be able to scan for ore, just search down some gravimetric sites.

5.It would be cool to have more mining ships..but do we really need more. We already have 6 dedicated to just mining.

 

Why fix something that isn't broken, just because it's not fun doesn't mean it's bad. It's mining, not all that fun, but it's rewarding. Making isk is fun :D

Mining is broke and has been for awhile now.  If the systems weren't static it would require, oh I dunno a person to actually use the scanning skill to find asteroid belts - imagine that.   Mining vessels in the far future are what makes the EVE universe go around - it requires ore for all those ships that get destroyed.   Doesn't it make sense that a mining ship would be one of the most heavily armored ships to keep people from blowing them up so easily.   It makes absolutely no sense, and you ahve to totally suspend disblief that the people that live in the EVE Universe are so stupid.  

ER, they're not stupid, probably just making the reasonable assumption that like everything in the real world things have to make sense from an economic viewpoint and just like in the real world, military ships are far more heavily armored than their freight hauling counterparts such as oil tankers.

Fact is, with smart flying the risk vs reward is always relatively low, miners in general have no problem making a profit in EVE even taking into account the inevitable losses that occur.

Not saying mining doesn't need an overhaul, but I take offense to calling players in EVE stupid about anything, some of the most economically savy people I've ever met.

Originally posted by oakthornn

A friend let me roll a character while she had things to do... Anyway, I only played the level 20 introduction part and immediately logged after going back to level 1...  The graphics for a mmorpg were very good, but Personally, I think the combat is atrocious.. You have to press the F1-F5 keys, number 1-5 keys to perform abilities, not  to mention hit alt when you want to use the cursor every freakin time! In my opinion, it just feels weird.. And then you get to spam left click for regular attacks and hit right click to roll away from being hit... It feels as if I'm trying to play a fighting game on the keyboard and mouse?!?  I mean, how awkward, strange, weird, and ridiculous is that??  Would one prefer to play a game like Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Street Fighter, Soul Caliber etc, on a keyboard and mouse or with a proper game controller??? 

So, why does Tera want to be a "action" based MMORPG game on the pc?? You will need to go out and buy a gaming controller because there's no way it's fun to play it on a keyboard and mouse,, UNLESS you have the opportunity to tweak the ui so it actually plays like a,,, pc based mmorpg...  Cuz if you can't modify this, then it just doesn't make sense for anyone to play it on the keyboard and mouse... 

Constantly spamming Left click, right click, the F1-F5 keys, as well as the number 1-5 buttons and alt with tab repeatedly over and over again is absolutely absurd, ridiculous and straight up retarded in a mmorpg.. Flame me if you will but no one can seriously say they like this and think its,,, fun., lol..

Darn, I really like the combat set up in TERA, guess I ruined your absolute statement.

Here's another absolute statement, I don't see how anyone can enjoy playing PC game using a game controller, I would never dream of doing so.

OK, I'm proven wrong on that one all the time, many people in TERA are using game controllers, go figure.

Originally posted by eric_w66

ESO PvE MMORPG, very exciting. Lots of room to do neat things.

ESO PvP MMORPG, aka DAOC rehashed, with three invented player factions. Why three? Why not two? Oh wait, PvP doesn't work with only two according to some. Why not 4? Why not 50? Oh wait, their lead guy is a DAOC dev. Forgot he ran out of ideas long ago.

There's a perfectly valid reason (and actual real world proof) that 3 faction combat is supeior to 2 in every way, and arguments that going past 3 just fragments the player base too much.

We haven't seen a good 3 faction RVR game in a long time (GW2 not withstanding)