All Posts by JackDonkey

something that took me forever to learn

your guns optimal range is well the optimal range

your funs falloff range is the range PAST the optimal your gun can shoot, so if your optimal is 5000 and your falloff is 2500, then your max range is 7500.

It seriously took me like 4 months to figure that one out so I figured i'd pass it along.  This is coming from the guy that spent the first couple weeks of the game trying to fit a medium blaster on a tristan.  I could bust any safe spot pre exodus in 5 hours or less though.

I played Tabula Rasa up to lvl 11 and I didn't think it was that fun.  I hate quests and I stuck it out until I got a group for an instance and I thought the instance was not really fun at all.

Also some bastard took the last name 'Donkey', i did get the last name "Dude" so that's pretty special I guess, but it's no where near as good as Donkey.

also no they shouldn't have an auction house, auction houses are shit, they should have a market like eve-online.

there at least needs to be the option of grinding.  I grinded a large part of my levels for my wow characters.  I was actually going to mention to guild members in TR that the game needed more grind.  After I did caves of donn once I thought I don't like the quests, the instances, the combat, and the lack of grind so I can't think of anything left to like (i'm not a crafter).

Edit: when I say "grind" i mean getting exp from killing mobs and nothing else.

leveling 30-60 is more fun than 60-70

eve was pretty cheap to make if I recall, partly cause of iceland subsidies.  It also had hardly any content in the beginning, they just slowly ramp up and have free expansions to do it with.

maybe the simplest answer is quests.  the focus on having lots of quests made mmo's suck.  Does TBC suck more than pre-TBC, yes it does (pre TBC didn't really suck tbh, until you ran out of 5 mans with your 4 friends and didn't know 35 other people), what's one huge difference between them, well the amount of quests is one.

In tabula rosa grinding is actually hard to do (well from lvl 1-11 anyway) but there are plenty of quests, yay solo.

Originally posted by Yamota

 

 

In my experience when I played this game a year ago, PvP is about 2 hours looking for targets just to see them warp away when they see you. But I wasnt a pirate so maybe they see more action.

the warp away option though is so much better than a wow or lineage can't run away thing.

Originally posted by lanorra

Personally, I think the next step in the evolution of MMORPGs will come when someone creates a game where the world is proactive, instead of interactive.  Let me 'splain what I mean.

In current, typical MMORPG worlds, the environment just persists. It offers essentially the same experience to player after player, character after character. A single experience will not meaningfully take into account the players class, race, religion, skills, talents, level, or most of the players past actions (excepting of course, the limited "faction" functionality offered in some). The environment never changes or if it does, it does not change radically, and certainly does not present a different experience for one player versus another. But of all the issues, the one that is the most radically boring  is the fact that all games today require YOU, the player, to interact with the world in order to uncover quests, or items, etc. YOU have to go up to NPC XYZ and hail them. YOU have to travel to a place where there is a boss that spawns and kill him (and he miraculously appears again for other groups). YOU have to run around to different NPCs to unlock quests, or to buy certain items, or to interact at all with the environment.  /yawn.

In a proactive world, the environment changes as a result of singular player's activity, skills, talents, and other character attributes. It also serves as a "character" in and of itself, and will seek YOU out as a player, rather than the other way around. The same event experienced by 100 different players may yield 100 different results, depending on any number of circumstances. Wow. Imagine a game where your experiences are different than anyone else's. Imagine a game where different characters can enjoy radically different experiences. Imagine a game where the world recognizes you for your charcter specifics and treats you accordingly. How could that get old? How cool would that be?

To illustrate:  You are walking through a forest, and a tree falls in front of you. It narrowly misses crushing you (you saved on your reflex roll!). A group of wood nymphs jump out. They peer at you skeptically, then ask you a number of questions, which you answer, and then your screen goes black and you suddenly find yourself in a room with no windows or doors, and you have to .. do something to figure out what the heck just happened. Another player comes across this same tree, already down in the road, and is jumped by bandits who where hiding behind it. He fights them, kills a few, and the others flee. Searching their corpses, he finds a map. He has to then figure out what it means. Another player happens by this same tree, but it's being chopped up by a group of men. The player hails these men, and they respond jovially, offering to trade their firewood for our player's cloak. He agrees, and makes the trade, and finds out later the wood is enchanted and makes a fine hilt for a magic weapon. Another player comes by and the tree is gone, and he passes by this little area without incident.

While it may sound horribly expensive or terribly difficult to create this sort of player experience, it's not outside the realm of what is already being created for players by MMORPG companies. It's certianly not outside the realm of possibility, only outside of the box in terms of current game design.

In addition, in a proactive world, your activities will have consequences. For example, if you go into the woods and slaughter a few dozen wolves, you'll suddenly find it a little more difficult to gain admittance to a druidic guild or temple. However, the nearby town's Militia is suddenly more interested in hiring you for things like guard duty, something they'd not be willing to ask just anyone. And this opens up new opportunities .. perhaps you get to learn new weapon skills, or leadership skills, etc.

My point is this: games will need to change their player experience focus. Games should not be about a player walking through the same, static environment anymore. The world should come to them, interact with them, give them experiences unique to them. Make their actions and choices meaningful. Give them a chance to fully create a unique persona and gaming experience. Give them a chance to really immerse themselves in a world that cares. When your play because you're excited to uncover your next experience, because you never know what it's going to be, then playing isn't about grinding, or money, or leveling, or progressing anyore. It's simply about enjoying new and exciting adventures, that in the end, result in the progession of your character. That's not a 'grind'. That's just pure fun.

/dares to dream. :)

i think what will mark the next generation of mmo's is when the AI can control pve in such a way as you describe (minus the part about wolves and druidic guilds, cause that's TBC grind).   Kind of like AI not just for a mob, but the whole world.   That's how I think people are going to get a PvE and sandbox in one game.

Originally posted by heerobya

 

Originally posted by Kyleran

 

Originally posted by Tatum

Originally posted by ryotia

y no progression at all, just pure sandbox where you build houses, cities, etc. the goal might be interacting with the community in a dynamic, evolving story like those WELL online developers claim they will do

Well, we all use the "sandbox" term a little loosely.  Anyway, I'd love to see an MMO that does exactly what you describe here.  Zero character progression, player driven content, the ability to build and create...

It already exists.... its called EVE and has all of these things.....

 

oh, you want another one.....

sorry but EVE does have a progression. Unless you purchase the game, log on only to pick a new skill to train every couple hours/days/weeks, and don't actually "play" for a few months... or years.... 

 

but wait, you still *suck* because you have no money to buy new ships... so you have to grind missions/mining to makee enough money to buy ships

EVE does have a progression, it's just a different kind then most people are used to in level / experience based games and it's much different then a true skill (toon skill not player skill) based game

  you don't have to grind missions/mining, you can play the market or do trading, or you can pvp in merlins forever which requires little money at all.  your idea of fun could be to scavenge loot from people npcing in 0.0, you could do it in a bantam and make enough money to buy replacement bantams.  That's the whole point, you don't follow a linear path of having to be rich.  you can do what's fun.

aside from blowing people up in eve some of my best mmo memories are doing instances in wow with level appropriate people (4 people less than 33 doing sm library, those same 4 doing archades with no one over lvl 43) and GRINDING in lineage 2 in a group, yes grinding.  Nothing worth remembering ever involved a quest, I guess maybe warlock fast horsie but that's it.

i quit once after playing it to level 8 on release day.

I found out my friends played like a month later and signed back up, then quit when I had 3 guys to lvl 10 and 1 at lvl 20

I finally got bored of eve and sat around the house for a month and then gave WoW another shot, I played for like a year and half then and quit when they took away CastSpell in macros.

Then I wanted to see what BC was all about so I signed back up again and rolled with some guildmates up to lvl 70 and thought man BC is the shit and by shit I mean horrible.

so I guess I've quit 4 times too, but I have yet to go back.

I miss playing eve and i miss playing wow.  Eve was best before exodus and wow was best before tbc, they both don't do it for me now.

 My boss took me to lunch one day and talked about eve and I went out and bought thinking it would Privateer2 clive owen is you online.  I figured out the game while still jaded about how cool i thought it was going to be.  I loved playing don't get me wrong but that jadedness about what I thought it might be like got me over the hump of figuring the game out.  Once i figured the game out, Like why my medium hybrid turrent wouldn't fit on my tristan, i actually had the requirements if you swap cpu and powergrid cause that was my goal to put that big gun on the tristan in the first weeks of play, then it became fun.

 All other games i've played since I've logged on a couple times just to dink around and after a day or two thought the game was kind of gay, lineage 2,  wurm, shadowbane, tabula rosa, auto assault, vanguard, everquest 2, anarchy online, scions of fate, rf online, and even wow.  WoW was no different than those other games in my first couple months of play.  Of all those games the only ones I gave second chances too were lineage 2, rf online, wow, I guess tabula rasa too.  Anyway for me it takes a long while to get up and running and usually involves stopping for weeks at a time before I get back into it, with the exception of my first mmo eve.  I made it to level 8 on my first day of wow and thought this game sucks back to eve.  Then I found out my friends played it like a month later and tried again and only got to lvl 20 and thought this game sucks.  Only after quitting eve and thinking about giving wow another shot did I really start to get in to it.  So i didn't start playing wow until about 5 months after I picked it up in the store.

some games just take a while to get into.

it's not really a pvp versus a pve argument it's more of the fact that todays games don't really embrace the fact that their game in an online persistant world.  PvP just happens to be the easiest way for a programmer to take advantage of the persistant world like with eve's sovernty, the world is always changing as a result and the only code it took was making pos's and stations claim sovernty and making them be able to be blown up.

WoW's endgame could be a 25 player LAN game, Eve's endgame needs lots of different people and different alliances since the endgame is pvp.

Tabula Rosa having 10 different instances of a world zone just shows that new games might be getting further away from embracing an online world and heading more towards lets have an excuse for people to pay a monthly fee.

A PvE game that embraces the online world is probably a bit difficult at the moment with hard to program AI.  Also if you want the landscape to change that would require a lot of bandwidth to update users on the changing maps and such.

So I guess once someone comes up with a great idea for a PvE constantly evolving world then things will be looking up.  Of course if you made an eve where some alliances were AI, like serpentis maybe trying to take over Venal or something, you'd have player alliances that could take back the area but then other players couldn't really take the other players if it was PvE only, so maybe PvP is the only good answer for endgame type evolving world stuff.

personally what i'd like is a high fantasy game where engineeringly impossibly stuff like really long skinny bridges and really high towers were in game and the world would evolve with people building unique structures and trying to destroy others with a mix of AI npcs doing the same type of stuff and blending in with characters (not necessarily on their teams but where the npc was more than just some thing that spawned here and walked aimlessly until killed).   But that's more bandwidth to update the map for people and complicated/impossible AI.  Sure that's a way ways off, but the games today don't even seem to try, maybe Tabula Rosa with it's bane taking over but I kind of doubt it and am only lvl 11 so I don't know too much about that game yet.

my brother and i evading 4 moo guys, mainly cause it was the first time I was all calm going, ok jam this dude, now throw a couple on him, launch drones, align, prepare for warp "are you clear?" "yeah the taranis just warped out" "ok i'm going good luck".  Before that it was all shit shit fuck damn oh crap regardless of the opponent.  It was kind of the first time my brother and I were like fuck these assholes we're better than them, and we got away, it's not like we wouldv'e killed any of them we had 2 scorpions, one was a ratting one, it was back when rail scorps were actually kind of cool.

afk mining bistot in a badger 2.  Or I shoudl say washing my car and getting back home to see the cargo hold almost full.

first time i lost and ship and realized there wasn'ta  reset button

i played eve for 1.5 years, then wow for almost 2, i've played eve maybe 20 hours in the last 4 months and I look at a couple eve forums almost daily even though I haven't played steady for 2 years, I haven't looked at wow forums at all since I quit about 5/6 months ago (although I do drop in on my old guilds forums from time to time).  The good part about FFA is the drama/politics, or I should say the fact that you can settle the drama/politics in game.

Also faction versus faction is the biggest shit ever, it's like the worst of both worlds, no smacktalk, no destroying the people of the same race that piss you off, no politics.

I mean in eve this one alliance surrendered then was evacuating and got blown up cause it was discovered the things in their cargo ships were against the surrender treaty.  That would never happen in a faction vs faction game.  Faction versus faction is just gears of war with a grinding character development side game.

having levels in an FFA game is retarded though, FFA games should all be item based, the pimper your sword the better you are kind of thing.  That way there is a decent death penalty (with full loot or destroyed items upon death like eve) but the player can set his own death penalty, meaning like he might suck cause he has cheap equipment on, but if he dies it's no big thing, or he can risk it all, his/her choice.

not being able to talk or group with half the people on your already low pop server is something I will avoid in the future. (faction vs faction sucks is what i'm saying)

they've been hiring for a "next gen mmo" since before they announced starcraft 2. Also I think we'd need the codenames for at least one non starcraft game before we go thinking that hydra could mean starcraft since medusa did, cause maybe they just use all monster names for codenames for every single one of their products.

Going with Scriar's observations (which look historically accurate) if blizzard does make a sandbox game it will probably rip off games like second life and habbo hotel before it tries to rip off an eve online or darkfall because more users = $$$$$

Originally posted by Kenze

Grouping became evil when MMos tried removing the Grind.

My foindest memories are of my EQ days getting a group and going to some cool zone and setting up a camp, and having someone pull mobs over and over back to that camp for the group to kill. thats where a lot of the socialization happened for me.

I dont see that anymore in mmos. You group now for specific quests or to kill a specific mob ,then everyone goes back to their own seperate thing. 

holy crap, i never even thought of that, but I think you are right.  One of the foundest memories in lineage 2 was when i was in a group with 2 melee classes and 2 caster classes, the fighters just kept clearing stuff out and myself and the other caster just kept healing, it was actually quite fun and it was a situation where you didn't want to go to bed cause you had a good thing going.  In WoW it's usually I'll group until my quest is over or until we clear this dungeon, but in Lineage it was we got a good thing going where's the coffee/red bull/speed.