Since you asked for a simple answer, it is "No."

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Originally posted by Shiva_Shadow
Destined not to play.
I only got about through about 10 mins to this game before boredom overtook me and I was uninstalling it.  Far less time than it took to download and uninstall it I might add.
Besides lacking fullscreen, the graphics make SNES look awesome.

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I don't know about you, but being able to do other things while playing a game is de rigueur nowadays. Maybe some people just stick to the game, but many of us do plenty of other things in the background, like looking up info in the forums, or even non-game related tasks like firing up winamp to replace most games' usually uninspiring music.

How is Faitu wrong? He did correctly point out that the features mentioned are not "unique", and without unnecessarily being insulting either. This is information that is useful to people who have played many MMOs and should have more than a passing familiarity with what is considered "typical" as opposed to what is TRULY "unique".

I'm not interested in reading sanitized reviews. I've played too many damn MMOs. I'd appreciate it if people laid off the freaking hyperbole.

It's a fucking review from last goddamn year, wtf is your problem? Necroing a bunch of old threads? It's not even actually bad like the usual incoherent drivel posted here. You must have the attention span of an 8-yr old CounterStrike player if even that measly summing up was too much for you. Go back to school.

PC gaming for me. Two words, "mods" and "emulators". However, I'm not picky. I do console gaming as well. If there's something I want to play, I buy the game - having watched friends play it, of course, to make sure I'm not buying something I'll regret.

I don't have to "decide" or "make a choice" on what I want to play on. Limiting yourself like that is just stupid. Play what you want to play, not what people tell you to play. It's your own money, it's your own entertainment.

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Originally posted by Zinzan

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Originally posted by Ozmodan

Aion is the typical asian grindfest, just dressed up a bit.  It has all the junk usually associate with such.  Personal shops that clutter and lag the cities. Channels which means everything is instanced, want to play with a friend, find the channel they are in. Bad pvp design, 2 faction wars just don't work, once someone starts winning constantly the rest leave.  Little to do at end game except pvp, oh yeah that will eventually break too.  Minimal crafting design, nothing to keep anyone playing.

So enjoy your journey to end game, but don't race through it, because you will quit when you get there.

 

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Seems ignorance got up out of the wrong side of the bridge this morning.

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I played MMOs for quite a long while (years), I only peripherally paid attention to forums or websites like mmorpg.com.

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Originally posted by grndzro 
So you would rather companies keep putting out crap just to make a quick buck and people ignorant to it because site's like MMORPG.com don't exist?
Mabye if enough games get trashed because of reviews developers will understand that they no longer can put out a rushed product and skate by to gross profitability.
I wan't  mediocre games to fail, and fail miserably. All this sifting through riff raff to find a diamond in the rough that dosen't exist is crazy. 

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True. I had formed my own opinions by the time I started visiting this site regularly (read: more than once a month). And my low opinion of the overall state of MMOs appears to be matched by the general tone of the posts here.

This place is useful to have especially when people can compare games against each other (as unfair or fair as that may be). Better than reading the same thing repeated again and again on scattered forums elsewhere.

How stealthy, writing a guide for a game most of its playerbase has abandoned ;) No, seriously. Take a look at the FlyFF forum. It's dead. Statistics alone should tell you that if many people still played this game you'd at least get a bunch of new posts every other day or something.

I've played Flyff for quite a long time. Mostly with friends, which was why I could stand the grind. So there's some stuff in your guide which isn't exactly the best way of doing things.

Many of the quests are worthless. Only a few are worth the time, like the find-the-pet one which gives you a not-too-insignificant bunch of money. Most of them give you a laughable amount of exp which you could've gotten faster by simply grinding, since at low levels exp per kill ratio is still very high.

Regarding job change quest: CHOOSE YOUR CLASS before even starting to kill things at level 1. Why? Because the job change quests require different drops for each quest. E.g. warriors will want something from Aibatts, a level 1 monster. Here's the catch: if your level is significantly different than the monsters, you will have a severely reduced chance of getting drops from it. So since the Aibatt is a level 1 monster, you will want to collect quest item drops from it right from the word GO. Not wait until level 10, because at that point it will only drop you stuff like 5% of the time.

Basically, the vagrant (no-job) levels (1-15) are best spent doing (1) collecting your future job change quest items, and (2) the few quests which give actually useful rewards.

Also, the way you worded the classes sounds like someone could pick assist or ringmaster. Yes, I know you said "second class" but your example was also the second one, so people may mistake it as you saying it was the class of the second character you tried. Because nowhere earlier did you mention the class progression change at level 60.

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Frankly, this article is just filler. Flyff barely gets any traffic, the forum here shows that. Your article wasn't totally wrong, but neither was it really useful. Written by someone who spent maybe a week or two in the game, sure. But, you know, guides are supposed to point out the not-so-obvious. Otherwise why write/read one, when you can simply waste a week to find out for yourself?

Let's not mislead him. It's NOT child-friendly; as in there's no filter expressly for that purpose. Just because you guys didn't meet foulmouthed dickheads doesn't mean they don't exist. Chat is totally open.

Yes, there is a filter. It's only a word filter though, and a pretty poor one at that. I can easily type "fock yo momma u retarted sonofabeech". I wouldn't rely on it to protect a kid from someone intent on spewing verbal garbage. It's just the standard weak filter put in place in many other grind games. And guess what? You can't ignore or block other players. So some asshat could stalk you spamming "sukk mi kok plz" all day. And since there's exactly 0% chance of a GM being around when you need one, people get away with mouthing off all the time.

There are better games, with more engaging environments and stories. If you've played a grindfest, Flyff is simply more of the same, just with a different look.

 As a player I've come across plenty of stupid suggestions from fellow players; however, it doesn't take a genius to spot good ideas from players who actually have a clue. I've lurked on dozens of f2p forums, so yeah I know what crap suggestions look like.

Some dude posted about IRL he deals with the type of customers who complain that product A does not come with the options that come with product B. Exactly. Many bad suggestions are made by players who don't really know what they want. They just throw wild ideas out there based on what they liked elsewhere, regardless of the fact that such features may be incompatible with your game. Unfortunately, these kind of responses seem to make up the majority of stuff cluttering up suggestion forums everywhere. There's a reason doing support is hell, and dealing with clueless customers is a big part of it.

As a feedback-giving customer I prefer to personally email my suggestions to the support team, or whoever's being tagged to deal with that kind of stuff. Posting on the forum is usually seen as an exercise in futility, and I blame this largely on the self-centered retards who keep throwing out crap ideas and then getting all pissy when others pick them apart. Of course it's bad that many companies don't appear to be acknowledging player feedback, but if I was a customer service rep who had to deal with hordes of clueless 5-second-attention-span primadonnas day in day out, I'd avoid the forums like the plague too.

Originally posted by Kyleran

I was hard pressed to think of anything. I don't like games which don't have jumping, but have never avoided playing one for that reason.  Never let character customization, graphics or sound affect whether I stay with a MMO.

Its all about the gameplay really, and everything else is just optional in my book.  I cringe when people complain about things I find irrelevant like "combat animations" or whether or not you can swim in the water.

I prefer open worlds, but can have fun in a zoned or instanced game.

Similarly. It's not hard to find a legitimate cause of complaint in a game. Little things like looks and jumping and swimming don't mean squat - of course, I'll complain if they're done poorly, but they won't stop me from playing a game.

The reasons why I quit are grounded in reality: no GM/admin presence (i.e. cheaters running rampant and nothing being done about them), and games which quickly reveal themselves as committing the cardinal sins of having mostly no-impact fetchquests, being a grindfest, and having more than a passing similarity to the cookie-cutter f2p stereotype (it's called a stereotype for a reason, devs - Pay Attention).

@GreenChaos: Just because you bought 5 sub-par games (and thanks for pointing out that today's games are more flash than substance) doesn't mean ALL non-MMOs are that bad. Thanks to the internet, honest game reviews are freely available. I do my own research before buying something, gone are the days when I would make random impulse purchases - and the industry has itself largely to blame for shooting themselves in this particular foot. Of all my purchases only a scant few have provided less than a couple week's worth of play. I'm a long-time gamer, and no longer trust trailers, hype, nor even demos. Either I have a friend pass on his/her own firsthand experience, or I trawl through a bunch of reviews, screenshots, and videos. Overkill, removes a lot of the suspense/anticipation? Maybe, but here's the point: you're gonna drop $50+ on it. You don't HAVE to go in blind.

@Herithius:

There's a difference between simple muck-racking haters and people making legitimate complaints. On the flipside I can ask why anyone would be so stupid to pay for a sub, considering that IN GENERAL the average MMO experience is hardly a smooth one. Honestly, can you tell me of any MMO, even pay ones, which didn't have teething problems? And of those, can you claim that all of them eventually got over the initial hurdles? In fact, the opposite seems to be true. It's like if I google any game, I can find stuff on it from the initial hype to launch date to eventual drawn-out fadeout into obscurity. I can't recall off the top of my head of ANY MMO publisher which closed doors on a title simply because the game had ran for too long, they'd made enough money off of it, and are moving on to a newer game.

+ Speaking as a programmer, once the core game engine is done (and it's not bugged to hell), I see very little reason why additional content should take as much effort as getting it started did. New areas? That's just map data, that's the design people's job, not the programmer. New NPCs, items, monsters etc? Ditto. Just more values to plug into the database. Even quests are just flagged db stuff.

Yes, it all takes effort, but getting the engine finished is the major one-time hurdle. Sure, you tweak it as you go along, but i don't see why massive code re-writes should happen on any sort of regular basis. Version upgrades are fine, but those don't happen daily, weekly, or even monthly.

+ Agreed. Server + bandwidth costs are what i see as a huge chunk of operational expenses which are what's stopping small no-name studios from publishing their own MMOs. It's not that it's hard to create games nowadays: it's the ongoing operational expenses, and I'm not talking about stuff like salaries which non-MMO-producing companies have to deal with as well.

I've played some well-done MUD-type games, but I know these are very niche games so I don't bring them up even though technically they're multiplayer online games as well.

+ Who says we don't also complain about movie ticket prices? Also, expectations are different. I pay less for a night out at the local family restaurant than at a swanky place with a dress code and mandatory reservations, despite both of them being basically places where you pay to eat. Price is an important consideration, to be sure, but the entire experience means something as well. I've never encountered an MMO which didn't have it's fair share of problems, whereas sp games are hardly plagued to the same extent. Console games even less - in fact console gaming is pretty much put the cd in and play, none of this update patch crap.

+ That sounds about right, what with the job and the family, i don't really get to game all that much. However, i find myself far more often digging out older games rather than reaching for the wallet for something new. Also, since I like to DIY stuff I tend to mod the heck out of my games, and mods are basically free content. Some game mods are very nearly full-blown expansions or even sequels in their own right, like in games like Morrowind/Oblivion, Freelancer, Titan Quest, etc. Many of them provide multiplay as well, just not MMO-style, and I can honestly say that a LAN party with friends beats partying with a bunch of random strangers any day.

Despite the stigma - plus the feeling that 99% of them are crap - I've enjoyed quite a few freeware / open source games as well. The Battle for Wesnoth, for one. That Battletech remake, done rpg-style. Not to mention the scads of doujin games.

Finally, i multiplay not just for the social experience, but to enjoy a game with like-minded people. MMOs have largely been a disappointing experience, socially speaking. Technologically speaking they haven't been anything that great either. As a programmer, i really hate buggy games, and the general shoddy state of most MMOs is simply appalling.

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I've ended up not playing MMOs for quite some time now. If devs are gonna get us back into the loop, i'd like to see something new for a change. And by that, i don't mean the same old recycled concepts given another facelift.

The money I spend on movie tickets guarantees me a watchable movie from start to finish (whether I enjoy it or not is a different question), however an MMO sub does not guarantee me there will be no downtimes, no lag, no rollbacks, no nerfs, no idiots having a bad day and taking it out on other people, no epeen waving, no online drama, etc.

Sure, companies can charge subs if they want to. Whether we think it's worth our dime is a different story. I don't know about you, but I've seen too many games Doing It Wrong that I'm not inclined to part with my money until the game is at least stable. Call me a cynic, but LAN parties with my buddies are the most enjoyable sociable gaming experience I've enjoyed.

As for MMOs, I prefer to wait for the dust to settle before trying something out. I'm not putting down $15 just to be some company's guinea pig on a fresh release. I'll play tried and true titles.

Originally posted by jcpillars

I'm one of the people she referenced when she said that some people took offense.  I posted on her original column.

I'm not arguing that game companies obviously use attractive, buxom women in artwork to sell their games. It's Sanya's simplistic generalization that there are hordes of 18-34 year old who buy the game BECAUSE it has tits and guns. If I walk down an aisle, I'm going to stop and look at the game with the huge tits. Of course I am.

But I'm not going to buy the game because of it. And none of my gamer friends do either, and they all fit into that 18-34 year old demographic. We buy the game if it looks like it will be fun to play, not because the woman on the cover has huge tits. And although we notice the games with the biggest tits first, we will dig through the racks of games to find the one with the most interesting gameplay to our styles.

Marketers, commentators, and developers greatly exaggerate the affect on profit from having huge-titted women on the cover. Sanya is just echoing a common resentment women have about pixelated game women (or any women in media in general), and the accompanying, although false, conclusion that young men think with their dicks and not with their heads.

We like our dicks. We give our dicks visual treats whenever we can. But ultimately, we buy games with our heads.

 

+1

We're not kids anymore. Will boobs attract the roving eye? Definitely. But guess what decades of playing ultimately disappointing games does? It turns you into a hardened cynic. In fact, one of my earliest thoughts on a game that comes in a package with a chick on it is, "I wonder if this is another shit game trying desperately to squeeze a last few sales?".

Like jcpillars said, sure I'm gonna look. But my next step will be immediately to scan the box for any list of features, or how the general blurb goes. And then (since I never impulse buy anymore), I'll google it up and check out a bunch of reviews and as many forum comments as I can stomach. Nowadays, this almost invariably helps me find the main flaws of the game which people didn't enjoy. It's saved me a ton of money.

So, did the marketing people do their job? Shrug, they got my attention. Did the tits factor in inducing a sale? Definitely no. Without the tits there's no saying whether I'd miss seeing the box or not, and regardless of that I'd read up beforehand on any game before making a purchase. So basically that advertising dollar was wasted on me. I'd just as likely look up the title of a box with something else on it, e.g. since I'm also a sci-fi fan I'd certainly be intruiged enough to look up something that had a gizmo on the box art as well.

Two words: Golden Axe.

Originally posted by Nadril

 

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Originally posted by Dameonk
Fantastic.... yet another "This game's awesome!", "No it's not!" thread.

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Yeah...

I'm glad the majority of the community isn't like this at least.

It's very likely that at least half of all the threads which have ever been made in forums worldwide about MMOs are about this exact topic.

Originally posted by Wizardry

Do NOT get sucked into that crap.They are the exact same game models as F2P only you get a game that took 1/10th the effort to make,so do not support it.There is no such thing as free ANYWHERE,to compete you must spend money and spending it on some BS illegal scam that usually uses "DONATIONS" as it's money maker,it is just wrong and encourages other developers to continue raping people.

 

Dude, lay off the crack. Not all browser based games are stat-based PvP scams. In fact, they're only a recent trend by the unscrupulous to prey on the naive. Your foaming-at-the-mouth characterizations of "exact same game models as F2P" also do you no credit, as there are actually some smaller (regional) companies that do put out good titles. I've played several. Non-english, of course, which helps immensely by keeping both the ignorant and the rabid 8-year olds with 5-second attention spans out.

@Kanthalos:
x_rast_x has a good idea. There are quite a selection of MUDs now that feature browser-based clients, although the majority of them still require telnet access (port 23) - basically it means you can't play at work/school if you've got a strict firewall in place, lol. Check out the Iron Realms MUDs, although those may be a little too involving. Materia Magica is pretty decent and I had no issues throwing in 5, 10, 20 minute sessions when I played it back in the day. AdventureQuest - a browser-based Flash RPG - even if people laugh at it, it's perfectly suited to quickie gaming. Who cares what other people think? If you find it fun, that's all it needs to be for you.

Edit: typo

Being a cheapskate, a cynic, and having experience with offline RPGs, I knew from the start virtually everything you buy from the grindfest style MMOs is going to be a waste of money. It's either some crap fashion item (i.e. useless and for looks only), or something that boosts your chance of doing something else by a minuscule percentage (like instead of failing crafting 99 out of 100 times, you fail 98 out of 100 times).

Sure I spent a lot of time grinding, but dozens of grindfests later my bottomline still shows $0 out. If I gave in to the temptation to buy a trinket here or a little boost there, it'd soon add up. Even a measly $5 a game would have easily result in a 3-digit figure, and I've been tempted far many more times than that. Hell, in most games' official forums there's almost always a topic about "how much did you spend?" and the figures are always something ridiculous.

By not spending any money on a game, I have less attachment to it. I don't have to feel like I need to play it a couple more weeks because otherwise I might feel like I wasted my "investment". I also don't feel compelled to "defend" it on forums for no reason other than money. I bet many people "defend" a game they like simply because they've put money into it, and they're afraid if they admit the game has shortcomings (but realistically, what game doesn't?) they'll feel like they wasted all that cash.

And with the way so many games are released half-assedly and chock full of bugs, can you blame people like me for being paranoid? It's not like the MMO industry is blameless - hell, it's virtually the other way around. Stop putting out crap half-finished games with shoddy support, and we'll MAYBE consider actually paying for some of that entertainment. Until then I'll happily freeload.

Edit: Bad typo! Sit!

Originally posted by Adderax

Those inmates are probably good people.  Only scum bags can be lawyers.  Lawyers owe allegiance to 'legalise' English and to the BAR (like a Mc D's Franchise).  When you ask these scumbags if you must obey legal statues, they will say YES...because they are bound by it as LAWYERS.  However legal English is not everyday English...and unless you are a member of that society (BAR), you have no reason to follow in this crap.  Human beings are not bound by it.  Most are too stupid to know what's going on.  Bottom line, lawyers and judges are scum.

Spoken like an 8 year old. Sure we love to ridicule lawyers but guess what, generalizations and cartoon caricatures are not the real thing.

altairzq : "eualas and what not that you just click to accept don't have much legal force and are way behind the laws, and are meaningless against an amendment in a constitution.."
 

Good job ignoring the many posts (hell, almost everyone else in this thread) saying how your constitution means jack shit when it comes to free speech on private property.

^ Do you really think in most cases they have much say in how things get implemented? Speaking as a lowly programmer myself, virtually all of the time your manager tells you what to implement, and he in turn gets his marching orders from management or the bigwigs at PR or whoever. "Doing things your way" is a programmer's pipe dream, unless you're talking about one-man shows or garage based companies.

Point is, your perception of the "diva" programmer who insists on doing things "his" way is largely incorrect. Decisions are made by higher ups 100% of the time, unless you're talking about a tiny company of 3-4 people where the programmer is also a partner or something like that. Most programmers are simply cogs in the machine, rats on the treadmill. Sure, occasionally you hear from big name studio people in the press like Carmack from id, but the vast majority of us are just peons.

Customer feedback gets filtered through like 10 layers of management crap before actually reaching the programmers, and by that time it's already in the form of "do this, then do that". That's the reality of it, unless you're talking about smaller no-name studios... but those aren't the guys making MMOs now, are they?