Its a curious thing...

if you get an artist to create the world, you will end up with a unplayed map, with mountains everywhere and beutiful but highly impassible landscape.

If you make it random, the artists wont work for you, and the landscape will not be optimal in its design, and might not end up as beutiful as an artist can meke it.

What do you prefer?

Its a curious thing... if you random generate the terrain based on a fractal calculation, you wont get any serious and good artist to work on your title, since they want to control everything (which happened to SWG)

On the other hand.... if an artist gets to control every single hill and tree... you will get an awful world, becuase no artist understands the nature of creatuing a world, so no players will find exploration fun.

While I do agree on the total focus on pvp is wrong, I dont think pvp is all that bad for the MMO genre, it just needs to be moderated a little better. It needs to not be the focus of the genre and we need the concept of ganking totally gone.

Vanguard had good graphics, no doubt about that, but... the Customer Service and the incredible amount of bugs that it was launched with, ruined Vanguards chances. If you take it down piece by piece, Vanguard fully live up to wow.

AoC was.. a bad design, a company that wanted to make something good, but lacked the vision it takes to make something fun. They did have better classes, I mean way better classes than Warhammer though.

Warhammer, I think is a pretty good stable MMO, not too many bugs. I did find the first 2 weeks fun to play as well, and then it became repetitive. I think the public quests was a good idea, although it could have been better implemented. And the classes, way too restricted in their gameplay, or at least it felt like that.

From what I have heard, Intel's coming title will challenge the way wow works, going for skill based and better graphics.

Originally posted by Ihmotepp

Originally posted by dilligaf

For the most part you are talking about Darkfall online.

 

He's not talking about Darkfall online. No one knows waht that game will be like. He's talking about game design. Darkfall online my be like RF online for all you know, since no one has ever played a beta.

 

Anyway, I agree. There's really not much difference between levels, and skill levels. I am level 50. I have skill level 50 in blaster pistol, or sword swinging. What's the difference? Not much.

Really, you aren't talking about skills vs levels, since you're talking about a game with no real progression. Levels aren't an issue, since there is no progression. It doen't matter how you make your character if there is no progression.

For example, you can pick from a bunch of skills. Ok. But what if therfe are 100 classes to choose from? Same thing. So it's not skills vs classes, it's progression vs no progression.

But what are you going to do? Half of an MMORPG is advancing your character, either in levels, or skill levels. You've now removed that.

Why fight mobs? No reason really, unless you're leaving in a grind for gear? Or it's just PvP all the time? Or a crafting game?

There IS a difference in how the levelling is felt.

When you have levels in the game design, this is a global number that you increase by killing things.

When you have skills instead, you need to train the specific skill to increase your skill level. That makes amuch more diverse gameplay. The problem is, it takes a bit more effort to make such a game and something that costs more money with the same unsafe player base, can be troublesome to get done, even if that solution is a much better way to do things. UO did it though.

Originally posted by Jefferson81

This tea-bagging thing that goes on that originated in the first person shooter games and has moved on to World of Warcraft and other fantasy games just shows how immature these people are and they seem to have homosexual tendencies that is not appropriate in a game for children.

I just hate the fact that my fantasy games have been infested with people that comes from the first person shooter type of games as this was pretty non-existant some seven to eight years ago.

The aggressive and in most cases immature first person shooter players happily kept to their games and us Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons nerds kept to ours.

But this has changed as World of Warcraft with it's player versus player combat and some other fantasy online games attracts the first person shooter player because they are essentially just like the games that they love but with swords and magic instead of machineguns and handgrenades.

And no, I can't stand most of the obnoxius PvP players as you wouldn't stand some old hobo coming at you with his yellow teeth stinking of alcohol and other unamely things.

TL:DR version: I don't like most of the PvP players and I sertainly doesn't like that the fantasy games has turned into third person hack n' slashers.

Totally agree... those 21 year old, mass-killers that does so without any penalty, what has this business turned into, supporting massmurdering like that. Ganking is like raping and should be punished the same way.

Originally posted by Ronmel

Originally posted by thark

This review is flawed and just pure bad. As someone said this review is just a pore attemt to please the angry horde on MMORPG.com

Just an example on things that are wrong or twisted of the truth..

There is for instance voice overs after 20 that has been patched in game ..

The computer spec's mentioned for the game is simply exaggerated, I have never lagged in this game, not in the way that is mentioned in the review at least. You need a good computer, but not a monster computer, and that is if you care to play the game in it's highest modes.

The mages in the game has Spell Weaving in regards to the melee combat system wich is not mentioned. Instead the review sais mage classes are all the same as any other MMO, besides if you wan't a mage and still care to use the combat system try a Bear Shaman or a Herald Xlotli

/junker

 

 

I am totally agreed with you on this. This review is a discrace. This game blows lots of others mmo's right back to the scratch table. How the hell can AOC get a lower score than for an example Matrix Online ????? Come on, Who the hell bought this review ? After this, mmorpg.com have dropped  some stepes on my ladder. 

ok..... if any game gets lower rating than Ybarras Matrix Online... something is totally screwed up. You just wont find any game worse than Matrix, its like saying the Devil is really a good guy, just maybe a little misunderstood !!

Originally posted by Admin

Originally posted by Recant

Originally posted by Admin

About a week or two ago we decided to apply the same curve algorythm to the hype scores (for unreleased games) that we have always had for released games.  We did this for the same reason - all the scores were at 4-6 and frankly it is boring and hard to tell them apart. 

Using our positive-only curve (meaning all games get more points than before with those at the top getting more) we are able to spread out or "zoom" into the scores.

The hype values of each game are still completely determined by user voting, just like our release games scores.

I wrote a detailed explanation of this in this FAQ item:

http://www.mmorpg.com/faq.cfm/showFaq/15

The other thing mentioned about the posts going back in time on Sunday is this neat little thing called "Daylight Saving Time" which instantly rolled our servers back 1 hour. Yikes!

 Edit: I would also note that sorting the entire list and looking at the scores is not really a good perspective.  I would first start with just "Released Games" or "Games in Development" by using the left menu on the game list.  You can't really compare hypes to ratings - they are totally different scoring systems...and really, most people have never played a game when they "hype" it - that is why we call it HYPE

 

I have a question.

All your algorithm is doing is multiplying each and every score by a certain number. 

My question is; why bother? 

Your FAQ says to make things more "funner", but this is not a reason.  Numbers are not made more 'fun' by being bigger, not unless we're talking about bra-size.   In fact this screwing around with figures makes the figures rather misleading, because games are ranked on a scale of 10.

If you just want to see a more pronouced difference between games, just add an extra decimal point to the final rating.   By screwing around with the figures you are making the data less indicative of what people are actually ranking.  If a game is ranked 6.5, and the game below it is ranked 6.45, and the game below that 6.4 or even 6.44... so what?  Isn't data integrity better than doing plastic surgery on it?  You lose information when you do this, specifically, what the average rankings people give are.

I have a second question:  What other psuedo-mathematics are you applying to your results to make them more "funner" before you apply the multiplication on the final result.  Are you selectively excluding certain kinds of rankings?  What mathematics are you using to do this, it would be interesting to see what is actually going on in the background, because I think your figures are bullshit, to be perfectly blunt.

Your ratings are completely out of sync with every other gaming rating site on the planet.  And this not just because this is a specialized site, there are other MMORPG only sites, or sites with MMORPG sections, and their ratings at least seem similar to each other.

Does advertising affect your ratings?  Are there any other little 'nudges' you give to your ratings?  I'm not being paranoid, I am simply deducing from your lack of respect for statistics, you're probably screwing something else up too, probably by accident.

Think i'm full of myself?  I'd love for you to explain to the class why your rankings aren't worthless.  That would be fun, I think.

 

Well, you are entitled to your opinion.  However, we feel this makes the scores better.

a) the FAQ I linked explains *all* the math used to curve the scores.  It is simple and being a multiplier it effects high scores more than low scores to it just does not make them all bigger, it extends the range from the high to the low.  It is not always the same multiplier, that multiplier is determined by how far away the top score is from 10.  If a game actually has a 9.0 the curve is almost nil.

b) other websites use curves, they might just not be as honest about it as we are.  A good example of a site that uses curves and is up front about it is IMDB (Internet Movie Database).

c) of course advertising does not affect ratings, but thanks for the insult to our team and my own personal integrity.  There are absolutely no nudges, the curve algorythm is old and been part of this site since 2001. 

d) we already have decimal places out 2 points.  I think a 3rd decimal place will not help much.

 

That guy is not the only one... Admin puts it into cement that this site is unreliable and even goes on to make sure everybody understands how unreliable it is.

The next step is fixing up the reviews or tampering with the numbers, due to payment from advertisers wanted to amp up their sales.

Interesting!!

Sorry nothing troll about it, it is my honest opinion. Starcraft is one of the worst designs and idea Blizzard ever made, at there actually was quite a few bad reviews of thte first game when it was launched.  I do understand that many people here like the game, so maybe they will make their new mmo in that spirit,  Even McCain had some publicity despite his failure, so why not a blizzard game.h

I hope though, that they will come up with some new original IP. Its time for some innovation.

Project Offset is a graphical engine, and a singleplayer FPS game, but its not an MMO.

Silicion Commander is interesting.... not the one I heard about though. The one I heard about is supposed to be a full 3D adventure/sci-fi MMO, showing off their coming Larabee chip, taking the graphics to a new height. It is supposed to be under development by a nordic developer (can hope its not funcom...). Should be very interesting to see what they can offer.

I think what he is referring to is the amount of work setting up a customer service team to handle the situation of millions of people phoning in and complaining about the game. They need to be hired, educated and serviced themselves and thats very hard HR work. The problem is to find actually capable HR leadership people and right now, very few corporations have figured out how to hire these qualified people to their organisation. Its not just a game industry problem, its global (just look at the banks)

I just heard rumors of a new coming Intel MMO title. Does anyone know which one that is? Its supposed to be a Sci-Fi.

It is not the feature set that is really the big part of the development of an MMO. It is the technology for the graphics engine, the server and the contents of the world. The two first you can find engines for, even for free although those are not the best in the world, on the internet.

The 3rd one, if you want a great and interesting world, takes a huge amount of time to design. It is not unseen that a single dungeon can take from 1 to 2 months to create and polish. Quality matters for the player and quality takes time.

With the right team, you could get an MMO up and running in its raw form within 6 months. The next 2 years you will do alpha testing and polishing the world. After that the Beta test and gold version comes, thats another 6 months, hopefully.

If  my memory is not failing me, the original DAOC was done in 18 months and had a fair launch. On the other end of the scale a game like Anarchy Online took 7 years and ended up as rubbish when it got launched (I still feel sympathy for that poor Gaute, now fired for his work with the rather unpopular AoC, despite actually being an ok new game).

It is incredible that developers can still think that click-to-move interfaces are any good. This is SO terrible that it shouldnt even be allowed on this site. The game itself? Who knows, how could we, without a proper interface to move around in the world, we will never discover it.

It is possible, my company just did it.  I can only say to you, try it !!! Follow your dreams of building a good mmo, there sure is room for one atm.

Originally posted by Raston

sorry, even if they did everything on your list, the game would still be pathetic.

The whole foundation of the game is flawed and unless they somewho mystically grow a clue, they won't fix it.

Massive PvP seiges my arse, 40x40 is NOT massive, sorry.

Shame they didn't take the good things from SB and rework them with modern tech to fix the exploits, but I guess that would of taken far more skill than they really had...

I completely agree with this. AoC is SO like WoW and Warhammer (beta) that its pathetic and it just has to fail. Gaute didnt see that, he wanted a new WoW..... that was his mistake and now his job... Poor guy.

Originally posted by drarkanex

Resigns??  More like Who did Godager piss off?  Doncha love it how even Erling can be so cordial about techincally firing Godager.  My question is, how can you "Pour your heart out" on a project like AoC and leave/resign/get fired 4 months later.  Why don't people just be truthful and just say what they mean.  Like rats leaving a sinking ship.  I don't understand why they didn't put Craig on AoC to begin with.  It doesn't matter now because FunCom will never see the launch numbers ever again.

I mean, companies gotta blame someone and look who they blamed.

I can only agree with the above.....

Gaute messed up 2 really potentially great games. I mean poor guy, I have no doubt he was living and breathing MMO games, he just didnt have any talent, whatsoever... And then AoC came out and the leadership of funcom finally figure that out.

Craig has a good reputation, sounds to me like he is the right guy to get AoC up and running in about a year....

Originally posted by GreenChaos

Originally posted by Z3R01

You know somethings wrong with a genre when the good games are 4-5+ years old.

I'm getting frustrated with the lack of quality games in this genre.

In every game I played there is always some flaw that bugs me so much it makes me leave.

I know i'm not the only one that feels this way, I know that others are waiting for that one mmo that's going to knock this genre on its ear.

Can we survive the wait? when this game does finally come will we even care anymore?

/frustrated mmogamer rant off

 

 

 

And you are not alone.  Many people on this forum feel the same exact way you do.

And it's really sad that people who haven't liked a MMO in 5 years still hang out in a MMO forum, doing nothing but complain.

it's beyond sad.

My favorite genre is the dungeon keeper genre. And there have only been 3 games in this genre, DK 1 and 2 and Evil Genius. And no evil overlord does not count.

But do I sit and complain for 5 years? No I moved on. There is nothing I can do about it other than make my own. Which I may do some day.

After 5 years you need to except the fact that the kind of game you want isn't gong to be made, and you need to move on.

 

 

DM games... then thsi game might be for you, whenever it comes out. http://trimiongames.com

If this was so, why on earht would anyone hire Ybarra, to make Stargate. This guy sucks, just check the Matrix online. A game possibly worse than the author of the phrase "YOU'R WINNER". But he does, Ybarra is actually still hired by someone to produce something. God help us!!!

Actually cudos to SOE for saving the Vanguard title.