All Posts by Drevnar

Originally posted by Rhoklaw

First of all, forums are not for praising only by fanbois. Sure, I may be awaiting WAR's release, but atleast I purchased AoC and tried it out,  which seriously suprised the hell outta me since I had no interest in it whatsoever.

During my adventures, I noticed several key points about AoC that I surely enjoyed and several that I can't figure out how they got past beta.

PROs:
-Unique Combat System
-Superb Graphics
-Mature Setting
-Fatality Moves
-Player Built Cities
-Crafting
-Numerous Quests
-Excellent Tutorial Area

CONs:
-Poor Melee Implementation in Combat System ( Too hard to stay on target to complete combos without a /stick or /follow command ) which makes Ranged Combat easier. What would they say if they actually had to aim their spells and arrows? I bet you'ld never hear the end of it.
-With great graphics come great instancing ( Just ask Spiderman ) Sorry, I'll take WoW, EQ2 and WAR graphics and have an open world setting.
-Swearing, naked people and gore. Who could ask for anything more? Obviously the same kids who infested Barren's in WoW apparently.
-As kickass as decapatations look and so forth, the fact your still getting pounded on during this epic moment leaves a poor taste in my mouth.
-Ahh, the freedom to have a place to call your own. To defend and improve upon and benefit from. But wait, benefits are turned off, NPCs are turned off and there is no PvP or PvE sieging implemented yet. So, does this even count as a launch tool? Or as a belated birthday present a year from now at the rate their finishing the game?
-Well, crafting in this game seems simple enough, no risks and crappy products. Some craftskills aren't even working properly while others are in limbo because Funcom forgot to add the drops needed to advance in it. Yet another incomplete and halfassed implementation of a fundamental gameplay mechanic.
-Definately plenty of quests and if you can't find any, no problem, cause you can grind to 80 in less than a week and thats all that matters.
-Tortage, the beacon of all that AoC stands for. Tortage is like a mini version of the actual game. No crafting, plenty of ganking and basically a whole lotta nothing. Seriously though, the game is not finished which is why it's getting the crap kicked out of it in reviews. Don't blame us, don't blame the game magazines but rather, stop paying gaming companies to beta test their games.

You must not be very good at the melee system, your combo's will always hit (unless blocked/dodged/etc) as long as you land the last directional hit in the combo chain on your target. After you do that stop moving or turning, you will hit your target. People jumping around is not an excuse for not being able to hit someone as it is still possible to get that last hit off.

You know, there are some pretty damn big zones in AoC and it is very easy to play for hours on end and never cross a single zone line or see a loading screen (not counting when/if you die, which are pretty much instant).

I'll give you the point about the community, it isn't the greatest. But why on earth do you still have the public channels subscribed? Get a decent guild and there goes all your community issues.

You don't take damage when you are performing a fatality, all though I believe you can still die if you have a pre-existing DoT on you, and people can interrupt you while performing a fatality (annoying but rare).

The patch that is going live 45 minutes from now is supposed to add in the guild functionality, although I do not know for sure.

There is not a single craftskill that cannot be maxed out n the current implementation of the game, some skills do however require low drop rate items to craft/advance. Low drop rate, but they do drop.

Do you honestly expect a different leveling time in any other modern game? (Most) People don't care about 1-cap, they care about cap and no company making a western MMO is going to have an insane time to cap such as seen in L2 and the like.

Tortage can be bad, but than again you can do a lot in night mode and once you get into the main world there is a lot less of that to be dealt with because it is more spread out and instance.

You know, it is funny how you label instancing as a bad point (I am guessing because of separation of community because load screens are typically less than 10 seconds for me, and they are sometimes damn near instant; not to mention the huge zones in the game), yet you also say that having a more condensed area such as Tortage is a bad thing. Is there anything that would make you happy.

You will get a fairly large increase in performance with that upgrade, however I hope you also order some TIM and rubbing alcohol at the same time and made sure that you can actually remove your current CPU from your system. The one Dell machine I have owned actually had the CPU permenantly set into the motherboard.

The rubbing alcohol is to remove the old TIM (or pad) from your heatsink and the TIM (Thermal Insulation Material) goes between your CPU and your heatsink *read a guide on how to apply it). Make sure you you completely know what you are doing before you even open your case up.

I'd say the night before would be better...

You will get that error message if the patch server is down. This used to be a hot topic in the CB until a dev put the issue to rest.

Originally posted by SGoodyer

Indeed it is bugged. I could see Rogues stealth if they were close to a torch or in sunlight and follow them lol.

That actually means that stealth is pretty much working perfectly. In AoC, Stealth is not supposed to be invisibility. You are supposed to use the terrain to stealth effectivly and every class has the ability to both invest points in "hiding" and in "perception" in order to make sure that no one has a huge advantage when it comes to stealth.

The performance issues are pretty much gone in CB, I get 60-80 average FPS, although occasionally going as low as 35FPS, with max settings (no bloom, only 4x FSAA) at 1680x1050. Loading screens really aren't that frequent, especially out of Tortage. It is very easy to play for an hour or more without loading once (except if you die), even in Tortage. In the rest of the game world you can easily spend an entire gaming session without needed to zone once; most of the zones are huge.

The technical issues are basically out of the way, all they have left is fixing a few bugs and balancing the game, although I will admit that at this time the game does need a fair bit of balancing and I am unsure if the game will be 100% balanced at launch.

My highest CB character was level 60, but my current character is level 18. I have personally had no crash issues or drops in FPS (except for a few select zones that Funcom knows about and has made a post on the CB forums about). The vast majority of my zoning happens in about 10 seconds with the longest clocking in at just under a minute. Overall, performance is very good (and CB doesn't even have the latest client, neither does OB). And personally, I play in such a way that I very rarely have to go through a zone line.

A lot of performance issues can be fixed by keeping your PC clean of malware, HDD defragged, and drivers up to date. You can also use the verify/repair tool in the SimpleConfig exe that is in your game folder to fix a bunch of issues that are related to your install of the client, not the client in general.

I am not going to deny some bugs, but the only ones I have noticed are with some broken quests (I count found 3 broken quests in Tortage). As a Dark Templar, my destiny quests all work perfectly.

You should also know that there is more to the combat system than just 3 directions and a few combo's. You have shields, dodges, additional attack directions and more involed combo's yet to come (I don't know if you have been high enough level to use these). One last thing, I have never been attacked by my target while performing a fatality. You can still die while doing a fatality, but that is from another person/creature attacking you or you having very low life and a DoT placed on you or something like thatt.

I wanted to comment on this whole "open beta is an older client" thing. I will say this, the OB client probably was the latest client when it was uploaded to Fileplanet (which would have been at least a week or two, possibly longer, before the OB launched so that Fileplanet would have time to get ready for it), meaning it is already at least 3-4 patches behind the closed beta (and some of these are significant). Now, correct me if I am wrong, but the OB has not been patched since it went live?

I know as a closed beta tester that the last few patches I have listed have fixed a lot of the issues I see people describing. I can play for hours without crashes, or disconnects of any kind (although I get the very rare lag spike for about 10-15 seconds). I run the game at max settings/4xFSAA/4xAF, but the game is playable for me (30+ FPS) with 16xFSAA/16AF. No bloom though, as I think it makes a lot of things look to bright. I get 45-64FPS all the time. My PC is 4GB of RAM, e6750@3.64GHz, 8800GTX, WinXP 32bit.

Also, I can't go into as much depth as I would like to, but combat does become more involved at higher levels. At level 13 the classes might have one or two skills that differentiate them from other classes of their archetype. I am not denying some of the balancing issues and bugs with the classes, but I am saying that I don't believe they are as bad as a lot of the people here are making them out to be.

I up until about 3 weeks ago I was questioning my preorder, but these last few patches, and especially the last two have convinced me enough of this game that I want out and fully paid off my CE preorder.

At least half your list is related to server lag, which is fairly understandable (but hopefully fixed for launch) considering the massive amount of people entering beta. Some of your other issues (such as the voice acting/text) are nit picking and can easily be fixed so those aren't really a huge issue.

You may also want to look into doing some PC maintenance things, such as virus/malware/registry scans as well as disk defragmentation, updating Windows and your drivers, all that kind of stuff.

I will attempt to answer some of your other points as much as the NDA lets me.

1. Loading Screens - For me, these are generally very short (a few seconds) and I haven't been zoning enough for these to be an issue. It may be a bit of an issue in Tortage, which is a bit constrained; but it is an island after-all. This improves later in the game.

2.  Graphic Glitches - Some times the RDB folder can become corrupt, this is easily fixed by selecting the Settings button from the launcher and navigating until you find the option to Repair/Verify the Resource Data Base. This fixed a lot of issues I was having. I am not saying there aren't underlying bugs to blame, but doing this can help rule out a game problem versus a problem with your install.

3.  Combat - This point doesn't really hold much weight unless you are a high enough level to be using a combo that uses more than one step (which there are none prior to and including level 13). And yes, there are reactive abilites like you are describing up to, and past level 13. You just need to know how to use or find them (such as pressing control to bring up the shield interface and the 1-4 keys to control the shields; not mention dodging by double-tapping a directional key).

4. Constrained World - I touched on this above, you are only seeing the beginning of Tortage, which is pretty constrained compared to a lot of other zones in the game. It should also be noted that there a large number of glitches in the game world (accounting for a lot of the invisible walls and some things that seems like artificial boundries) left behind or creating as the game world has change a lot from the time I got into beta to the point it is at now. These are being cleaned up.

5. Death - It has been announced that the death penalty is a sort of "Penalty-Lite" for beta so that people can get up in levels faster to test some upper level content easier (also, the leveling rate in beta is faster than the leveling rate that is supposed to be in on launch). The death penalty will be buffed for launch, an XP loss will also be introduced to the penalty as well.

Ignore anyone saying that SLI/Crossfire adds a huge performance boost, it really doesn't. For only double the cost of your graphics card you get a whopping 20% improvement in frame rates at upper resolutions.

For SLI/CrossFire 1+1=1.2

Funcom has separated PvP and PvE content so that you really only have to do what you want and you will not be penalized for doing so. Thus, negating your entire perspective.

With 2GB of RAM I would bet you could get max with around 45+ FPS (PS. This is not baselles speculation and I wont tell you why).

During the first 20 levels you will be able to toggle between night time and daytime modes. Daytime is online with other players, nighttime is online aswell; basically you are put in an instance by yourself.

He has some good movies under his belt, but I didn't think he could write one this good. I would suggest watching it if you haven't

I watched "Good Will Hunting" for a movie report, pretty damn good, expecially considering it was written by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

That system requirements lab is an epic fail. I maxed out everything except for the OS (I have XP, not bothering with Vista yet) and it put me half way between minimum and recomnded, when the truth of the matter is I should have maxed the thing out. The only part of my system that it said was not a full 5 bars was my OS.

We really need more of our guild members to post on these offsite boards, it gets lonely here :(

From my understanding, here is what the are asking you to do:

1. Do not make a new thread on a subject that has been covered in hundreds of others.

2. Do not necro really old threads.

3. If you want to make a new topic, scan the first few pages of the forums for that topic before posting. If you see nothing than make the thread.

What they are asking is hardly unreasonable.

Originally posted by pandahero

Great apps so far! Keep 'em coming.

We have been seeing an increase in the number of apps as of late :)

Originally posted by Cathalaode

 

 From what I added up, you get about 163 points of feats, compared to the 75 points that you get to spend, This is a good idea (163 x 3 = 489, 75 / 489 x 100 = 15.337... Meaning that you have about a 15% chance that somebody of your own class is going to be the same as you)

 

And to think that I came to this conclusion while I was criticizing the post.

 

163 x 4 (archetypes) = 652

163 x (14 x 2 {Class Specific}) = 4564

4564 + 652 = 5216

75 / 5216 x 100 = 1.437...

 

So, in a perfect universe, there would be about a 1.5% chance that the person you run into has the same layout as you, and that is not considering the equipment, level difference, or the fact that people tend to gravitate towards specific layouts.

100 / 1.5 = 66.666...

So, perfect world again, there would have to be 67 people fighting in an all level 80 match, in which everyone has the same general equipment for their class before anyone would get a duplicate.

 

I do wish the progression was more non-linear though, it looks like you just pick a branch and run down it without having to make any decisions, twists or turns. Just once you reach said level pick a tree and work your way down it. I just wish that if two people were to go for a specific feat, they would be able to reach it different ways, or at least have more branching out.

Umm, I don't know exactly where you are getting such a high number, but (with no restrictions based on prerequisits, it would be impossible to calculate that with the information provided) every class will have roughly 4.36x10^47 different ways of choosing feats (if that 163 does not include multi-tier talents).  

What level of math have you taken? this is a simple combinatorics questions (without going into much more depth based on prerequisits and which spec is considered "best"). Ultimately it is impossible to calculate how likely someone is to share a spec because we don't know any where near enough about the feat trees, what will be the best or most popular specs, how gear will influence spec, etc.