ya know

I just want KOTOR 3..

I think turning this into a MMO is a mistake and I don't care how bioware says they are going to cater to a story.  It not going to be the KOTOR game I want to play.

I may play this because its star wars.. but I seriously doubt its going to be that great of game.  The things I really want to see I know I won't and the things that I don't want to see starting with Microtransactions I will.

I'll probably play for the story quests, and then stop playing as thats all i want in the first place.

i'm pretty sure that this game is going to be ruined.

I think there are going to be some fantastic ideas, but much of this game already sounds expiremental as far as technology.

Adding microtransations on top of it, more than likely will be a deal killer.  MT games usually work out so that those who spend the most are the most powerful and no matter what anyone else tries.. unless you spend more than what a monthly fee usually is, you won't compete.

MT games are an ideal way to make more money than subscription based games, sadly too many people don't understand that nickel and diming someone to death is a much smarter way of making money (aka the crap you buy at radio shack for $1-3)  stuff has about a 95% markup but because its so cheap.. no one objects to paying the premium.

Thats why radio shack stays in business, it has very little to do with the big items they sell.

Same thing here, just a different version, MT is best for the company, not best for the consumer.

Anyone actually read the decision?  As I understand it, in laymans terms, not legalese, is that Blizzard won because Glider was running concurrently with WOW.  What scares me is that this sets a very poor legal precedent in which running other programs (for instance something to encrypt data) could also be illegal.

It's not even on the basis that glider copied the protected memory, copied what was there, modified the copy and then injected it back into the protected memory space.  If this ruling isn't insane I don't know what is from a legal standpoint.  This is a major can of worms that I'm not sure how it's going to play out within the courts, but this precedent scares the hell out of me.

Conversely I'm happy that glider is getting run through the mill here as I hate both botters and farmers.  Botters are obvious cheats,  gold selling(and especially buying gold)  is more of a grey area but one that I believe violates the spirit of participating within a game.

I can't imagine why you brought this up, the rabid fans of star wars are about to go beserk in this thread.  Just glad I can get my 2cents in before that happens.

I think we can all agree that Star Wars as it currently stands is but a shadow of those who originally played it.  The numbers are nowhere near where they should be for the number of people this game drew originally.  The game for whatever reason has been mismanaged to the point where they alienate just about everyone. 

What you have left(the majority of them) is a group of people who just don't care about a good game, they only want to have Star Wars shinies and are willing to put up with just about anything so long as it says Star Wars and has lightsabers.

My point in saying all this is that, your conclusion about Sony catering to the vast crowd of casual players (in SWG I'd call them people who like to get beat up by the devs and still pay for it)  is just flat out wrong.  What you have left are the people who are willing to do anything no matter how craptastic  as long as they have a sense of community and the game keeps open.  Sony has essentially distilled out anyone who wants to play a game over the years.

So to claim that the pvp system and how its ignored is a bad thing just points to how Sony has no understanding of their IP and also to how the poeple left are just resigned to the fact that its a bad game and they will play it regardless.  

It's a Star Wars game and for that alone no matter how bad it is, you'll always have a rabid group of fans.

This isn't about open PVP or closed PVP or wearing items or faction farming as that happens in every game.  This is about people who just don't see the flaws, or dont' care about them.  Although I have to laugh when you say the roleplayers who don't want to pvp, ..*blink* the most avid roleplayers who I dealt with in SWG before the mass exodus of players were all into PVP.  They wanted to roleplay AND PVP and SWG was one of the first games that really allowed them to do both in a meaningful manner.

Just can't believe you brought this up, shouldn't there be a ban on editorials about SWG at this point?  This article is just going to induce a flamewar.

There are plenty of ofther games with better pvp and I'm sure everyone knows some of them. 

Originally posted by kidRiot

Because i'm thinking thats happening to me.  Before i joined the Marine Corps, I was a Hardcore gamer/MMO'er.  Now that I'm in the Corps, i have A LOT less free time than i did as a civvy.  Now with 12+ hour work days, and going to the field almost every week (and leaving to Cuba in November), along with keeping up with my physical conditioning and gymnastics, I have very little gaming time.

So I thinking i'm becoming a casual gamer.  I still want to be a gamer and still play MMOs (I love them), I think i have to become a casual gamer.  In a way, its enlightening that I can actually "enjoy" a game now.  When i was hardcore, all i thought about was the end game, and never truely getting the full experience.  Back when i played EQ, i was a casual gamer.  Took me about a good year+ to get lvl 50 (along with alt whoring).  But I enjoyed all of it, and didnt care much about the end game, just cared about the now. 

So now I need to decided on a MMO to once again be a casual MMOer.  I'm debating between WoW (played first 6 months of game launch), WAR (will get it regardless to test out) and EQ2.

Welcome to growing up.

Originally posted by Darkholme

Originally posted by InTheSea 

Ok, I understand you there, we have too little competition here, and it's thanks to competition that anything happens because the regulators don't do anything unless the European commission fines them.

Cause we have had a 10GB limit, now it's 20GB / month. I can only dream of 250GB / month atm.

Well that's what I'm afraid of happening over here. The lack of competition and the lack of any real regulation and ineffectual slaps on the wrist and stern talking to's do nothing. I'm worried that if the FCC let's ISPs get away with limiting and don't set specific guidelines/regulations to what they can and can't do, then we'll really get screwed like it sounds like you guys are. So that's why we're getting all up in arms about these things now, and b##ching to the FCC.

As an aside, I started monitoring my uploading recently. I do a lot of webmastering duties, content updating and such, so I wanted to see how much I actually do on average. 10-20GB per month would really screw me over it looks like.

See my previous post, you are doing commercial work, not home use.  hell you can write off your internet account on taxes as an expense so you really don't have any ground to stand on IF you are affected.

Further the government is regulating more than enough in our lives and you want them to regulate more of them?  Are you insane?  Just let the market work itself out and you'll end up with a solution that works for you.

I knew this questioin was going to be coming up, keep in mind that WOW is designed to play on dial-up connections.  Not well if you ask me but it can be done.

Think about it, you're talking about transferring more data than many people have in the capacity of their entire hard drives.

If you downloaded 2 games a day, you'd have a hard time hitting that cap.  I cannot for the life of me see how anyone who considers themselves a HOME user can justify more bandwidth than that.  Before I hear about people complaining they need it for work.. *COUGH*  you are talking about a COMMERCIAL use so damn well pay for a commercial account.

The people using that kind of bandwidth know they aren't normal users so frankly if they have any complaints they can either switch services or pay for a better account and stop blowing this thing way out of proportion.

i don't like the basic gameplay.  The game feels clunky, I damn near was looking for the "next turn" button when in combat.  thats how bad the gameplay is.  Having said that, many people won't mind that at all, but many others will.

It's what bothers you about a game that influences your opinion.  Unfortunately all the things I like are outweighed for me by the simple fact that swinging a big axe isn't a fluid action.  (insert weapon of choice)

I didn't really encounter many bugs, but I also didn't care for the core gameplay mechanics.  The entire game feels "clunky" to me when I'm in combat.  It doesn't feel smooth the way most other games do.

I played the game for a while I've been in beta for a number of months. I've tried many different careers leveled a few up to about level 18 or so. 

It gets hard to level something when you know next week all that work is going to be wiped.  So I spent more time poking around the different systems and in general getting a feel for how things worked. 

I started to try crafting, realized that it was something that will take a good amount of time investment in and figured I'd be better off focusing on systems within the game I could experience and get a good impression.  My impression of crafting, albeit limited was that it was nowhere near the quality of the crafting experience in SWG but is more complex than that in WOW (then again scrambling eggs is more complex than WOW).

Right at the start I tired  play Dwarves, unfortunately the class I wanted to play they've removed from the game.  However some very basic things I realized very quickly, the models of the characters when they run doesn't really match the ground they cover, its like the ground is sliding as they slowly lope along.  It's distracting and worse it looks primitive.  unfortunately as I moved on to the other races I noticed many similiar problems with the other races, making them all fairly primitive, the best models are the elves, but even there, things are not great.

That leads me into the next issue I have, the combat, its VERY obvious this is a turn based combat system so much so that you spend time waiting for your next attack to go off, unfortunately this also means that people can see attacks winding up and run away while your stuck in animation mode.  And yes this means you don't hit them.  (Some abilities you can run while in the animation, others you can't, and frankly in a PVP oriented game if you can't move while attacking, the game becomes a great excersize in frustration)

Collisions are turned on but only sometimes there are other times you can run right through people, now I'm not sure if thats intentional or not, I think it is because mostly collision only matters in combat, not out of combat running through another character who is blocking the door to an inn.

Combat feels clunky, every game I've played or beta tested since SWG (beta) has seemed to go  out of its way to give a feeling of realtime combat even though its turn based (SWG, WOW, DDO, CoH&V, Tabula Rasa, etc etc)  not so with WAR.  With war it feels as if I'm taking 3 steps back in generations, now this may be due to diagnostics running in the background but I doubt it.  Essentially combat was step, swing, wait for opponent, swing, wait for opponent, swing.  Not much fun, and completely destroyed my hopes for the game.  Basic gameplay just doesn't feel up to the other games out there.  Sure the number crunchers will go nuts with stats and all that but those who are a bit more used to the quicker gameplay styles won't enjoy this nearly as much.  It flat out feels clunky.

It really pisses me off to say that too because WAR has so many other things going for it, the Public Quest system is by far the greatest organic way to form groups I've EVER seen within a game.  The fact that you can enter into RVR scenarios at level 1 and only level in RVR is fantastic. (I don't recommend it but you can do it) 

The guild management tools are some of the best I've ever seen.  I like the artistic style I'm hoping the low-res crap that I've seen is only because of beta and not how the game is going to look when it goes live. (I'm hoping so because they wanted to save bandwidth on downloads) 

The chat system flat out sucks, SOE so far has the best chat system in their games to date, maybe someone else will get a clue and emulate them. 

I've not seen anyone doing UI mods for the game and I hope those are released fairly soon as the default UI is adequate but after years of having WOW UI mods custom feeding me whatever information I wish, WAR definitely falls short there.

The RVR is interesting but as many others have noticed, it looks like there is going to be large discrepancies btwn Order and Chaos which pretty much invalidates how much fun that aspect is.   when you log in you see that there are 1500 chaos and 450 order, it's little suprise that one side is in total control of a zone.

Basic quests, they are your typical, go here, grab this, kill this.  I saw very little in the way of ingenuity.  However they do put large colored areas on the map so you know where to go to complete your quests (this is a good thing, as many of the quests are extremely vague)

My overall impression of the game to date?  It's so so, I think PVP nuts who only want to PVP would be much better off playing WAR than WOW.  But those people in the middle who like a balance and those who are into PVE should stay away as the game just doesn't play well enough for them.  The game isn't going to be the WOW killer I think many of us on these forums are hoping for, I do think it will be a small MMO with a good fanbase but nothing more than that.

I'll try to answer any questions people have as honestly and as frankly as I can.  I will however completely ignore ravenous fanbois.

Funny most poeple who I see doing the PK thing on a regular basis are the ones most likely to buy gold from online gold sellers.

While my evidence is anecdotal here, I'm guessing many of us can point to others whom we know do the same.  The reason they give for doing this is that they dont' have enough time to get all the rewards etc, so they just buy them using rmt.

Why I bring this up is that this would seem to be very counter to your point of the people with the most in game time being those who PK the most. 

Further, if anything my experience with hardcore PK people is that they dont' spend hours online sharing in a community but instead log in.. kill/grief for 30 minutes - 1hr and then log off.  They tend to not participate within the communities at large (which takes a large time investment)

Can I play a HUTT?

They won't play it :P

They won't have the people who don't want that to terrorize.

Originally posted by erandur

Aha, and games befor WoW didn't have healers and tanks or even rangers... right? And as soon as a game dares to be different, people bash it. Like Guild Wars, came out after WoW, but often forgotten - of course.

Why stick with MMORPG's btw. Try a MMORTS, or whatever is out there.

as many times as i've tried to play guildwars not once playing it did I ever get the feeling of a MMORPG.  I don't bash it, but I just don't find it to be a MMORPG.

The heart of the Star Wars movies and story is Redemption.  If your not given the opportunity of redemption in your gameplay then I think your losing a very important aspect of the SW mythos.

However I also don't think this should be something anyone can do lightly either.  There should be some rather heavy penalties for swapping sides.

And  lets hear it for the criminal/smuggler types.  That's always a major faction within the SW especially the expanded universe, so to discount those would be foolish.

Mandalorians anyone?  who wants to be a Mando?  There are tons of reasons for not wanting to play the Jedi/Sith aspect.

What about Grey Jedi, Kotor 1 had Jolee Bindo. 

So no, at character creation no matter how much I think you should pick a side and stay with it, Star Wars DEFINITELY is not a game where you stay on one side.

Originally posted by Draenor

KOTOR MMO is a deffinite no

 

bah.. no one gets my jokes

hehe yes but most games make sheilds as soemthign that aren't very effective.  Can this hypothetical game be different sure.

But you definitely see where I'm coming from.   Personally I don't mind getting 1-3 shotted, provided I can do the samething and use cover etc etc.  I like playing FPS games and fail to see why no one seems to be making a MMORPG with FPS combat mechanics (heck FPS's are becoming RPG like in the levels/gear etc.. just look at COD4)

Ya know the thing about SWG was that people actually thought of themselves as their character.  So they didn't run around acting like asshats.(those that did very quickly became alienated to the entire server)  Everygame I've seen since then has had so many multiple alts that you its easy to be an asshat and then login as someone else and not suffer the consequences of being a jerk.

This is why I'm in favor of all characters on a server sharing the same last name :D (or something like that)

LOL I hear ya.. I hear ya.

fortunately I play to play with my friends, not the game itself.  That being said, WOW has definitely defined the genre to the public (not those of us here) and here's to hoping something new and clever comes out..

heck here's to hoping that a game comes out and puts a gui on some of the most advanced muds.

The problem with global chat is that players abuse it to discuss crap.  But more importantly it becomes an area where "old timers" abuse newcomers.  Thereby alienating newcomers to a game.  This is a problem in any game where the population reaches a size whereby it is possible to become anonymous.  Or reroll enough characters to have anonymous "alts".

As most of us know, MMO's are about communities, and WOW has in many ways become to large for its own good, the vast majority of players know nothing about MMO's other than WOW and don't understand why MMO veterans become disgusted with WOW on a regular basis.  The don't understand the lack of community building experiences in WOW and how its either raid (can't even say pvp since arenas arrived) or chat.  And the chat experience in any of the populated areas is essentially spammed by people with big mouths and no thought, or hoping to piss off as many as they can.

A mentoring system of sorts is a good idea but its also a bad idea, if you get rewards for mentoring a lowbie it's just another system whereby people will abuse it, (aka roll with someone they know and not help out newbies over and over so they can maxx whatever reward is available)