Game has real stealth, not the silly invisibility stealth you see in most MMOs but real stealth.

The radar is the key, you _can_ see enemies on the radar if your perception beats their athletics skill (which is also the stealth skill in the game). If your perception is not good enough then you wont see another player on the radar until he actually attacks someone.

The enviroment is also made in such a way that its actually possible to really sneak around in the game. So the result is if you want to be a stealther you need the skill to beat your enemy's perception and then you really have to sneak up to them using the enviroment to hide from their sight.

The result is that yes its quite possible to be a sneaker, you just have to sneak for real. People tend to look at their radar for combat information when its there and that will make you non visible if they don't spot your toon directly.

FE is the first mmo I have seen where stealth and sneak attacks actually works and makes sense.

Never make the mistake of thinking that what you think is good equals quality in general.

Ask for as many different games as possible, not that there should or shouldn't be any general trend and then be happy that people have the freedom of choice to play whatever they like.

Maybe the right game is out there for you and you just haven't tried or found it yet.

I love this game. Just hit 45 the current cap and my characters really feels like its mine. Its unique in my guild having a combination of skills no one else in the guild has tried out.

Its a game that takes the best of classic mmo's and combine it with the best the newer generation has invented, you can themepark it as much as you like but you can also play it very much like a sandbox, the choice is yours.

The game is huge, and deep. Its not just a shallow scene in which to do quests after quest. You always have something to do, even at max current lvl you do not stop developing your character and you still have soo much to do.

Did I mention size. I had to go and check some stuff in a couple of towns this morning, jumped on my cargo bike and ended having to drive over 70 km! 

Just be warned, there is no fast travel what so ever in the game, there is no respecs, there is very little guidiance, you are on your own in the wasteland and have to live or die by your own choices.

Icarus are very smart people. They have created the game economy in such a way that there can never be any hyper inflation making gold farmers very unhappy. And when it happens, they track all economic flow and capture people that even do secondary or lower steps to cover money transfers. And they ban gold buyers without mercy.

The game also have the best customer service of any MMO ever! There are GMs online at any time which interact with people in the game. If there is a problem they cannot handle they tell you why and where to go and then the higher ups fix the problem for you. The GMs know and understand the game and the players and are generally great people.

All in all its a gem of a game, there are a problems with the roles of certain skills in PvP and that the general pvp goals at the endgame is designed in a way there is very very boring, but the guys at Icarus knows it and they are very quick to fix stuff.

The FPS system works better in PvP than in PvE. In PvE its very difficult to hit a target that moves sideways from you, not so for players, if you have a player in your sight and shoot, you hit and its as smooth as any 1st person game I have played. Engine is optimized for PvP not PvE.

The game also have found the perfect balance between ranged and melee and that is simply the FPS aspect. Once you have to do FPS targeting most of the unbalanced effects of ranged vs. melee in MMOs disappears. Kiting becomes almost impossible if you can only hit a target you have in your sight in front of you.

More variations in Buggy skins. At the moment the only buggy that have a different skin from the standard is the combat buggy that have two machineguns installed.

Speaking of machineguns I would like that they worked at all. :) I guess its a fix that wont come until S4 with all the heavy weapons implemented there but it does feel silly to have a couple of machineguns that have no sound when they fire and that cannot do any harm what so ever.

Originally posted by Darkholme

Originally posted by Spiritof55 *stuff about no lag fixes*

Two thing stood out to me in these patch notes that will help with the lag...

One if the fix of multiple memory leaks. Most of those will come in the form of engine tweaks, which is the main culprit for the graphical lag people experience.

The other is...

Polished assets for improved look and performance:
  o  Remodeled and textured some residential and public buildings.
  o  Remodeled and textured several indoor and outdoor objects.

To me this says more fixes to help alleviate the graphical lag.

I guess we will see how much these help later today. They have said the work on tweaking and optimizing the engine will be ongoing. It has already improved quite a bit throughout beta.

The texture changes are one of the things I am most happy about. I have noticed that its the vicinity of certain types of buildings that caused a memory leak on my PC and caused the game to crash over time.

For example I had not problems what so ever in Flagstaff, but Embry and Traders flat would over time cause my game to shut down. And those towns share a lot of building types.

There are two problems with the game. One is that Cryptic doesn't seem to know what they really want it to be. The second is the extreme shallowness of the game itself and the minimal content it contains.

It does feel like it was made because Cryptic needed to milk some money out of the work they had already done with their Marvel game that was stopped. 

Game felt like a superhero game initially but the content had not been made for the kind of blowthrough stuff you expect from playing a superhero and there were so little of it that Cryptic felt they had to extend the longivity of the little content they had by making the game less and less heroic. The end product is a game without a soul, vision or any real reason for its existence except for making money for Cryptic.

Originally posted by Malickie : Yes and wait until there's enough people in the pvp area to have 200v200 battles and watch the server melt just like it did in SWG. It's fine and dandy when the players are spread out, it usually was in SWG as well. The second a fight broke out in a busy cantina/ starport or between two large guilds, the server would simply crash. I've noticed a lot of similarities in regards to performance in early SWG and FE. I wouldn't doubt if performance was similar in regards to large scale pvp.

Heh no it won't crash the server, it crashes people's clients. Problem is already there now in PvP, fight for 1 hour in a battle with maybe 30-40 people and your client simply shuts down because of memory leak.

I can only imagine that if you had 200 vs. 200 then everyone would crash every 2-3 min and since a raid leader has to manually invite relogs constantly then it will impossible to maintain a force under those conditions.

Originally posted by Scot

There was something wrong with cultural elitism I take it? Why, because someone stuck up for their culture? Or was it because they did not want the world to become the domain of the lowest common denominator?

They did the classic mistake of saying this is not what I like, therefore it has to be bad. Its the pitfall every generation falls into when something new comes up.

Also there is something fundamentally wrong about trying to decide for other people what they should think and do. The core beauty of the western culture is to allow people to thrive or fall but in the process be free to make the choices they make.

Edit: And oh you don't "fight" for a culture. If your culture is not strong enough to stand up on its own then there is something wrong with it and it need to change or be replaced. All attempts through history of trying to maintain or recreate the glory of the past has always ended up with a sick construction, Germany in the 30's is the classic example of that.

Just like there is McDonalds out there then there are also great restaurants everywhere, just as there are mass market consumer games and more refined games. The McDonald does not force you not to visit the good restaurant does it? Even though most people prefer going there. Same with MMOs, just because there are wings, boobs and huge weapons does not mean that good games aren't being made and are available.

The choice is yours what you want to play and I don't think we should complain about mass marked oriented games, then you begin to sound like the cultural elitist back in the 50s that wanted to ban comics because they lowered the intellectual standards.

The differentiation in types of games give _you_ the freedom of choice, it does not hurt you in any way and be thankful for that.

Originally posted by SnarlingWolf  

Fallen Earth's population could fit on a single shard of most other modern MMOs. They didn't figure out some amazing technical feet that all the AAA developers have been missing, they just have a small enough population to keep it all on one world.

 But yes we get it you like FE and want everyone to play it but that is not what this thread is about at all.

Its not entirely true what you say. One of the reasons why they have managed to have one server is because they made the gameworld so incredible huge. Atm the overall map is 10 thousand square km, they are only using about 2000 square km of the map atm but that is still a very very large game area so they spread out a big game population on a single server but that server is hosted by scores of machines.

They plan to expand the game until they use 60% of the map but even then they have backup plans so if the population becomes too big they can expand into the other 40% to increase the play area for all levels.

Its not because the population is low that they can have 1 server, its because that server creates a playground there is maybe 10 times larger than most competitive games and maybe 50 to a 100 times larger than a game like CO or AoC.

I think one of the biggest mistakes that many dev teams does is that they don't explain WHY they do what they do. Most players are reasonable people and if they feel they are respected and told infomation in an adult, balanced and reasonable way they are inclined to look at the case from a broader perspective and can accept that yes maybe their fireball of doom was a bit over the side.

It comes down to that dev teams need to be utterly open about what their goals is and what their method is to reach that gold. Then most of the bad feelings will be absorbed by reason and open frank discussion. 

But most teams don't do this, they hide behind CS and bring press statements and patch notes and then hope for the best and the result of course is that the changes seems unreasonable and that will decrease the customers trust in the dev team so that when they adjust again people will have very little trust in the team doing the right thing and they will certainly feel angry because they feel treated badly.

What developers should understand is simply that people are ready to accept bad things if they understand why the bad thing was necessary. 

One of the reasons I like FE is their not only good but insanely excellent and effective customer service.

First the have gamemasters active in the general help channel at all times, you can /who to find GMs and contact them personally about issues and they are frank and open about possibilities and often come with advices on what you can do to help.

And if you have a problem they cannot help you with they give you instruction on how to contact the higher ups, what will happen and how long you can expect to wait before there is a reaction, which in my case was a way longer than it actually took to help me with my problem.

I have experienced good and bad customer service in many games, some were really bad like SWG, most were quite ok like in AoC, WaR and Lotro but never ever have I seen anything as good as in FE.

I think every new MMO company should take a look at how Icarus has organized their CS. Its lightyears ahead of any other game I have ever played and it all comes down to communication, communication and communication and it makes the player base forgive problems in the game which in the case of FE from time to time can be quite severe but people don't mind since they are treated like royalty by the GMs.

The PvP fights themselves works very well. Its actually easier to hit a moving player than it is to hit a moving mob for some reason. It feels like the engine has been optimized for PvP and not PvE.

The way you take a town in S2 otoh is a little bleh, you do PvE quests in a the PvP zone in order to flip over a towns faction and the point is to protect your own questers while you kill the enemy questers. Sounds good on paper but in reality its too grindy and there is little point to actually fight for a town since it all takes place in the wilds outside the town. We had a 24 man force taking a town and it took 5 hours of grinding to do so and honestly it was boring at the end.

I hear it gets better in S3. Lets hope so. I want to kill other players for town control, not some plants and NPCs.

It might not be houses, there are rumors about fortified positions and artillery fire in S4. So maybe construction is used by combat engineers.

That being said the one dont exclude the other, we might have it all. :)

What you need is a combination of a strong vision and the skill and wisdom to make it work.

One of the problems with many MMOs made in the past 3 years is that they don't really have a vision, they just follow an established recipe created by WoW and then add some variations on that theme. They don't really contain a core vision about what the game should be about.

I know I repeat myself but to answer your point about themeparks and sandboxes then I like Fallen Earth, that game is neither and both, it depends on how you decide to play it yourself as a player. Game is far from perfect but it does offer a deeper gameplay experience where you still have the old style sense of a huge open gameworld (there is no zoning anywhere what so ever) and yet have managed to take some of the good stuff from themeparks and used it to enhance the world instead of cheapen it like you see in game like AoC and WaR.

Icarus has convinced me that great games will come from the small indy companies. The big established companies are too locked up in marketing projections and conventional thinking for them to be able to deliver a fresh product that actually moves the genre forward. They can certainly polish and refine already existing ideas but they cannot create living worlds to experience anymore.

It just takes a team of people with the skill and will to make a strong idea possible. And that is a big thing because combining these and the money needed is a rare event that we wont see every year.

The reaction to attack nay-sayers is quite logical and makes sense when you look at what MMO's need in order to be entertaining. 

You need other players to interact with in order for a MMO to be fun and playable in the long run, so when you see negative things being said about a game you love you react because that negative comment can hurt _your_ personal game experience (this is utterly different from single player games).

The fanboy problem starts when you don't have a realistic view on the game you love to play and begin to attack reasonable objections. Its gets even worse when the fanboy deep down know its correct and therefore attacks the person who came with the objection instead of just the issue at hand.

But the problem also goes the other way. New games can easily hurt the player experience in other games, and that will bring people from other games to attack the new games in order to prevent a bleeding of players to the new games and these people are just as bad as the fanboys.

Often they don't even realize their own motivation for badmouthing a game, they seriously believe what they are writing, often based on a few days of playing the new game and then wanting to return to the old one and have all their friend come back with them.

But the worse ones of them know quite well what they are doing and are as bad as the worst fanboys out there.

I was about to say that Fallen Earth might be a game you should try out since it really does answer many of the complaints you have about new games, but then again it does not help with the core issue of your post.

There is atm no MMO that can give you the sense of accomplishment that you have in a single player "RPG" (as a PnP RPG'er I never liked to see that word in computer games). And how do you design that kind of progress when it has to include the efforts of thousands of people at the same time?

One answer has been to have large faction based PvP that changes the control of parts of the world, you saw that in DaoC and WaR and now also in Fallen Earth but it still does not really contain story and progress.

Personally I think we should wait and see about Kotor online because bioware has designed it so it contains 8 different progressive story lines. Bioware know their stuff and how to tell a story in a computer game so there is hope for people that love that approach to games. But we don't know how well it will work in a MMO yet and many MMO players of other orientations will hate it because it will probably be very solo and instance oriented.

Its the gameguard that have found something it doesn't like and then shuts down the game without any notice.

1. read the game material on their homepage about how the game system works. Since you design your own character from scratch, understanding what each skill does and how you get it to do it is a good idea.

2. use the N key . . . 

3. Go to http://www.globaltechatlas.info/