Originally posted by holifeet

Community is great but shouldn't game developers be left to make what they want to make, or will all games be just the same eventually?

Rule nr.1 of game design has been and always will be: "Kill your darlings"

One persons vision can almost never ever be a good thing for a great mass of people. That's why dictatorships fail in the end and why wise kings were wise because they listened to their people.

I am not saying that the vision of one man always will fail but if it fails to make something positive for the masses then its a bad thing for a business.

If a developer cannot kill his darlings he should not make massive multiplayer games because his task is to make things that is fun for a LOT of people.

One thing to add to the article; I have been in many different mmo communities in the past 10 years and I have noticed some things that always happens one of two ways.

Communities become more and more constructive over time if they can see that their ideas and opinions are taken seriously and are being acted upon. But if they only get canned responses, sugar coated monthly updates and see that none of the prime concerns of the community is being dealt with then the community becomes less and less constructive and instead turns angry and bitchy.

Board communities also really do reflect the general mood of the players in the game. Yes the vocal ones are always a minority but they are representing the mood of the players in general. I have often moved around and talked with people in games who never post on boards and I have discovered that in ANY game I have played that what is being said on the boards really do represent the mood and attitudes of the player base in that game.

They were sadly utterly unprepared for the reality of running an online game. There were no in-game gamemasters you could contact and no working anti cheating software. So the game became a pigsty of cheaters in no time.

Add in that they made game systems that went against normal gamer behavior and had little understanding of player motivation and the game was doomed.

AoC had such small zones because it originally were meant to be played on the Xbox too. Since the secret world is PC only it does not have to follow the same constraints on zone size.

If they can pull off what they write in that state of the game then we might just begin to have the game we thought signed on to a year ago.

There is a reason why some find driving enjoyable and others find it terrible. It comes down to your PC;

On my desktop I have about 60-70 fps at high setting and I can cut corners, countersteer, evade pedistrians and so on without problems and generally its great fun. My Micro is pure joy to drive on the desktop.

Then if I log on, on my laptop I run 25-30 fps on minimal settings and now on the same car I cannot drive down a street without hitting half the cars and pedistrians and have to completely forget about doing any car chases.

The lower your framerate, the harder vehicles becomes to control. For some reason the key controls become more and more "hysterical" the worse your framerate becomes.

Try a /fps and see your FPS. Less than 30 that driving becomes bad.

I love the driving in APB, it actually take some skill and finesse to speed fast through the crowded streets and avoid disasters.

This game is just about perfect for me as an off-hour popcorn game. :)

I am a sucker for customization and the main reward in the game is increases of customization options.

At the same time I am getting really tired of MMO pvp which is often more a question of who made the right build or use the right class more than personal skill. In APB the better player wins 8 out of 10 times, pure and simple. I don't feel like I am cheating when I win and I can accept that the other player is better than me when I lose.

Its the player, not the mechanics that counts.

So you have instant fun, instant PvP and massive customization. Just perfect for me when I want to PvP.

Then I can go play lotro when I want to pve he he.

Regarding crafted gear, there are two ways to get access to it. Befriend crafters or join a big clan that have a lot of hand-me-downs.

Serious crafters are usually busy with projects so it takes time to fit in smaller orders so its a good idea to keep in contact with several crafters.

To give you an example; I am building a car for a clannie right now, started today and if all goes well it will be ready in 5 days, that is 5 days real world time. The project is in 5 steps though so I could make something simple like a new gun in between steps but it need to be planned.

Patch 1.4 has introduced major changes to the game but it is far from a NGE, the patch is rather similar to the realm ability patch in daoc instead.

Instead of having a chaotic skil /power system that was made with little planning or balance creating some of the worst balance issues ever seen in mmo's they now changed the system into a planned organized system where you can no longer stack 20-30 different effects to create overpowered combinations.

It means that old FOTM builds now are far weaker and non optimized builds are much stronger, making the endgame more accesible for more players.

Everyone also got a free respec, which is a complete respec so they can rebuild everything bought with advancement points.

All in all the patch is not perfect but its a big improvement and you see a lot of people returning these days. 

Originally posted by eyeswideopen

Originally posted by afoaa

Its weird we can see that the population is increasing in the game and has been for the past 6 months. The state of the game said it was increasing. Then all of a sudden patch 1.4 is pushed forward and is barely being tested in the test server and now lay - offs.

For every one person joining, how many are leaving?

 

No idea but the overall populations has been slowly increasing month by month. The game demographics has been very different from A titles which usually explode at the start and then quickly dwindle. Instead it started slow and has over time quietly expanded sort of like how Eve started.

Its weird we can see that the population is increasing in the game and has been for the past 6 months. The state of the game said it was increasing. Then all of a sudden patch 1.4 is pushed forward and is barely being tested in the test server and now lay - offs.

Originally posted by Wardrop

Or players turning into gods with over 30 buffs... its retarded.

Well they adressed that issue in the State of the game too near the end with a new buff stacking system.

Time to test the respawn changes. Last time they said it was only near towns it was everywhere. So lets see if they can do it right this time.

Also time to test decay. As far as I can see there is no random element in it at all in the live game and on the test server before the 4/9 patch. Each and every time a weapon fired a fixed number of rounds it dropped a condition % and that number was much less on the test server than it is on live. For example my shotgun fires 80 rounds per percentage on the live server but only 24 on the test server.

The faction suit I have btw increased its decay rate by an insane amount. It can be used for  a week on live without dropping a percentage, on the live server it takes 6 hits by a mob for it to drop 1%.

Originally posted by Benedikt

i didnt have time to play cca last 2 months, how they are breaking the craft system?

Well they are introducing the item decay and overcharging system. The idea was to have items slowly permanently decay over time but in return you could make superior gear. Sounded great on paper.

The reality is quite different on the test server:

First of all overcharge. If you sacrifice 3 similar items into your main item it gains a +10% damage or +10% damage resistance bonus. This has the effect that it increases the imbalances there already are in the game between rifles/2h weapons and dual wielding. Because of their much lower initial dps they also gain a much lower bonus from overcharging than dual wielders get increasing the imbalance that is already making the game completely one sided.

Second decay. All items have 20 fatigue levels which can be increase to 30 through overcharging. Each time you repair an item it lose a fatigue level. You can restore the item 4 fatigue levels by sacrificing another item into it. Problem is that they at the same time increased decay rates dramatically instead of slowing them down as Lee has said they would in the interview where he presented the system. Overall the net result is that you need to replace all your gear about once every week of playing.

Third they made all materials in the game much more scarce. You only get a 3rd of the materials you used to while scavenging.

So the result is that crafters will be hard pressed even to keep their personal gear in a good state. They will not have time to make gear for other players. There will no longer be trade of materials on the AH. Crafters will get frustrated and angry when competing for the rare scavenge nodes which they need to get many times more the materials from than they used to and non crafters will see their gear degrade.

The system will also mean that it will be much much harder for new players to enter pvp and it will increase the divide between non elite and elite players. The elite player who all do not use rifles anyway will see no difference between each other since the overcharged armors cancel out the overcharged weapons. They will only see that the time they need to spend before they can be in pvp will increase dramatically.

This is btw the changed system they put in after the initial shocked reactions from the player base but they are not willing to face that the entire system is badly made and an overall mistake.

Originally posted by Trueth

Arena additions are usually pretty lame. One real question though -- Does the driving in this game still feel like the vehicle is gliding on the road like some 1999 hovercraft drving game?

No they fixed that some time ago. But they just broke it in today's patch for motorcycles again. :D

And they stealth nerfed item degradation too. Well no surprise they stealth nerfed that because in the poll they closed 80% of the players hated the changes to crafting.

Edit: more testing seems to indicate the it wasn't all items but only some that got the PTS degrade rates. So its probably a bug.

This article is full of damage control info. Right now the mood is in free fall in the game and its not because Lee left.

They have been ignoring the concerns of the core player base for half a year now and keep on adding stuff instead that is not wanted or needed.

They are now in the middle of breaking their own crafting system which is the main attraction of this game.

The players are angry and get ignored, they are now beginning to ban people on the boards and move threads away from mainboards if they are negative.

And now they come here and say "listen to players" again and again which is exactly what they have failed to do.

To say that a MMO don't need an endgame because its sandbox is silly. All mmo characters need a stage where the focus of their existence is not progression but non progresssion activies and that is the "endgame".

If this part of a characters life is not meaningful and contain some kind of purpose then the endgame becomes boring and shallow.

So what developers need to do in MMOs is to sit down and say: "What is the purpose of having a character in this gameworld apart from developing the character?"

In FE the purpose were supposed to be to fight for your faction which then would give purpose to crafting since you needed stuff for the conflict. The sad thing is that Icarus being such roleplaying oriented as they are forgot about GAMER motivations and therefore the purpose of the "endgame" didn't work since the entire conflict is irrelevant, the entire conflict town system is boring and pointless and the RP part of the game system constantly punish you permanently if you engage in PvP.

That is why the endgame has devolved into petty squabbles between small pvp clans, because that is the only thing that have any purpose or meaning at the current cap.

Now the game can easily be given purpose at the cap, they just need to change the pvp reward system and implement faction wide bonuses for success in conflict towns and then all of a sudden things begin to mean something again. They should also change how the conflict town mechanics works so its based on player vs. player events instead of the current very boring pve grinding.

Once the cap is given a purpose again then the rest of the wonderful gameworld also becomes deeper because you then know that all actions you do during lvling also will in the end have a purpose and meaning and that will give even more dept to an already strong world.

Its faction vs. faction control of towns, but the problem is that it doesn't really work since the towns don't really mean anything and you take control of them through doing mindless repeatable quests hundreds and hundreds of times in a pvp zone instead of fighting enemy players.

So its a boring grind and in the end don't reward you so people don't bother and instead there is just random pvp between players that love to fight for the sake of fighting.

PvE wise you will discover that there is always something to do if you are a crafter. If you are not then you might end up bored as a pve'er.

Looks very interesting. Its about time we see more games that get rid of classes and levels. I'm still reserved about this title since its funcom but it does look promising.