The truth is that no one who can tell knows.

A lot of the stuff we have been told about the game has been creative ideas from the funcom devs side. But what in the end really gets into the game no one really knows.

For example stealth were originally thought as hiding and using the enviroment to make your toon not be rendered by an enemy but now it looks like its just Daoc, Eq2, Lotro, WoW stealth from the capture the flag vids. But then again there might be factors you cant see from those vids so who knows?

Its the same with mob AI, spellweaving, crafting and so on. No one really knows what makes it into the game from the creative ideas.

It looks believeable. Its not ding dong flashy soap smelling cartoons like you see in games like Lineage 2. It looks like REAL heroes.

Hyboria is a gritty word with dirt blood and vomit. With naked dancing girls running in fear from ravagers and dark sorcerors with blasted minds dabling with inhuman alien powers that is beyond evil.

They have at least done the looks right.

AoC is not very fast. If anything it looks a little bit slower than Daoc. Yes it has FPS style targeting but it also have realistic combat speeds and it penalize people who run around during melee. So I dont think it will favor twitchers and circle runners.

To me WaR looked very much like DaoC people just seemed to last longer (but that might be because people assist like crazy all the time in DaoC).

Movement and combat . . .  well if you have ever trained swordplay you know of the concept force projection. Running in circles will prevent you from being able to project force. You move to evade and set up for counter strokes but you cannot move in the same instance you strike unless its a feint. Knowing this you always die a little inside when you see circle strafers.

FPSers seems to be unable to understand the skill involved in playing a MMO because they equal skill in the game with physical ability where MMO skill is a question of brains. If you mindlessly begin to attack the wrong target you kill your own side. If you forget to see what the person next to you do you lose the fight for your side. If you dont know exactly what an ability do for you and your enemy you lose the fight. Its a brain game that takes a LOT of skill if the game is good.

Good pvp games does not reward buttom smashing. They reward the intelligent player and punish stupidity with instant death. In daoc you saw skilled players even on noob toons kill 3 to 4 times their numbers in battles because they knew what they were doing and the enemy did not.

Yes wow is very much a blend of the east and west in game styles.

IMO the worst thing you see in mmo pvp is circle strafing. It has nothing to do with real swordplay and is an artificial construction created by bad programming.

One of the great things about daoc pvp were that circle strafing gained you NOTHING if your enemy werent stupid. They also programmed melee and ranged in such a way that melee were actually useful in pvp (action - delay instead of delay - action that you had for ranged attacks).

MMOs have a different kind of skill than FPS games when it comes to pvp. Its knowing your role, and when to do one thing or another. DaoC were extremely unforgiving against stupid players and rewarded good players. WoW just reward the fast player rather than the skilled one.

BTW AoC have FPS targeting in combat but they know about circle strafters. Thats why you do almost no damage , take more damage, spend much more endurance and suffer additional bad effects if you move while fighting there. Thats good game design. :)

I dont think funcom has the money to delay it again.

The last delay cost them a lot of money not only in added development time but also in their stock value.

Many asian morgs do a lot of damage to peoples sense of what combat should be like atm.

When you look at your typical Korean morg the action is so fast paced and flashy that they only have a few frames in each animation. And it looks nothing like what you could in any way realistically expect a sword swing (just to take an example) would look like.

But when people get used to all that flash bang suggar animation then when western games try to look more gritty and even realistic the people who play the eastern games find them bland and boring.

I aplaud games like WaR and AoC for not jumping on the Asian mega fast flash bang sensory overload bandwagon.

Realm pride only works if it leads to something.

In DaoC everyone in a realm benefitted if the war went well for their side. Everyone felt it when you lost a relic so it not only was a realm thing it was also a personal thing.

What created the realm feeling what that only by standing next to your realm mate could you win and keep the advantages of winning. you had people who spend hours as forward scouts alone without a real chance of getting individual kills, but who were essential for the information they gave to army leaders. You saw people suicide out of raids when the call for defense of your realm was heard. And you saw the biggest guilds invite everyone who could take orders into their pvp raids and direct them as individual forces towards targets as a part of a major battle strategy.

Those were the days.

What killed the realm pride in DaoC was when realm abilities which were individual benefits you gained from your personal success in PvP became more important that the overall realm bonus.

Then you saw the elites gather into smaller and smaller groups while the majority were left as fodder.

So if war is to recreate the sense of realm and nation that DaoC had in the beginning then they have to make the RvR bonuses general so they benefit everyone and then make it plainly clear that only through a combined war effort can you gain those benefits.

WoWs success were based on the fact that most people do not like their games to be hard work.

Before WoW MMO's were mostly a niche for people who liked to dedicate a lot of their life to the game and feel gratified for the the rewards they got from that huge effort.

But most people in this world do not like to do great efforts to have fun. They want it served to them so they can relax after work. If its interactive then even better for many too.

Its often a similar thing you see at work. The greatest obstacle to develop a company is often that the employee dont want to move out of their cosy habbits. They will much rather stay and do the same safe things that have become a routine instead of taking up new challenges. The wast majority of humans prefer a safe, relaxed and cosy enviroment from challenges. Even though the challenges can give you great rewards.

WoWs developers simply understood this basic human principle and yet they also understood that for this to work in the long run they also had to put in some hard to get carrots so the few that really liked to strive for greater things could go for it and become special. Same as VIPs in the real world with the same social functions.

WAR is not really a challenger to the position WoW has. It targets a different and specific audience (like most serious new MMOs do). They are targeting the Warhammer fans and they are targeting those who like RvR (which is different from PvP). And they are building the entire game world around the WaR between sides.

This means that WaR will have its special audience, just like pirates of the burning sea will have its special audience and they will often not be the same people that is the wast majority of WoWs players. The biggest mistake of AoC is that FunCom is trying to make the game too mainstream fantasy MMO (despite the gore and tits) so they will have to compete with Blizard for the customers which is a one sided battle. EA Mythic is smarter.

Both CoH and EQ2 started out as pure PvE.

But pvp is the only way atm that devs can create endgame that can keep up with the demans of players and keep them in the games. So dont expect many new titles to be pure PvE.

I have noticed that most of those who dont like cross sex characters in the games are the gamers that want to involve themselves emotionally with other players. Im am usually much more worried about people who like to hit on an online toon than those who play cross gender toons.

As to why so many men play cross gender compared to women then I have a theory that is stems from social rules in our modern world where its not allowed for men to explore their feminime sides in the real world while women can freely explore their male sides. But in MMOs those restrictions does not exist. So its an outlet for many men that does not exist for them in their daily life while most women dont have that pressure.

This does not mean those men are homosexual or want their toons to have relations with other men, it just mean that its an outlet for a repressed side of their personality. Thats why you see the word "comfortable" often in the explanations.

Originally posted by Enforcer71

Interesting read and a positive one towards the combat which was good to hear. The only thing I hate is the capture the flag type BG always hated those, they never interest me.

Well Capture the flag and drunken brawling are only mini games. The real PvP is something between DaoC and Shadowbane.

You have the borderlands where guilds can compete for control of the area, building battlekeeps (small cities) or towers over resources and then try to hold them against competing guilds.

It will be a constant cut throath battle for power.

For people not in the big guilds that fight these wars there is the option to hire yourself out as a mercenary for one side or the other.

The capture the flag game is just a place to quickly try out 1 group vs 1 group combat and I predict that people will quickly tire of it except when known group challenge each other.

You can change some aspects of your appearance in game. Like Haircuts, beards, scars and tatoos.

I dont quite agree with some of the info in the article. The only class in the game with better morale than the captain is the guardian. The captain is also the 2nd best tank in the game. And its more a lack of AE taunt rather than soaking damage that make the captain weaker.

The ability to constantly heal during combat, combined with massive buffing ability also makes the captain one of the best soloers in the game at high lvl. The captain has no problems killing even lvl elite mobs.

As to damage, the class is right in the middle of the scale. The champ and hunter do more damage. The minstrel and guard do less and the burglar and LM do about the same damage. If they captain equip a shield and 1h weapon their damage drop to guard/minstrel scale but since they can only equip small shields then the increased  defense does not equal the lost damage so its overall a bad option for the captain to do so.

The standards are AE buffs, but in addition they add a significant buff on the captain. For example my lvl 50 standard of war add +50 might and +50 agi on the whole group but it also add +20% on all damage and +10% morale on the captain. The extra damage and morale usually give a bonus that far exceed what the pet can do. The standard of victory add +366 power to the whole group and +1 in combat power regen but it also add +10% damage, +10% power and +10% morale on the captain.

There is also another buff, the captain can add +5% morale  to his group in addition  to the buffs described in the OPs article.

So for example if a hunter is grouped with a captain he can get +50 might, +50 agility, +3.5% crit chance., +5% morale plus the bonuses he can get from becomming the captains shield brother which is 25% dps boost (on a timer), and much more healing.

All in all the captain is a very powerful class, but not very flashy. My captain can survive things and defeat enemies that my hunter can only dream about, like soloing deep down into goblin town without worry or killing multiple lower lvl elite mobs.

Originally posted by bluealien1

 

I'm going to start off by saying that this isn't WoW/WoW2..I mean WAR, and if it were I would be far away. I would much rather have no UI preview things then have incorrect ones that were uninformative.

 

If you want AoC information, you do need to look around a bit. I expect there is good reason behind this, I'm guessing that they purposely place information among different websites because then they can grab a wider audience into looking into playing this game.

Confidence in this product. It's obvious to me that FC in confident in AoC for the time being. If they were not confident, they wouldn't be holding a huge contest to have one lucky/talented/dedicated fan to Oslo to be in AoC paradise for sometime. If FC wasn't confident in AoC they wouldn't have invited all of the big name gaming websites to play the game in San Fransisco, and the media didn't seem to have anything bad to say about the game, besides the usual beta stuff. They are confident in AoC, I am confident in AoC, there's alot of information out on this game, and next month we have been told that a "flood of information," will be released.

Well the problem with the way they present the information is that its not up to date with how you present information today. They mostly give out information in text form in non-interactive messages that is very similar to old fashioned press releases. Problem is today people get information in a different way. They use interactive interfaces because they give you access you the information you get curious about all the time every time you get a new information so you go around in circles building up knowledge based on your curiosity. Just look at wikipedia and its success.

AoC probably has more information out than its competitors had at this stage but its not accessible in a modern way. It simply look unprofessional.

Add in details like the newsletters never reached a huge minority of those subscribed to them (47% of the subscribers never recived the 2nd last newletter) and those newsletters often contain information you already knew if you followed net news. So again you lose confidence.

The confidence I am talking about is not FCs confidence in the product, its the confidence potential but casual customers have in the product. And in this business customer confidence and exitement means far more than adds, visiting conventions and the actually quality of a product in development. A good product can die quickly if no one is exited about it before release.

Isnt the problem primarily how the information is delivered rather than what information is out?

If you looked at wow at this stage before launch you had graphical interfaces with each class and race with pictures of members of the class and race, graphical interactive windows with examples of how they worked and what abilities they had access too. Lots of it werent correct but it still gave you a sense of what the classes were about and instilled a lot of confidence in the product.

Same in WAR atm. You have the podcast which not only are entertaining but also extremely informative combined with half finished graphical windows again on their main page giving out informations (not very much admitted) in a modern form that again give you confidence in the product.

AoC has text messages randomly placed allover and no direct link or inteactive links that say anything. It does not in any way instil confidence in the product. The AWESOME trailer you put out last week made me and many others drool for more but after the initial euphoria the questions arise: Why does a game that look this good and completed have such a poor homepage?

There is a reason why you see many more men playing women than women playing men.

The reason is bound in how society accepts deviance in gender based behavior.

Generally its much more accepted for women to copy male behavior than it is for men to copy female behavior. Every person male or female is not 100% of either gender in our psychology, we all got male and female sides. But in the real world where women can act out and use some of their male personal traits every day in real life, men cannot in any way act out any of their female traits without serious social reactions.

MMORPGs has become an outlet where men can act out those side of their personalities that women can act out in the real world and that is the major reason why you see so many men play female characters.

All the other stuff with looking at a nice body, getting gifts and so on is just a natural followup on the need to act out part of your personality that you as a man has to suppress 100% in your daily life if you want a normal social enviroment.

And it has nothing to do with homosexuality, its just a way for men to enjoy what most women in the modern world already have acess to.

This is not a talk  about raiders vs. casuals but a question I have asked myself.

Before I start I will say that I am neither a raider or a casual but what you can call a hardcore jack of all trades. Soloing, grouping, PvPing, raiding all stuff I do depending on  my mood.

In Lotro you do not need to go on raids to get the best stuff in the game. In fact allmost all the set drops of uber bosses can also be dropped from extremely rare drops of any mobs over a certain lvl. Also crafted gear rivals set gear.

As a result you see almost no one raiding in the game, otoh when you do raid everyone alsways talk about how fun it was.

So my question is: Does the frequency of raiders in Lotro truly represent the percentage of people who really likes raids (since raiders are more positive there)?

I really dont know and was wondering? And if its true what can developers do to make raiding more popular so more people do them for fun?