Originally posted by actionreaction

 

Actually, Math says face rolling does work in WOW because of horribly designed tier power progress.

 

GG BUDDY>

What? At equal tier & gear, the better skilled player still wins. Face roll is when I can just literally push any button and guarantee a win. Raid content requires movement, ie pay attention aka not facerolling. And PvP content is still skill based aside from certain class perks, but class vs class skill dominates.

Originally posted by actionreactionSo pretty much to break it down

GOOD FOR PLAYER BASE

• NO READING/ LESS READING - Most people I know, live busy lives with families, work and friends, so the more time they can spend "doing" and the less time, sitting in one spot reading the more fun they have.
• NO WANDERING/LESS WANDERING
• NO LEARNING/LESS LEARNING - Easy to learn, hard to master, that is the way many games are today, including wow. Face rolling rarely works, and the best of the best in PVP or PVE take the time to optimize. But thankfully, those less involved still get 90% of the class involved in their play sessions and never feel useless or lost.
• INSTANT GRATIFICATION (KILL-LOOT-REPEAT) - Games are supposed to be fun. Hours of travel is not fun. Killing 1000 skeletons for one drop is not fun. Waiting for 3 hours for a spawn, then having someone tag it and get the credit is not fun. Again it comes down to time available as well.
• LUKE SKYWALKER NOT UNCLE OWEN - Who wouldn't want to be? And for those that do prefer Uncle Owen, there has always been crafter routes and other in game play styles(Like housing in games) to appease those appetites.
• PLAYERS DON'T CREATE (SANDBOX) - PLAYERS PLAY ( THEMEPARK ) - Sandbox is fun to some. Themepark to others. EVE is disliked by more people than play it, does that make it a bad game? No. Because to each their own.

WINNING

Comments in red.

Maybe you have countless hours to sit by a computer screen playing games, but many more do not. Maybe you like to stress and sweat in a game, but others have real life that gives them enough stress, that they want to relax during leisure time. That doesn't make WoW or ToR a bad a game.

Originally posted by TheScavenger

Its funny people complain about it in the US, but let their 9 year old watch peoples heads getting cut off in games and movies.

People in the US complain about everything. Some people are so bored in their lives that instead of finding something fun and exciting to do, they look for what's fun and exciting for others and make it their goal to cause those people to feel as miserable as they do.

And with social media nowadays, you can't even make a simple funny comment in jest without someone calling you a racist or a bigot or whatever else comes to mind.

What happen to the days when people lived their own lives and let others live the way they wanted? (Provided that they weren't mass murderers or the like :P)

Thanks again for reiterating the constant ridiculous criticism that completely misses the point of those opposed to some F2P pricing models.

Not once have I ever seen someone say, "Give me EVERYTHING for free." Instead the issue is when the game costs more per month to play "ENJOYABLY" then the old way of $15 sub. For instance, I bought the PP for $60 bucks, standard price for a game, similar to what I bought TOR for. In TOR I was able to play any class/race combination I wanted and got the first month free. In this game, I ended up with only 4 heroes from the pack, (but they didn't let you customize), my free hero at the start, and then a guaranteed free hero after the raft(which again I did not want). Thus I had to spend additional money to get the 2 other heros that I wanted to play and one was 2k G's($20) and the other 1.2k G's($12). So in the first month I have already spent $92 dollars on a game, that a traditional mmo with sub would have only costed me $60.

In addition, you have to buy your STASH tabs, which is your bank, and yes i said "Have To" because if you want to craft at all, there is not enough room in the single tab you get. Then, if you buy costumes because you want to change your look, which in a standard mmo equates to new gear styles, that's an additional amount, and each one is around $10+. So you could easily spend $200 on this game just to get the heros you want, the costumes you want on them, and the necessities of storage.

So in a traditional mmo, $200 gets you the game at ($60) and 9 months of game time. In this game, 9 months has ZERO guarantee of finding new hero's and more items to fill your stash with. Thus you will be buying new heros(Most LIkely) and more storage space and probably costumes.

Thus, games like this, with their ridiculous price points actually cost more than sub based games.  And unfortunately the only option is to not buy stuff, but then the game isn't as fun if you can't do what you want in it.

So for someone like Bill(the OP) to try and stand up for the outrage that is greed and lack of concern for their player base is very upsetting, but then again, someone in his position in the gaming industry probably gets most things for free so he cares not how much it cost.

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Originally posted by Yamota "I’m very excited about the prospect of key members of the Dark Age of Camelot team designing Elder Scrolls Online Cyrodiil “Alliance vs. Alliance” warfare." The exact same thing was said about Warhammer Online and how did that game's RvR turned out?  

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    Originally posted by Pirhana7    Cyrodiil is basically an open world PVP server on its own.  At level 10 you can go to Cyrodiil and play there.  It is massive, about the same size as each alliances home world.  You an do EVERYTHING in Cyrodiil.  Yes the main focus is seiging and the zerg will be there but there is so many more place to go.  You can go away from the hot spots and do PVE, you can do quests, you can go into dungeons (but watch your back for enemies coming in).  The map is divided up so each alliance has homelands.  This also gives the invading feel that DAOC had and GW2 lacked because of its poor map design.    Cyrodiil is the PVP set up alot of us have been asking for since DAOC.  A place that has the big keep seiges, roaming group fights, map bottleneck locations for stealtehrs to wait and picl people off, and PVE that has the watch your back feel with the risk of PVP happening at all times.

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This exactly and explained so very well. Its boggling why people are so frustrated with it, and I assume its because they only read blog posts and brief articles instead of looking into the full extent of the idea.

Originally posted by Dihoru

Originally posted by Holice
I take it many people have not played WoT recently. Artillery is no longer the be all end all of the game. Sure they can get lucky shots but they have been tweaked, and with the new powerful fast attack tanks, Arty is not a pleasure cruise sitting safely in the back anymore.

Arty are still skilless trollhards who for the most part play for kills not for the win. I've played too many games in a tier 7 or tier 8 where the arty (all of them) focused on me when the tier 10 right next to me was chugging along in full view in the open. And before you ask: the arty was higher than tier 5 so they could splash damage most tier 10s quite reliably.

Won't disagree with you that many arty are self serving, but many tankers are too. Like when an IS-7 or T110 go for the Tier 8 lowe instead of slugging it out with other Tier 10s. Unfortunately the game rewards based on individual performance instead of a flat rate, with minor bonuses for individual performance, and there is no negative for being a solo oriented player in a team game.

Originally posted by hasaosan

6 3 and 2 are the only mmos that should be on this list the rest are epic piles of crap

 

darkfall is 1 of the worst mmos ive ever played

swtor was a collosal fail and if i remember correctly was the shortest lived p2p game ever

gw2 was a fail aswell from what 99% of gw players said

tsw is an outdated game that doesnt deserve to be on any lists

SWTOR still has more P2P members than most every other sub based game out there.

GW2 was a failure for those who spent all there MMO years in GW1, but for the majority of the mmo population GW2 was a success. GW1 was very niche, and GW2 opened it up to many more people.

TSW is not outdated, had a great concept on player builds and a unique storyline for MMO's. It just didn't have enough to do after you maxed the skill wheel, and pvp was severely lacking in the building.

Darkfall....i agree. :P

While I agree with the ranking for almost all the games, you really need to break it down into categories for a best in class or genre rather than best overall, as rating MMO's this way is like saying what the best ice cream flavors are, its personal preference. With that said, my thoughts are:

Rift definitely should have been on there, especially over Darkfall.

WoW still tops the charts with subs so how is it not a best of?

Eve is a good game and very niche but definitely not best of, especially when basing it on CCP released population numbers. They always leave out the fact that EVE players have multiple accounts, and they count them all as unique. EVE grows because people start gathering so much ISK that they can afford new accounts every few months with the PLEX system. Take away PLEX and you'd see a huge decrease in sub numbers. 

SWTOR has made great strides and has a solid player base of subs mixed with free players so I can understand it being on the list.

GW2, WoW, SW:TOR, Neverwinter, TSW, RIFT, EVE would have been my top 7.

With the game still far off, it's very pleasant to see our applications start to roll in at this time. Definitely stop by and get to know us pre-launch, as it always makes the teamwork better and the game more enjoyable when you know your guildies!

Originally posted by doodphace

Originally posted by Holice

For SWTOR, regardless of your assessment on why its been successful, there is no doubt that having a stable 500k subs is successful.

Well it really comes down to a person's opinion of successful. 9 million subs vs 500k is a big contrast. And on top of that, didn't SWTOR have more pre-orders or beta applications than any other MMO ever?

I guess you can make the analogy of if a single guy makes a new phone and sells 10k of them he feels its a success, but if Apple were to only sell 10k new iphones, it would be a catastrophic failure to them. In the above case, EA/Bioware is "apple" and not a small startup.

The biggest issue with cause and effect quests is that if no one causes the issue, the effect never happens. What that boils down to is, do the developers take the time to create quests and events that have a chance at happening so rarely it was a bad investment in time?

In the ideal world, with unlimited devs and time, any quest is a good quest. But in reality, they need to focus on the most important aspects at all times, which changes over the life of a game. So if it turns out that the rewards are not worth it, no one will farm the farm.  And thus the other side will never get the quest npc begging for help. If the rewards are too good, then people may abuse it and just allow back and forth swaps to maximize games, similar to keep flipping in other games. 

Originally posted by doodphace
"only successful sub"? EVE and SWTOR would like to have a word with you...

EVE doesn't fit this discussion well, because all the old players who know the ins and outs of the games now play for free because of the PLEX system. There are literally thousands of players who support 10-20 accounts based on market manipulation and other isk producing game features. EVE maybe has 500k subscribers which means if there are 20,000 players with 10 accounts, they account for 40% of the population. Whereas WoW has at least 8mil unique subscribers, as there really is no point in multiple accounts for the vast majority of the player base.

SWTOR has a free to play model, and it saved the game because without it, the game would be a lot less populated and more subscribers would have left from lack of players. Whether it equates to ghost towns, bad economy or long que waits. The F2P they introduced is not the best out there, but it certainly was all they needed to maintain a game that was plummeting quickly while they scrambled to fix and improve.

Wow, as someone says has something for everyone. It is fairly easy on computers as far as resources. It's friendly to children and adults, and it came out during a time when other games were more focused on the challenges instead of accessibility to more people. WoW streamlined MMO's and the majority of the people in this world want their game times to be fun and relaxing, not a second job.

I highly doubt that battlefield or CoD will suffer much if suddenly instead of being able to use an MP5 and SCAR, they provide the same weapons and instead call them SG5 and RACS.  Even if they have to do slight look modifications, most will not care much so long as the game retains its violence and explosions.

For those that truly believe the older games were king to the ez mode games of today, do you not realize that many of those games are still around? DaoC, EQ,  EQ2 and I'm sure some others still have servers running. Many other older games have private servers you can find if you look hard enough. Why are you not still playing those games?

If those games were so superior to the games of today, why did so many people leave them? Because it got boring doing the same things for 10 years is an answer I hear alot. WoW survives in its high popularity because it provides a good mix of instant gratification and hard content. Aside from the best of the best, most people never see 25 man heroic raids, but everyone gets a chance to grind reputation for good rewards.

It just doesn't make sense for any developer to try and produce a new game based on the much older way of mmo thinking when those games have declined in popularity compared to games like WoW and even TOR, with its 1.4 million free players and half million subs.

Games that do come out that try to be really hardcore or niche rarely succeed as well, so its even more of a deterrent for developers.

The bottom line is that the old way of thinking is the "old way" because it doesn't work anymore. Whether its because the old-timers don't put the time into the games that they use to, or simply remember the old days as far better than they actually were is debatable, but all we can is hope that the future brings more in depth games that can appeal to every facet of mmo gaming.

Originally posted by Iselin

Originally posted by winter

 

 Meh some people have Jobs and families these days. not everyone is a able to put life on hold for 12-16 hour just to do a dungeon raid. Not everyone wants to ruin their lives or the health like old school EQ used to do being a second job requiring 8-12 hours a day several days a week.

   Sure I guess its fine if you don't have a job, and don't have any family or loved ones (girlfriend etc)  However I think for most of us we grew up or simply got smarter about how much we could play before it started messing with out RL. Not a popular opinion in the old school crowd i know

 ^^^ This. It was the invention of jobs and families that killed MMOs.

You do not have to be disrepectful to their opinion.

And in a sense, Winter is spot on. In the early days of MMO's EQ and previous(even as far back as the days of MUDs), most gamers had a stereotype that was spot on. Anti-social(when not as their computer of course) nerds. Whether or not everyone agrees that the previous stereotype is true, the stereotype was there. But nowadays, MMO's touch all walks of life(ranging from sex to country). People that don't even know much about gaming know what WoW is, but if you asked them what UO was, most would have no idea.

And why is that? Because WoW mainstreamed MMO's. No longer did you need days of waiting in line to get your time at fighting an epic boss to give you 1 of 15 pieces you need to make your epic weapon. No longer did guilds need to have 200 people in it to make sure you saw all the content(more so true after 15/20 man raids evolved). The old school games catered to hardcore and lots of time. Think of all the stories of how EQ ruined someone's marriage or life due to the obsession. Can't recall hearing DCUO doing that.

So while the small majority of people may miss the old days, the business model leads the bigger companies to mainstream mmo's. But there are still plenty of small companies who are trying to keep hardcore mentalities alive, like EVE and the upcoming Camelot Unchained, but don't expect any of them to ever have millions of "real" players.