All Posts by rejad

Originally posted by Obraik

Originally posted by smg77

It's currently the only way to get an instant travel vehicle so it's just the fanboys buying them. From my last vet trial there are *not* a lot of brand new players playing the game. Those that do use the free trial and give up after a few days because the game is so bad.

But there's only a handful of people per server!  There couldn't possibly be that many people buying the game!

Originally posted by Obraik

Originally posted by rejad

 

Originally posted by Obraik

 

Originally posted by rejad

Enjoy what you have, because that's all you'll have.  They're done making any improvements, its all just more collections and instances from here on out.  There's so much more they could do to make it so much better but they've settled for just being a bleh version of every other game out there.

Selective views?  They recently emplyed around an additional 5 new Devs, an Asisstant Producer and an additional Community Rep over the last few months.  They've split the update cycles into two paths - one that's all about content (called Chapters) and the others are all about tweaking and bug fixes (Game Updates).

 

With Chapter 10 being all about Droid Commander (a rather major system revamp), I'd hardly say development has halted.

All you did was confirm what I just said and made up something I didn't say.  I did not say developement has stopped, I said it wasn't focused on improving the gameplay anymore.  Bug fixes will improve the game, but I'm talking about actual game play changes the players have been and continue to ask for.  And the chapters?  More instances, more collections, more boring-ass grind?  You call that an improvement?  And Droid Commander?  Big whoop.  Remove classes and give us general expertise.  That might convince me to resub.

 

 

And I know they hired a new Com Rep, they had too after that last doofus got himself fired.

Define "game play changes".  The profession updates being made are based on feedback from the forums.  The animation update in Game Update 1 was based on player feedback.  The UI changes in the same update was also based on player feedback.  Unless of course you mean the focus isn't on improving game play unless it caters to what you think needs to be changed ;)

As for issues I have specifically asked for, they are the same things that are brought up by others even now in the forums.  Removing classes and generalizing Expertise, improving group XP, banking XP for respects, optional decay (Smuggler slicing was a WONDERFUL idea for this), crafted items comporable to looted, GCW with meaning (perhaps a planetary control meta-game).

These are things that I call for to improve the overall experience.  It doesn't have to be these things, it can be anything.  Just do SOMETHING other than more grind.  Another Heroic Encounter is fun for like an afternoon.  The things I and others ask for are things that can reasonably be done but are ignored because they do not fall with the "rip-off WoW" parameters.

UI improvements and more animations being returned?  Yeah that's swell.  Why did it take two years of asking for it?  Otherwise, they're just offering more grind, more wasted time, more bleh.  Other than glowsticks and scifi, why play this game when there are literally dozens upon dozens just like it?

Give us choice.  Give us community.

Originally posted by zaxxon23

 

Originally posted by rejad

 And when money doesn't flow it gets horded so you have a few players with ridiculous amounts of it and then throw it around on occasion causing the prices of everything to go up, far beyond what a player can reasonably earn without RMT'ing or selling something for an inflated price to someone else who did.  See EQ1's economy if you want more proof of that.

 

Your argument lacks logic.  If it does you haven't really shown me anything to support that, other than what hold for opinion.  What I have stated is what I have observed in at least three different games.  People don't ask for incredible prices on mediocre crap.  People ask for very high (in your words...inflated) prices for the best of the best, and it should be of no surprise whatsoever that such prices are charged.  Agreed, however this effect DOES affect mediocre items and prices go up across the board although not nearly as much.  In games with a signifigant lowbie population its more pronounced but where the servers are old and the marjority of players are end-game, most of the time you cannot even find non-uber items for sale because they're not worth the time to farm and sell them on those servers. These top end items are meant for the best of the best, and if you don't have the money to afford them it means that you have simply failed to reach the top of the game.  It is not your right to own the uber sword of pwnage.  It is your option to put in the investment required to attain such an item.  If you're a good player, then you will either find the item or an equivalent item or two to trade for the item you want.  If you think you need RMT to do this, then you fail as a player.

In the end, that uber sword of pwnage is going to go to one of two people.  The super no-lifer who excels at the game, or the RMT'er.  Since you're not an RMT'er, then it doesn't really matter, because you will never get such an item.  With or without RMT, you are still stuck.  Don't blame RMT for your obvious inability to become a top player in whatever game you're playing.  This doesn't make you a lazy or incompetant person.  It just makes you a normal player.  Frankly, your complaint about somebody RMT'ing for an item you realistically have zero chance of obtaining is purely an exercise in futility and jealousy.  Of course, jealousy is the primary reason for most people's dislike of the RMT market.  To be honest, I've never cared about someone's jealousy, and frankly I never will.

I've NEVER ONCE felt that I needed to purchase RMT'ed coin to play and compete in a game, even in games where RMT run rampant.  Nor have I, except on a Station Exchange server.  Guess what, you don't need RMT either.  In nearly every single MMO, if you want an uber item, you must find it or find another uber item in trade.  RMT does not affect the tradability of items in any way shape or form because if prices are "inflated", then you'll get a lot more for that uber item that you don't need, thus enabling you to purchase the uber item you want.  RMT has NOTHING, do you hear me, NOTHING!!! to do with your ability to find great items and trade those items for what you want.  I think you missed the part where I said "selling something for an inflated price to someone else who did."  Items in direct trade with no game currency ends up being a default method of exchange in games that get destroyed by RMT, I agree.  If you don't have the ability to trade for what you want, then you have failed as a player.  Pure and simple.

The rest of what you talked about was the standard hard-core elitist argument.  And that's just fine for hard core games with niche audiences.  I'm talking more of the larger casual audience.  Perhaps I was unclear on this.  WoW attracts the casual audience due to its easy learning curve and quick rewards scheme in the early levels, even though this tapers out and few become really hardcore players.  Hence the greater urge to RMT in that game.  I feel that the game that will attract the larger audiences will be the ones that steer away from the concepts of time and money sinks.  Games that focus on gameplay, content, and community.  The whole attraction of leveling and looting has been a small audience in the game world even before computer games.  More people played Monopoly than ever played Dungeons and Dragons. 

But I'm getting off-topic.  The main gist of what I am saying is in games that have time sinks in them, there will always be players who will try to go around them.  You can applaud them, you can denounce them, in the end if you play you have to figure out how to put up with them.  The best way to avoid this is to avoid having time sinks altogether.  Or at least as much as possible.

Originally posted by Pappy13

Originally posted by rejad

Then we disagree.  I argue that money sinks in the end only encourage RMT; rewarding players who break the EULA and punishing those who play the game as intended.  There is no work around for this, money sinks have failed to fufill their purpose.

The purpose is balance.  Some people won't resort to RMT no matter how bad the money sinks are and some will resort to RMT even if you pull all the money sinks out.  Without money sinks, RMT would still exist and the economy would be destroyed.  Yes, the larger the money sink or the more of them that are added, the more RMT seems like the only possible answer for some, so there has to be a balance.  I think what Blizzard is trying to say is that if most of us stay away from RMT, then the economy will be fine and they won't have to add more money sinks.  I don't think Blizzard enjoys putting in the money sinks, but they can't just pull them out and let the economy be destroyed either.  The purpose is to keep the economy on an even keel.

And of "earning."  I "earned" the right to play and be entitled to the content of the game when I paid for it.  That, too, is like life.  RMT'ers can be "satisfied" about how they earn more real money and can afford to buy what you think is worth your effort.

Yes you earned the right to play, but only under the rules with which the developers setup.  You are not entitled to every bit of content WITHOUT any effort on your part.  As long as they aren't putting in random chance to who can and cannout access the content then you're not harmed in the least.  It's up to the individual to decide whether or not the effort is worth the reward.

 

  I didn't say pull out all the money sinks.  They have their uses, even real economies pull money out of circulation when its required to do so.  I argued that relying on them as the sole means of keeping the economy from going insane doesn't work.  Money sinks are best used for things that should be an option in the game.  For Blizzard to solve the money problem in their game would probably require a rather signifigant, and admitantly unadvised a this point, overhaul.  They are basically left to lawsuits and being SOL.  The second issue, well I suppose you're right about that.  But I would change every instance of the word "effort" with "spare time" because that's really what it is.  This is more of design flaw, in terms of the massive and massively lucretive "casual" audience.

Originally posted by SonofSeth

 

Originally posted by rejad

 

Originally posted by Anofalye

I just want to solo/group in PvE, all the way, from the start, to the end, and miss nothing which would make me a better soloer/grouping (it can be incredibly hard to achieve some, but always, in group/solo, never outside of these 2 gameplays).  No nerfs please, you put the rules you want, your duty is to uphold them.

 

Simple guy has simple needs.  Raiding, no thanks.  PvP, no thanks, Tradeskills, not really.  RvR, definitely not.  Solo, pleaasse.  Grouping,  mooooooree! :)  Forcing me to Raid/PvP/RvR actually prevent me from even playing the game.  Forcing = If my progression path lead me to said activity (aka better rewards).

 

So simply put...everything belongs to PvE-groupers!  At least, on 1 server.  I don't care what happen on other servers, even if they have auto-max level and auto-epic stuff, don't care (how you keep peoples subscribing there isn't my concern either)...I will earns mine and on my server, everyone who has it, earns it by soloing/grouping.

Solo and grouping for PvE only?  Play a single player RPG with multi-player support.  It sounds like to me that Neverwinter NIghts 2, playing on a persistent world server, would really be up your alley.  Or hitting a LAN party and playing Dungeon Siege 2.  I'm not being sarcastic, it just sounds like what you're asking for is achieveable by what I suggested.

 

 

How can you people keep NOT GETING IT!?!?  Singleplayer games are not persistant worlds and the feeling you get from it is far inferior to a true MMO. So no, he does not want to play a SP game, he wants to play an MMO that doesen't force him to do shit he hates!

Did you miss where I said playing on a persistant world server for NWN2?  In case you never heard of them, they are essentially MMO's on a smaller scale run by players who build game worlds using the toolset that came with the game.  The servers usually run 24/7 and can have 50 or more people logged in at once.  Some of the communities are really huge.

Originally posted by Samuraisword

 

Originally posted by rejad

The reason why its so bad in WoW is because anything you do in the game that doesn't involve killing and looting involves spending gold.  Making a guild, expanding your bank slots, getting crafting materials, getting a guild bank, buying mounts, etc.  And we're not talking a small amount of coin, either.  Just playing the game most casual players are not going to amass the amount of coin to do everything they want to do in the game.

Its almost like Blizzard purposefully designed the game to encourage RMT.

Having reasonable money sinks in a  MMOG is a good thing, it helps the economy, and is a realistic representation of the exchange for goods and services.

Life and gaming are about opportunity costs. You can't do everything even if you are rich, because time is limited. You have to choose your priorities. Want to achieve in a MMOG based on merit and immerse yourself in a true virtual world with boundaries limited to that virtual world, then you have to invest time. Want to be uber with limited time investment without the satisfaction of earning it thru effort and you don't care about the quality of the game, then use RMT but stick with games that support it.

Then we disagree.  I argue that money sinks in the end only encourage RMT; rewarding players who break the EULA and punishing those who play the game as intended.  There is no work around for this, money sinks have failed to fufill their purpose.

And of "earning."  I "earned" the right to play and be entitled to the content of the game when I paid for it.  That, too, is like life.  RMT'ers can be "satisfied" about how they earn more real money and can afford to buy what you think is worth your effort.

What helps economies, in virtual worlds as in real worlds, is the flow of money.  Games with item decay and such are good examples.  Star Wars Galaxies with decay a good weapon would cost around 1 million or so credits.  After decay was removed a good weapon can be anywhere from 30-100 million.  And when money doesn't flow it gets horded so you have a few players with ridiculous amounts of it and then throw it around on occasion causing the prices of everything to go up, far beyond what a player can reasonably earn without RMT'ing or selling something for an inflated price to someone else who did.  See EQ1's economy if you want more proof of that.

Originally posted by Obraik

 

Originally posted by rejad

Enjoy what you have, because that's all you'll have.  They're done making any improvements, its all just more collections and instances from here on out.  There's so much more they could do to make it so much better but they've settled for just being a bleh version of every other game out there.

Selective views?  They recently emplyed around an additional 5 new Devs, an Asisstant Producer and an additional Community Rep over the last few months.  They've split the update cycles into two paths - one that's all about content (called Chapters) and the others are all about tweaking and bug fixes (Game Updates).

 

With Chapter 10 being all about Droid Commander (a rather major system revamp), I'd hardly say development has halted.

And I know they hired a new Com Rep, they had too after that last doofus got himself fired.

Originally posted by xPaladin

 

Originally posted by rejad

I think part of the strong sense of betrayal from the SWG is the fact that most of them seem to have been MMO virgins and were not regular gamers when they started playing the game.  To me its really just another game.

However it had and still has a lot of features I like.  I would still be playing it save that instead of continuing to improve the NGE they've settled on their instanced raiding WoW-clone model.  Why pay for a buggy, laggy, second-rate version of a game that costs the same and does it a thousand times better?

I get what you're saying and don't necessarily disagree. Maybe a lot of folks in SWG were new to MMOs, but I knew there were a lot of MMO vets hanging around and it caught them by surprise. Myself, for example. When the NGE rolled out I remember having a pretty grand feeling of "what the fuck" the entire first day I was playing around with it. My initial feeling with the game was that it was crap and there was absolutely no way I could pay for such garbage. I remember being so very let down by how terrible it was.

 

In truth, I took the CU fairly well though it did wreck a lot of crafters. I could see where they wanted to go with that idea and, for the most part, they kept the game's core dynamics intact. I might not have been against the NGE idea if it (a) didn't wipe out most of the community classes and (b) actually worked like Battlefront as they wanted it to. They just managed to completely destroy the game.

Finally, speaking as an intermediate programmer, I couldn't see how something like this would've ever been released. I still don't fully understand it to this day, even after all the rhetoric and apologies. I still wonder what the fuck these people were thinking from the onset.

The CU and constant nerfs never surprised me because I'd played EQ1, lol.  And the NGE, the first day I logged in I thought "someone with an MBA is responsible for this" and just sighed.  I've worked for some terrible companies before and that level of shooting themselves in the foot and then being indignant about it, and not losing their jobs over it, was something I've long been accustomed to.

Agree.  I actually had more fun in EQ1 where quests were mostly worthless.  Grouping to grind places was more fun than these new solo games.  Sure you didn't always find a group but I have far more memories from that game than I do from the WoW account that I've held for nearly twice as long as I had the old EQ1 account.  Solo friendly quest based advancement is like playing a single player game in a room full of people with headphones on.  So anti social.

Originally posted by summitus

I started playing again because of my Station Pass and its a very enjoyable game and does'nt deserve the hate it gets, the sad thing is too many people dont have minds of their own these days so the Hater's have sort of succeeed in putting nice people off playing the game.

People who had minds of their own could look pass the Star Wars fetish and see what a pile of crap the new game is and that the only direction its going is "Generic WoW Rip-Off #x."  And this isn't coming from some preCU fanboy, I played up through last Dec, I gave it a chance and it did improve but it ultimately fell short and became obvious that they had no intention of doing anything that their beloved WoW wasn't doing.

Originally posted by SioBabble

It would be interesting to see what would happen if Blizzard (which seems to me, without directly observing, just a general impression) is something of a gonzo anti-corporate outfit, while SOE is VERY Harvard MBA in outlook.  Which means it's dumber than a box of hammers when confronting the real world.

I think there would be a substantial clash of corporate cultures if the two were brought together.  I'm not sure if Blizzard's "the game has to be fun and working before we publish it" attiude would survive contact with SOE's "the players will never know we're using the revenue from the expansion to actually complete it" philosophy.

All that being said, I think the current dev team could be better spending their time on other things than holsters.

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Originally posted by Gutboy

Yes this "dead" game continues to roll on, we are getting the new heroic encounter the "Domain of Evil" in a couple weeks.

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If you want to run "heroic encounters" there are far more, far better, and FAR less buggy ones in WoW. Heck, even EQ2. Stop kidding yourself. What other improvements have they announced? Nothing. Just another instance and a few more collections. Oh and a few combat animations one of the devs tweaked on his spare time. Just enough to keep that carrot dangling.

The reason why its so bad in WoW is because anything you do in the game that doesn't involve killing and looting involves spending gold.  Making a guild, expanding your bank slots, getting crafting materials, getting a guild bank, buying mounts, etc.  And we're not talking a small amount of coin, either.  Just playing the game most casual players are not going to amass the amount of coin to do everything they want to do in the game.

Its almost like Blizzard purposefully designed the game to encourage RMT.

Zu Online is a great game?  It doesn't feel like its finished.  Nice try, ad sock.

The only one out there I'm playing right now is Mabinogi.  Sure its level based and has a grind but there's no classes and lots of ways to customize your character.  But I haven't got too far into the game (open beta doesn't hit for another week or so) and can't speak for the end game.  So I'm still unsure how much I'll like this game later on.

Enjoy what you have, because that's all you'll have.  They're done making any improvements, its all just more collections and instances from here on out.  There's so much more they could do to make it so much better but they've settled for just being a bleh version of every other game out there.

Originally posted by permanent1

 What i find funny is that every game goes to the class based system when so many prefer the skillbased systems, that tells me one thing that with class based they prefer it because it takes less dev time and saves them money which as we all know is all they care about..but someone needs to take a risk and go with a skill based system then they will see people flock in if done right i would be there i loved the old system.

We don't know if the majority of players prefer it.  We do know a significant number of forum posters do.  And since only like 10% or something of game players ever both to even register to the forums of their game, we cannot say that a consensus on a forum means, well, squat.  Unfortunate.

Originally posted by Obee

 

Originally posted by rejad

 

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Originally posted by Burntvet

 

Just to show how far things have gone, I stood in front of the coronet starport for 107 minutes before I saw another player arrive. In Theed, I stopped after 90 or so minutes and logged off.
Went over to Nauritas later in the day, this time it was 67 or so minutes in coronet and 55 minutes in Theed.
I remember 100+ people in both of those places all the time.
Instead, now we have the NGE.

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People stopped going to Coro and Theed during the CU. Since the buffs of preCU were nerfed people didn't need to see Entertainers or Doctors to go hunting. And since most everyone got JTL during preCU (and everyone in game has it now) Coro was no longer a centralized meeting location since most people could go to any planet they wanted to in a single jump.

 

 

There are three meeting places in the game right now. Mos Eis has lots of new players (not so busy a hub anymore), Restuss because of the PvP zone, and the Villag