All Posts by rejad

Originally posted by ummax

I think you would find that combat characters would become godly in some cases.   If I were to use this system I would go for a ranged proff and slapp all the points into the proff until every single skill was ungodly and then one shot everyone.     I think it would be hell to balance and I think that the system would basically create characters with maxed out expertise trees and that content would have to be made harder and that there would be moer incoming nerfs to attempt to deal with this maxing out expertise trees leaving the mix and match crowd totally innept and then forcing them to do what the other guys were doing and max out an expertise tree.      I think they have a decent system which makes balanced characters now and I dont think changing it all from the ground up YET again is something that is wise or needed.    If it happened again I think I would throw my computer out the window. ....

I quit the last time for years due to frustrations being unable to use the targetting system.    If they changed the template/ build system/combat system  again I think i might go nuts so I beg you no thanks lol.   I want to play the game not continuously adapting to yet another combat system.    I also see this having more balance issues then the previous system.   

Yes because the current kick in the teeth you're getting right now is so much better than the torch the groin you had earlier and don't want to risk going back again even if it means the experience could actually become enjoyable.  The game is already screwed beyond belief, anything they do to it is an improvement.

It costs nothing to complain.  Which is great because I'm really cheap.

Now I won't shut up simply because I know it bothers someone. 

In other words, using the existing Expertise to mimic the old skill box system.  I had been proposing that on the official boards for about two years.  Nobody really paid any attention though, as can be attested by how many times I see others come up with the same idea and have never heard it before.  I doubt it would even be considered; WoW doesn't do it.

Dude I trash this game all the time here.  In fact the majority of my posts are exactly that.  I've only got one warring, and that's for shooting off my mouth at someone for a completely non-SWG issue.  You don't need to go overboard to be negative.

---

Originally posted by Camman321
Game crashes. They happen all the time, for no apparent reason. My computer is fully capable of running that game client, as it is running AoC.

---

And even when it doesn't crash its still laggy as hell. EQ2 had better graphics and didn't lag half as much.

---

Combat: So I've got 2 or 3 different abilities and the main one is shooting a very weak gun, that does minor damage. Very boring

MOBS: Hmmm...you've health like every other game. Instead of SWG calling MANA, MANA, they call it Action Points. 80% of mobs I ran into had 2 abilites.

1. Draining Action points

2. Hitting me

That's it. That's the combat layout of SWG. I've found more creativity in the dump I laid in my yard, than I did in the combat system/log of SWG. The only damage it records is hit damage. That's apparenlty the only damage players do as well. Hit Hit Hit.

---

Sounds about right.

---

Unbalance: Mobs vs players is very unbalanced. Do not expect to be lvl 20, and expect to live through a multiple mob aggro. 2 lvl 18 or 19 mobs will down you quicker than you know. Which is funny, because most of the time you've no choice but to pull multiple mobs.

The strategy there is really try and kill one, then die. Wait 60 seconds, then pull the other one. Doing all this while the mobs are continuously draining your action for mass amounts.

MedicSetup: This has got to be by far the WORST HEALING CLASS IN ALL OF MMORPGS! The main medic heal has roughly a 10 second Cooldown, healing you for 600 HP, while you're sitting at around 4k HP. 0.o So soling, don't expect to heal more than ONCE per encounter!

I couldn't stand more of the game to find further abilites.

---

Wow, no offense but you must suck out loud or didn't set yourself up right. This game is easy, even with the increased difficulty they implemented a year ago. I'm guessing you weren't using your abilities right or didn't use the Talent, I mean EXPERTISE, system.

---

Social/community: While it seems the forums are booming with activity, ingame, no so much.

There is no region or general chat. The only chat you EVER see is if you're standing next to some one, guildchat, group or a tell. There's no trade chat, general chat, recruit chat, NOTHING! This is very lame and unexceptable for MMORPG.

You join a guild. But the only benefit of a guild is to talk to people. There is NO option fo a guildpage. You have no clue who's in your guild, you'd barely know your own guild name if it wasn't sitting above your head.

You can't check to see who's online. For recruitment, or if you want a group for quests, etc. The only way is ALREADY knowing people's names, and adding them to your friends list. Yes, I was suprised too that this game had a friends list.

---

There are other chat channels, the default UI just doesn't display them. You have to create new chat tabs or change your chat options. Not really worth bothering for the most part because people seldom ever use extra chat channels. Some servers use channels and others don't, depends on where you are. You CAN see who is in your guild but you can only do it from the guild management terminal in the guild hall. When this game was designed, EQ1 was still the big thing and a lot of the social tools and options we find in WoW didn't exist back then and these concepts have been long and difficult in porting into the current SWG game.

---

Items: Item discription has to be one of the worst features. The information you receive is damage and dps. That's it.

Stats: So the stat layout looks like something you'd find in a browser based game. Considering stats are like the most important feature of your character, you'd think they woulda have put more time into them. All stats either do 1 of 2 things.

Increase your HP regen or or action regen. That's it. Oh my bad, one stat gives you a chance to hit for max on melee or range. There is no character sheet to see what's equipped, etc. You can only tell by seeing what's highlighted in your inventory.

---

Right on. Your stats matter little unless you can increase them by at least a 1000 but even then they give 1-5% gains. In the old game items were FAR more complex with several different stats that worked different depending on what you were fighting and what armor it had.

---

For a MMO, the game hardly encourages community, grouping, social action. That's probably the worst feature.

---

This was my biggest complaint when they changed the game into the living abortion it is today. Use to you gained quite a bit from grouping, now groups only hurt your progression.

---

You can't alter the UI without crashes, bugs, errors, etc. While most MMORPGs encourages UI MODs, and it's almost a given to be able to personalize your UI, not in SWG.

---

The current devs can't figure out how to do it because the devs who made the current incarnation of the game sucked.

---

Altogether. It's a very sloppy game. While it may be a huge game, with more gamespace than you've seen in any other. It doesn't make up for the lack of...well...what I've posted above.

All in All, I think this MMO creation was aimed at attempting to lazily create a StarWars game, and collect money from StarWars fans. Than it was to take a Move Trilogy and a create a high quality MMO out of it.

---

This is basically the same thing everyone I got to try out the NGE told me. They all made it about as far as you did. This game was once much better than what you saw, although it still had its problems. It used to deliver a much different experience than the current crop of bandwagon jumping games and shameless WoW-clones.

It would help if he wasn't in an accoustically unsound room and had a better mic and wasn't yelling.  This is really hard to listen to.  The "cancel now and avoid the rush" bit was funny though.

Originally posted by Exar_Kun

I would also Upgrade the Graphics with "Euphoria" and DX10 quality and style. It would use viberent colors, but the Characters wouldn't be "Cartoony" or WOWish.

 

So in other words, you want to keep the current population levels.  Dude, think for five seconds.  How many people can even afford that kind of rig?  How many people out there wanted to play Vanguard or Age of Conan but never even get the chance to see if they like it at all because their machine cannot run it?  And you want something even more PC intensive?  MMO's are still niche compared to the larger video game market.  And the people who play MMO's actually tend to be older.  Not old enough to have built up a career with lots of disposable income and too old to have mommy and daddy buy them a new rig every Christmas.

And a big N-O to #10 there.

There were TONS of fans there.  You just couldn't see them all in those pics because most of them were out running instances at the food court or doing collections in other parts of the convention center.

I suggest staying away from video games, especially MMO's, as much as possible while in college.  It doesn't cause people to flake out and fail classes, but it does give a person who is in danger of such a thing something that they can go into idle mode on.  Take up a hobby, like art or working out or something, to fill in your idle time.  Something that keeps you from just switching your brain into safe mode like video games do.

I know.  Those numbers they gave and the situations they describe are optimal, which grouping seldom is.  And the situation is worse because there are so few new players.  On Kettamor or Naritus I would have been surprised if I WASN'T the only level 50ish person playing at any given time.  Most people who play now are at level 90, but they still want to help new players even though there really isn't a decent way to do it.  In the past I brought in new players to the NGE but they all left because of this very thing.

From this thread.

The Senator responses here are total BS and show a complete disconnect from both their fellow players and reality. My primary grip is the usual blather from Badgersmacker but also the Smuggler Senator pipping in with some stats that make me ROFL my ass off.

---

So, taking those numbers and adding it up to something people can relate to: XP/Hour (which would be the total grindable XP you can gain. Lets say all members of the group are same level. Ideally 1 player should be able to kill 1 mob, 8 members would be able to kill that same mob 8 times faster.

Groupsize % of XP per kill % XP "per hour"
1 100% +0%
2 100% +100%
3 87% +161%
4 78% +212%
5 73% +265%
6 70% +320%
7 68% +376%
8 66% +428%

---

Are you freaking kidding me? 428% more? This person later admits to being an accountant and these are just the raw numbers. Lets consider how they actually work.

You can kill mobs in the NGE system fast enough on your own. At level 60 and level 90 it took around 30 seconds to kill a mob my own level, with about 10 seconds downtime every few mobs. Now these figures are saying that with a full group I'll kill it 8 times faster. But I'm only shaving off seconds here, not minutes. If I'm grouped with 4 people (really stretching considering server populations) instead of 30 seconds it takes 15. That's it. Go AFK long enough to sneeze once and you've lost your time advantage over soloing.

Now as anyone who as played a grouping intensive game like EQ1 will tell you, creating and managing a group is a lot of work. It takes time to find people, time to assemble, time to get to the place, and time to organize to keep everyone on the same page so you don't get people wandering off. Plus people constantly leave or go AFK or whatever.

In EQ1 this was acceptable because most classes couldn't solo and those that could took as long as 2-3 minutes to kill a single mob at the higher levels. In SWG there isn't anything that is soloable that cannot be killed in under a minute. This coupled with the XP penalty (even though it was lifted by 10%, big whoop) makes grouping entirely unfeasable and useless. The time you save with a group is lost by organizing the group.

The only way to get people to group for XP again and to actually level ATK instead of AFK is to remove the stupid XP penalty OR increase the difficulty of the mobs significantly. And I can tell you which one is going to go over better with the players. EQ1 had a grouping penalty, but you saved TONS of time killing a group and the average mob was so difficult that fighting two or more often meant death so it was a lot safer too. If these factors are not present, then the way it is now in the game is the way it will continue to be, fancy charts or no.

Originally posted by rejad

 

Originally posted by ealeth

The answer is simple: bittorent... 

I already wrote about it here:

http://mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/1983830#1983830

If you are on DSL or cable connection, you suffer pretty much from others downloading from you, the more you upload, the slower your download speed will be.

So, find someone with ATM, transmission or such, syncronous internet connection, or use 3rd party soft to limit the upload, because if you block it totally, you'll not be able to download as well

 

Ah, would also explain why it eats up so much bandwith for doing seemingly little.  I guess it also stands to reason that the longer I let it run it will eventually go faster.  But still, I limit my upload speeds because it drops my performance when I'm torrenting, would be nice if I could do that with this.  Thanks for the info.

Picked up a program that lets me limit bandwith, seems to be working so far although its slowly dipping slower but staying above 100kps so far.  Once again, thanks for the info.

Yeah that would be nice but I don't have a Fileplanet key.  *shrug*

Originally posted by ealeth

The answer is simple: bittorent... 

I already wrote about it here:

http://mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/post/1983830#1983830

If you are on DSL or cable connection, you suffer pretty much from others downloading from you, the more you upload, the slower your download speed will be.

So, find someone with ATM, transmission or such, syncronous internet connection, or use 3rd party soft to limit the upload, because if you block it totally, you'll not be able to download as well

Ah, would also explain why it eats up so much bandwith for doing seemingly little.  I guess it also stands to reason that the longer I let it run it will eventually go faster.  But still, I limit my upload speeds because it drops my performance when I'm torrenting, would be nice if I could do that with this.  Thanks for the info.

***EDIT Solved my problem. Picked up a shareware program called NetLimiter and capped the downloader on its upload speed. Now my download speed is better.  Staying above 100kps.  Still sucks but beats the hell out of the 1kps it was hovering around before.

Alright, I'm thinking "forget this crap" right about now.

I got to be one of the 300 who won the beta key two days ago. Naturally I was happy because I want to try out this game and also because I've never really won anything useful in my life. So everything works like a charm until I start trying to download this behemoth. Now, I understand that the 13 or GB will take me a handful of days but this is really stupid.

I start the download with the installer from Funcom's site. It takes a few minutes to actually start downloading. It starts at about 200+kps, not great but not bad. It quickly drops to 100 for about 20 seconds, then to 50 for about a minute. Sometimes it will stay around 20-25 for five minutes, sometimes it goes straight to 1. In the end and always within 10 minutes, its down to 1 and below, eventually the speed drops so low it stops altogether and just sits there looking pretty. After nearly two days I'm still at 7% completed.

I then have to restart it. Which wouldn't be terrible if it wasn't for the fact that I would essentially have to be sitting in from of my machine for two days doing this. Actually it would probably take a lot longer because it takes a few minutes for it to start downloading again once you've stopped it. Mostly it hovers around 4-13kps which the downloader says will take about 9 weeks or so to finish, roughly 7 weeks after I can buy the damn box at Best Buy.

(excuse me, have to restart it again, there it goes, ah, back down to 9kps so soon, restart...)

I don't know if this game is the massive pile of donkey suck that so many of you claim it is. And at this rate, I might never know. I certainly don't want to spend good money on something whose merits are so heavily questioned without trying it first. Hell, I dunno if it'll even run alright on my machine yet. I've decided to just let it run without restarting and see if it will at some point, by magic I suppose, start downloading at a decent rate. Which is a pain because it eats up bandwith for some reason or another, I cannot figure out what its doing with it but all I know is that everything loads like dial-up with it running.

So in closing, SOE's games are an abomination. But I can now say something positive about them; at least I have a chance to play their games. Any suggestions or rituals that will make the TCP/IP gods look upon me with favor would be appreciated.

---

Originally posted by Sam123jo0123

---

Originally posted by rejad

---

Originally posted by Sam123jo0123

---

Originally posted by Sam123jo0123

---

Originally posted by Narc1

yea I was worried someone would say that... even post CU it was never this bad, feels like such a lack of things to do now :/

---

It's best to take an answer from someone who plays the game.

I'll try to sum it up;

Quest
Explore
Travel
Kill
Hunt
Raise a pet
Join a guild
Fly in space
Craft Structures
Build a city

My current pet is rather adorable :)

If you need any help you can message me in-game, PM me and i can send you my name :)

---

It just dawned on me that i missed out PVP and GCW, Rebels for-the-win.

---

As he is returning to the game and your list is everything from preCU, he's probably already done all of that and is sitting on a level 80+ character. And speaking as someone who was playing the game until just recently I have to say that most of what is done is "same as it ever was" PvP in Restuss, Heroic Instances (which he has said is the reason why he quit WoW and if you don't think they aren't just like WoW's instances then you've obviously never played WoW), and collections (yaay, massive grinding with minimal reward, like a free Korean MMO but with more lag!).
So to better answer his question, basically nothing he hasn't already done.

---

Why keep living when you had already lived for 1 day?

---

Life is something you make the best of. A video game is something you either enjoy or toss in the dust bin or leave on the game store shelf. Anyway, back to the POINT of the conversation before you derailed it with an unrelated and flawed analogy, he asked what was there to do that was different than what he had already done and I told him essentially nothing. He's explored all of SWG and all of the features that make it unique and he's partaken of the "new" content already in WoW.

That was the point. What was new that he was not already bored with? Answer: nothing. This isn't whether the game is good, its whether there was anything new to him, and there wasn't.

Originally posted by ArcAngel3

Wow, I know one diehard vet that has been posting on the O boards since 2005 asking for this.  I hope this really makes a difference.

One thing that really killed the community was that everything could be done solo and that grouping really reduced your rate of gaining xp.  Whether it was intended this way or not, the group xp rate served as a strong penalty for grouping.  Penalties for grouping in a MMO don't seem to work well.

If its not me you were talking about it certainly sounds like what I was saying.  This is definetely a step in the right direction.  However if having a full group still means an overall penalty, then its useless.  Also it doesn't change the fact that most who play are level capped so there isn't a lot of people to group with when grinding XP these days.  My solution was to remove the penalty for grouping with people of different levels and allowing level 90 players to bank XP for respec purchases to create a constant grind that new players could use to finish their characters and meet the established players of the server, as it was during the CU.

Originally posted by Sam123jo0123

Originally posted by Sam123jo0123

Originally posted by Narc1

yea I was worried someone would say that... even post CU it was never this bad, feels like such a lack of things to do now :/

It's best to take an answer from someone who plays the game.

I'll try to sum it up;

Quest
Explore
Travel
Kill
Hunt
Raise a pet
Join a guild
Fly in space
Craft Structures
Build a city


My current pet is rather adorable :)

If you need any help you can message me in-game, PM me and i can send you my name :)

It just dawned on me that i missed out PVP and GCW, Rebels for-the-win.

As he is returning to the game and your list is everything from preCU, he's probably already done all of that and is sitting on a level 80+ character.  And speaking as someone who was playing the game until just recently I have to say that most of what is done is "same as it ever was" PvP in Restuss, Heroic Instances (which he has said is the reason why he quit WoW and if you don't think they aren't just like WoW's instances then you've obviously never played WoW), and collections (yaay, massive grinding with minimal reward, like a free Korean MMO but with more lag!).

So to better answer his question, basically nothing he hasn't already done.

The fact that the music industry treats every artist as a sink or swim proposition so they only put out records of those who market research says fits into the most profitable niche, ie the same old shit.  Disney on the other hand uses their vapid preteen shows and hordes of screaming fangirls to manufacture successful acts.   Country music is just whoever looks the most wholesome and attractive, irregardless of ability.  Christian music just puts out everything secure in the knowledge that it will sell OR THEIR FANS WILL GO TO HELL.

Also the underground doesn't pay anymore.  When bands in the old days were starting out playing at bars and clubs, they got paid.  Now they don't even get free peanuts.  The Beatles were making a living off of music for about five years, right out of highschool, before they hit it big.  You can't do that today, therefore bands are more prone to breaking up due to job conflicts and traveling less to gain fanbases.

No.  This would never work.  You would never raise 5mil and they wouldn't even consider it if you did.  That's the kind of money they spent animating Yoda scratching his nose.  Its nothing to them and even that is too much to achieve from donations.  There is no potential for any kind of profit from such a project and they would want to keep full control over their franchise.  This is utterly unrealistic.