I really hate the cash shop idea for games with a monthly fee, but I know it will expand until it levels off against consumer demand.  TCGs with exclusive in-game items have been around for a while now, and they are popular enough that companies keep making new sets.  Same with all the other little percs that companies cleverly market to you so they don't have 'cash shop' written all over them.  

Gaming is value entertainment as it stands right now.  Your average casual Joe gamer has fairly deep pockets, enough so that there was a rapid expansion of the RMT as more players entered the genre, and don't pretend that these big corporate behind the games are that stupid.  

Second Life tried some identity verification system for age, but I'm not sure how well that worked for them.  I think most people probably understand the reason why, and also that really if they can do it for age.. they could probably run something like that for gender.

Honestly I kind of chuckled a little inside at the outrage.  In 12+ years of being on the internet, I've sat and watched the strict code of anonymity slowly change into a word of social networks and tweets.  It seems to me that MMO communities have been declining in that same period, from friendly and helpful, into harsh and immature.  I attribute this to the multiple layers of anonymity that gamers still want to hind behind, being accountable only to the TOS, and distancing the idea of being true to yourself and others.   Now I don't like the idea of forcing someone to play their gender in a game, but I'm not threatened by breaking down a little bit of that anonymity.   Certainly the 'RPG' side of the MMOs would lose a little, and I acknowledge that.

The precedent was set long ago with loot cards, and repurchasing software for exclusive items.

When CoX started adding a few things to the online store, they blatantly told the community that they were running on a shoestring budget, and they wanted to add a few specialized developers to the team.  Now with Cryptic I'm guess they had a big budget coming out of the gate, and the game hasn't made as much money to this point as they would have liked.

Makes me wonder if the $15 a month standard fee is dated and should be raised? 

Originally posted by Xondar123

 

---

While I sympathize with Jester and Trey, being a vet myself, I am curious about this system. This is something SOE promised for years. If it brings more (or any) fun for the present players, good deal.

 

If this system is sucessful, it would be nice to see it emulated in other games.

---

 

Other way around. Other games have had such systems in place far before SWG, Ryzom and City of Heroes come to mind. SWG is always emulating what other games do.

SWG should have this disclaimer..

The game is a big patchwork quilt of systems taken from other games, and put into place with little vision or respect to the lore... Get ready to.. *starts Orgrimmar theme song*, cough *record scratch*, don't we wish guys.. *starts Star Wars theme song*.. enter the Star Wars Universe, immerse yourself with Zombie Storm Troopers and Cupid Ewok..

The last email I received from SOE was February 2nd about housing pack-up, but I could really care less otherwise.. RIP Kauri.  

$50.. lol good luck with that.

Originally posted by JestorRodo

 

 

So were in SW lore does an Ewoks with wings? Muahaha, only in The SOE-SWG lore for their wishy-washy wa-wa way to celebrate The RL Valentine's Day!

I don't care if Zombies are part of SW Lore , what I do care about is SOE is using it because all of their half-baked original ideas end up as EPIC FAILS ( it feels so good to say it when its oh so true).

Zombie Themepark ? Sorry, you are infringing on Six Flags territory.

 

Lore, who needs lore if WoW is doing it... like almost everything else that has been introduced into SWG..  it's nothing new or original in concept.

"WoW has these seasonal events that players just eat up, so I think we should say screw the lore and fluff the game a bit."

or

"Hey lets introduce a PVP system.  Any ideas?  Anyone?  Ok how did WoW do it?"

or

"Players want something epic, so does anyone have some ideas?  No?  Well I hear WoW does a lot of instances with heroic encounters.. lets do that."

or

"Collections are working well in EQ2, why not port it over to this game?"

or

"I hear that CoX has this cool mission architect system that a lot of their players are having fun with, lets do something like that."

Originally posted by Dana

Originally posted by ebonfire

I read this before I headed out, and what I have to say has been eating at me all day.  I am by no mean an EQ2 fanboy as I've only played it for about 3 months total over the last two years, and I understand the desire to adhere to the time line, so with that being said...

You talk about how the MMO landscape has changed, and I think that reflects more in EQ2 than any game I can think of.  It launched a few weeks before WoW, and has since released 5 expansions, almost being marketed as a release each time.  What started out being very group centric, unforgiving at times, is now a shadow of what it was designed to be when it launched.

I think that the EQ2 you can log in a and play now is most definitely a post WoW reaction to how the industry has changed.. the bulk of the game you have now is post-WoW.

 

Just one more time...

EQ2 launched before World of Warcraft.

The article was about the top 10 games launched after World of Warcraft.

First, you obviously didn't participate in the train wreck that was Vanguard at launch, or you wouldn't be giving it a free pass right now. 

My point was simply that EQ2 also launched early (a few weeks before WoW), grossly missed the marked, was reworked with a ton of content added after WoW was released, and managed to survive in the shadow of WoW in a way that really reflects on what kind of game it has become.  If you were writing from an intellectual standpoint, and not from entertainment standpoint, then we might have a decent conversation about the true transgressions of the industry after WoW was released.

I read this before I headed out, and what I have to say has been eating at me all day.  I am by no mean an EQ2 fanboy as I've only played it for about 3 months total over the last two years, and I understand the desire to adhere to the time line, so with that being said...

You talk about how the MMO landscape has changed, and I think that reflects more in EQ2 than any game I can think of.  It launched a few weeks before WoW, and has since released 5 expansions, almost being marketed as a release each time.  What started out being very group centric, unforgiving at times, is now a shadow of what it was designed to be when it launched.

I think that the EQ2 you can log in a and play now is most definitely a post WoW reaction to how the industry has changed.. the bulk of the game you have now is post-WoW.

I think it's pretty fair to say that Blizzard failed at introducing a balanced hero class into the game.  The complaining has gone down quite a bit, but for a long time you'd read countless threads on the official forums about DKs ruining the game.  Really at the launch of Wrath, the game was dominated by Retardin and DKs, and it amazes me because any other game with such crappy class balance would collapse in on itself.

I have to give some credit to the long time WoW players I know  because they can be really patient about waiting for changes to come down the pipes.  I lost my faith while playing a shaman.. 10 months of Wrath was long enough.

Anyway..  Blizzard seems to focus on the things it can do well; introducing new classes has turned out not to one of them, and I honestly wouldn't expect another.  They must suck at making new dances also....

That project (we are not supposed to mention on here) at one time had several hundred thousand registered users, and right now has just under a hundred thousand active community members since it has been cleaned up...  which is more than the current subscriber base of SWG.

lol all 12 of you?   

Last summer there was a lot of buzz about it on these forums, with many people stating their opinions that it was the best game, and I kind of thought that it may be going somewhere.  Around that time SOE was giving away free game time to vets.. it was good timing because the client had just been re-optimized, most of the hitching was gone, and they had clean up almost all the bugs that were around at launch.  A few months later they released the newbie island, another raid area, and then started pulling developers.

This is purely my opinion, but I believe that SOE put Vanguard on life support when it heard the community saying it was better than EQ2...   which around that time had a new expansion coming out. 

Originally posted by Zorndorf

Originally posted by Yamota

Hasn't WoW always been easy and casual? Isn't that one of the major reasons it got so popular?

I think in general WoW is synonymous with easy in the MMORPG genre.

 

So whay can only 0.1%of the RAiding community  take out the hardest mod bosses.

Any comments :)))

If the core of gameplay was 'hard modes' then I'd agree, but we both know its not.  When making a judgment, I believe you have to knock out both extremes, and what is left in this case can be summed up as mind numbingly easy.

When someone asks me if playing the bass guitar is hard, I tell them no. I wouldn't go out and find some Victor Wooten song to throw in their face as a point of reference because it is very far off the spectrum.  The vast majority of music in pop culture can be played by an intermediate player, but then there are those hard pieces that only the 0.1% can play... though that doesn't change the answer to the initial question. Sorry I tend to relate a lot of thing to music, but you see where I'm going.

Hard modes change the difficulty of a few encounters that a lot of people could probably care less about.  It doesn't change the difficulty of the core of the game when you exit the raid instance, and that's what people are talking about here.

Trade chat was the new Barrens chat the last time I logged in..... "anal first aid"... god help us *turns trade chat off*

I think that 1-60 was a lot of fun at launch if you ran all the instances in your level range. I remember my first level 60 character taking 20 days of time played, but on the flip side my most recent 80 took just over 5 days of time played. A lot of it is knowing the most efficient path threw the game, playing on rested experience, and then having access to the optimal equipment for the spec you want to level with... in game friends that help you out by running you through instances makes a big difference.

I enjoyed Wrath for a while.. until I had to go out of town, and then came back to a schedule that didn't allow for much playing time. The thought of logging into to do dailies, sitting around Dalaran waiting on raids to start, and all the other nonsense is just a complete turn off now that I have free time again at night. I honestly think that WoW trains your brain to run on auto pilot because of how simple and repetitive common tasks are in that game. The community is the other thing that I will not miss about WoW.
 

Off the top of my head..  NO ADK Legendary weapons, scale down defense caps on melee classes by about 10%, and remove mind poison/fire completely..  I'd play it again.

People forget about the 'CURB before JTL' movement on the forums before the CU..  because temploiting made pvp highly unbalanced.  Bring back the combat queue, button mashing, intense ego driven pvp, Starport camping, and all the other glorious things about the old game.  There were about 10 major things that destroyed the competitive balance, and they would just be a mess if reintroduced in today's gaming climate if they were not fixed. 

I've bought a lot of music that I ended up disliking, and I've watched a lot of movies that I wished I could have gotten a refund afterward; all just based on other people's personal preference that I should have read into in their reviews.  Entertainment is universally expensive in modern society, and it has caught up the the MMO universe.

I've come to accept the genre for what it is now days.. You see a game that is interesting, you choose to pay for the software, use your months trial, and decide from there. Hopefully the game is good enough to get a month of play out of it, but I'm tired of being upset from buying into the hype on gaming forums. Developers often don't listen or don't care, and I see the same mistakes being repeated over and over by nearly every company putting out new games, so this is just my philosophy to cope with the current state of online gaming.

Gamers reach their saturation point rather quickly, and I think a lot of people still have this web 1.0 mind-frame that online entertainment should either be utterly awesome, or it should be free. If blowing $50 a month on software is hurting you; then maybe you should look to improve your life in the time that you'd otherwise spend gaming.

I enjoy gaming.. I see it more as a journey than anything else. To find that one end all destination will probably never happen, and I'm glad for that.
 

A game with a harsh death penalty will have to launch very polished, with near flawless crash-free client, and servers that run almost completely lag free... or the death penalty will not last more than two weeks before being taken out.  I played Vanguard when it launched and the death penalty there was not really that bad, but it was very annoy to lose experience to a bug or crash. 

I still remember the first time heading out to Endor with my lightsaber, knowing from that point on.. a death will be three hours or more of additional grinding.  Yeah it was pretty exciting at times.. 

Originally posted by templarga

You got what I was alluding too. It is about how you spend your time. If all you do is log-on and raid and that is it, then it is hardcore about raiding. The same can be said for running heroics, crafting, PVP or whatever. Casual or hardcore has little to do with the amount of time played in game, but hat you do with that time.

There is a big difference between hardcore and casual raiding guilds, and you really can't deny it when compairing the two. When you start looking at the best guilds in the world having 200+ attempts on some of the hard mode encounters; you'd realize that there is a difference betwen that kind of guild and a guild that goes bare bones because of time contraints just to clear the instance without attempting hard modes.

My guild ended up being ranked around 3400 when we downed Yogg.. where as the bottom rung of the top end guilds were finishing up Heroic Glory of Ulduar Raider around that time.  WoW is about the amount of time you put in, and everything comes down to time.  Could my guild do Mimiron hard mode if we could afford the time for 200+ attempts.. yeah I think we could. 

Originally posted by Nicksd

Originally posted by Ramonski7

Originally posted by Nicksd

Originally posted by templarga

Originally posted by ebonfire

My guild spends around 10 hours a week inside of 25 man instances, and the average raider plays around 15 hours playing a week.  We have a lot of people that during the work week only log in on raid nights, and log out shortly after the raid is finished.  I admit that we haven't progressed far in hard modes, but we have cleared Ulduar heroic as a casual guild full of people who lead normal lives.

 

10 hours a week raiding and in a guild that only logs in to raid?

That is the very definition of a raiding guild and is by no means what most people would refer to as casual.

Just my opinion.

 

10 hours a week is very casual. There are guilds who spend 5-6 hours a night in a raid instance. Hell there are people who spend more then 10 hours a week in normal instances, are they not considered casual players because they don't raid?

 

You can raid Naxxramas casually. The reason is that Naxxramas is a intentionally easy ENTRY level raid encounter planned with the release of WoTLK that can be finished by even the least skilled raiders/puggers in 10-man mode in 1 night and 25 man in 2, it's been out long enough to warrant that.

 

Uldar is NOT in any way shape or form a casual raid encounter, videos are reviewed, strategies are researched and supplies are gathered. Now how you tackle the encounter with it's 7 day hard reset can be planned casually: 2 hours per night for 5 nights or hardcore: 4-5 hours Friday and Saturday. But in either case I doubt it will be completed.

 

It's HOW you describe how you use the time played that defines if it's casual or hardcore....

 

I guess that depends on your point of view. 2 hours a night is nothing big, or is playing 5 hours two days out of a week. I consider that casual play. He also said they haven't completed hard mode. So throw that part out the window.

As far as how hard the instance is, or which instance is in question, I don't think that has anything to do with this set of quotes. It is about what you consider casual play style. The person I quoted nor myself mentioned anything about Uldar.

As for as the topic top this thread. Sure new fights might take a little time to learn, but after the first or second kill it gets fairly easy to kill them. The general problem I see is finding people who know how to pay attention. The fights themselves are not all that hard as long people understand whats going on.

 90% of wipes in raids are caused by someone not doing what they should be doing, not because of boss difficulty.

I think most raid wipes start out as tanking or sometimes healing issues.  Then you have coordination of movement, proper positioning and transitions between phases, and improving your dps if you hit enrage timers.  It really shouldn't take that long if you are not bringing new people in all that time that have to learn the fight.

Pugs usually fall apart after the 3rd or 4th wipe, and its always the same encounters with stupid checks that people constantly fail at.  People just want to enter instances, stand in one spot, press buttons 1 - 2 - 3, and get loot.  Blizzard does nothing to encourage people to become better players, instead they are going to close the gear gap for bad players and bad guilds by giving them top tier badges for  running under tuned heroics.  Oh its ok, they are casuals.

'Casual' does not mean bad, but people use the word casual like a crutch.  If you spend less than 20 hours a week gaming, and gaming is not a top 3 priority.. then you are a casual gamer.  If you can schedule 10 hours a week to raid inside a video game, it doesn't make you hardcore, or any less casual than the bad player who can't pass the stupid checks.

Casuals do raid, and they do it well if it matter to them.  Three hours, two or three nights a week, and a guild that's willing to work with you to help you become a better player is all it takes. 

Wow has slid to an incredibly easy level of difficulty.  I'm just so tired of hearing the casual excuse because its a myth.

My guild spends around 10 hours a week inside of 25 man instances, and the average raider plays around 15 hours playing a week.  We have a lot of people that during the work week only log in on raid nights, and log out shortly after the raid is finished.  I admit that we haven't progressed far in hard modes, but we have cleared Ulduar heroic as a casual guild full of people who lead normal lives.

There is a big difference between 'bads' and 'casuals'... imo the bads are lazy about how they play the game.  You can be a casual that contributes equally with a hardcore in a lot of environments if you show up in the proper gear, gemmed and enchanted the right way, a good spec for raiding, consumables, knowing your class, and with the encounters researched in advance.

The next big patch is full of handouts for people who are just not good at raiding becaus they either lack the awareness to function properly in a raid groups, or they make no attempts to improve their performance in scripted encounters.

I pug 25 man naxx on occasion, and I could make a list a mile long full of what I see as fail, but the truth is that these people don't care.  They will eventually bring down the ship imo. 

Alchemy now has Mixology... "You receive an increased effect and duration when you drink any elixir or flask you are able to make."  Its great for me as a raider to get double flask duration, and an additional 37 spell power from the Frost Wyrm Flash.