I'm trying to figure out how those links prove the game is not a scam

You have the italian reviewers who are friends with the devs, and you have The Noob who has her website hosted for free by the devs.  Then you have a bunch of question and answer sessions with gaming sites, none of which have actually played the game.

Here is a test for you?  Ask me 10 questions about 'my game' and I'll email you the answers.. does that mean 'my game' is real.

The funny thing about the italian article is that the 'directional' combat has been removed from the game.. they could'nt get it to work.  And The Noob said that ships, guilds, pvp system, player housing, and most of crafting is not 'turned on' in the game she played.

So basically they have a map, they have some mobs, and you run around and auto-attack them.    Sounds 'feature complete' to me

Originally posted by downtoearth

Originally posted by Random_mage

Originally posted by downtoearth

Originally posted by Theocritus

      Zero chance...I think they will only let in a very small amount and probably choose that from the pool they already have.

no... its a stress test wellt he test high end content

 

Source?

or you still "POSTIIVE" the game is going to be released on the 22nd?

i didnt say that a week ago i said they willa t least do a open beta type thing at least on the 22nd i ne wbefore the delaya nnuncmeant that they was proly goign to delay if they was smart but i didnt say anything

Is english your second language?  I'm thinking Greek is your first?  I usually don't criticize spelling, but you really make it even hard to understand what you are trying to say.

No way there is going to be an 'open' free trial or beta on the 22nd.  More than likely it will be the exact same people who are in the current 'beta' and they will just change the name to 'free trial'.  There will still be a NDA for them, and gaming sites will also not be part of the new 'free trial'.  So in essence, everything will be exactly the way it is now.  

Originally posted by bodypass

Originally posted by googajoob7

Originally posted by bodypass

 

PvP in Wow rocks, because of the different choices of PvP. Period.

Arena deliver the stats on which balance can be based. Some cry Warlocks are under represented in today's arena top teams of the .... last 3 weeks?

Well patch 3.08 is already rocking on the PTR and guys like you saying PvP in Wow is unbalanced are a joke.

Why? Because the whole world looks at the top Arena players and can see for themselves where balance problems are by sheer data and results.

The same for the crying of lack of resilience. The Arena is there to watch the data and correct it.

In other "pvp" games it's the developper that says: our classes are balanced and not a single player can come up with data.

I always laugh at world PvP made by others.

WotLK gives you multiple realm fights per night with hundreds of players around a Siege Keep. Other games just crash or limit the numbers of players to .... 48.

----> No other MMORPG comes even close to the total fluid control of you basic avatar .... and that's the first condition for a PvP based game....

be it in Arena or BG's. Those willing to fight in the "grey masses of uncontrolled world PvP" can always choose Wintergrasp with tanks and siege engines.

CHOICES that's what Wow is all about always.

Choices you don't have in those other games.

That's why you play Wow for 2 years and others for one month.

 

 lol what a load of rubbish . you d would have to be a little blind deaf and dumb ( with the emphasis on dumb) to actually think its balanced . erm i noticed you use the word crying in your post ( about lack of resilance ) . it leads me to think your quite young . possibly in the 10 -14 years age group, come your not 53 your 13 arnt you ? . you see most people above that age range dont use the phrase unless they are little slow if you know what i mean . wows pvp in the past has been great and proberbly will be great again but its not good at the moment . i like wow but i m not stupid , brainwashed or immature enough to think the games pvp is in good shape at the moment . the people you talk about crying about the pvp proberbly are actually complaining about real imbalances in the game . either that or you work for blizzard lol

The problem these days is that people no longer READ what someone else writes.

Therefore .....

I made the important part RED in my text above:

and I repeat it once more:

The Arena is there to watch the data and correct it.

In other "pvp" games it's the developper that says: our classes are balanced and not a single player can come up with data.

And players can see for themselves which classes win more matches and end up front

Drums.....: enter the patches based on those stats to balance the game. .... understood  (finally) ? Patch 3.08 is rolling in already.

You can find ALL classes in the top of Arena teams. Some combos and classes more than others, but at least we have a system that allows to check upon it.

And I can find ANY class in Arena with 2100+ rating, which means the GOOD players are there with their class.

So stop whining because obviously you are not in the same league as them.

You fail big.

 

 

my moonkin can't break 2000.. therefore moonkin aren't balanced  :)

But yeah, you are right.  Every class and spec is represented in the top ratings.

Originally posted by Ilvaldyr

Originally posted by ghoul31

But it's easy to see how much money AOC would have made, had it been finished. The Banks should have been able to see that. 

That's an easy statement to make, but it's fundamentally wrong.

The MMO market is incredibly volatile; it's impossible to accurately forecast how well an MMO would have done given an additional 6 months of polish.

And back to the OP's original question; it's the developers fault.

They spend too much time/effort/money on unnecessary things like perfecting the refraction of light through raindrops, and neglect the vital aspects such as basic gameplay and design. Then they run out of cash and are pressured into an early release by skittish investors.

What they -should- do is get the basics right as soon as possible, then spend their remaining budget on tweaking the fluff stuff.

Part of the problem is that game developers are terrible at business.  As this poster said..the developers of AOC focused so much on 'cool effects' that they neglected the real gameplay issues.  PvP wasn't in at launch, Seiging wasn't working at launch, dungeons were broken at launch... yet the developers spent a crapload of their development money trying to put in DX10, just so when grass blows in the wind, the sun reflects properly.

I think there are a lot of new followers of darkfall.  This kind of thing has been going on for 7 years.  They were supposedly a month or two away from launching the game in 2002, 2005 and 2006.

Expect the following comment to be made around the middle of February

" Due to the nature of the game, and the fact that we want our players to have the best service available, we are going to delay the launch of Darkfall until we have the proper infrastructure in place".

Then they will go silent for about 6 months.. all the fanboys will leave, and they will start hyping their game from scratch with a brand new set of 'fanboys' who won't know the history behind the game.

It's happened 3 times already with Darkfall.

Originally posted by altairzq

Originally posted by daarco

Isnt that great : )

Now maybe the people that wants to play Darkfall can have like a......community. And all the vaportrolls, haters, naysayers and so on can go and play some other game. With 300k fans we dont need the haters anymore.

Ad maybe that number will increase even more, so we shouldent fix our eyes on it to much.

 

Do you realize many of them are what you call haters? I'm a beta aplicant, and I'm subscribed to the forums, and no way on earth will I buy the game unless I can try it for myself, or after a month of solid good reviews.

Yep,  I have 3 of those 300,000.   But there is no way I'm buying this game for at least 2 months after a full release.

Originally posted by Xasapis

There is always something to grind for, in every MMO, if people just want to dump their gametime into that level of simplicity. Some people just look at the MMOs of the past in nostalgia, where the only content was the grind. Some of them even try to recreate the grind experience into the modern MMOs, realise that it's pointless and moan about it.

LK expansion is by far a better expansion than TBC ever was (at least that's my personal opinion). Unfortunately for quite a bit of the hardcore (or wannabe hardcore) crowd, it's even less designed for your needs and more designed for the needs of the people with limited gametime. I don't see why people keep on beating the dead horse here, WoW was never meant to be EQ or UO and it will never be.

As for this dungeon, I'm pretty sure it was designed to be the most accessible and potentially (since if you screw up you got to start over) the fastest dungeon in the game. It certainly serves its purpose well.

exactly.  No matter what Blizzard does, someone will be unhappy.  There are just to many players to please everyone.  Blizzard has decided to focus on the 1hr heroic runs, rather than the 4 hour BRD runs.

And again, that doesn't make the dungeon 'easier'.  The bosses in Wrath are MUCH more demanding on everyone than the dungeons in Vanilla.  In Vanilla, it was all tank/healer vs boss, with DPS at most trying to beat an enrage timer.  In Wrath, DPS has to do a lot of different things and has to learn an encounter just like tanks have to.

And finally, to win the argument.  Blizzard had to release 3 new server this weekend.  That makes 35 new servers over the past 2 months since wrath was launched.  ' raid2play' is dead.. it is time for you guys to move on and find another game.

Originally posted by convict

Well I would hope it goes up when their making post in the forums about installing xfire for the purpose of increasing its xfire ranks.

Yeah, it's basically exactly like what they did with that 'vote' last month.  They posted a direct link to the website from the official forums, then they got Famine to tag the thread.   The link originally even 'forced' any clickers to vote for AOC, and then they posted details about how you could vote multiple times.

Then Orion posted a thread here about them 'winning' the poll.  :) see any similarities?

Originally posted by OrionMan

Originally posted by Jackdog

Originally posted by Azrile

Originally posted by Jackdog

For what it is worth the XFire hours are 400 more between last Saturday and this one.

Could be the server merges, and people taking another look see

Could be the low new low price, hey for less than 10 bucks US cant be beat

Could be the XFire threads on the forums and fanbois starting to use it to artificialy bum the numbers

Most likly all the above

Whatever the reason at least the trend is upward not downward. What I keep asking myselfr though, is the game interesting enough to retain those customers for several months? For me it isn't. Not that I think there is anything terrible wrong with the game, just for me there was not enough to do and all my gaming buddies are busy playing another game that also happens to be very very good and offers me more for my time.

 

Except that the trend is now DOWNWARD.

AOC FALLS TO #50    LOSES 5 SPOTS IN ONE DAY

Jackdog.. you forgot one other option.    Xfire fell drastically on Saturday because Funcom wasn't in the office running xfire on all it's machines  :)   JK... but yeah, I agree it is a combination of all the things you said.  Add in that warhammer is hitting some rough spots so with the server mergers and nearly free 30 days, there are probably a lot of people checking out aoc.

hours played between last Saturday and this Saturday are up by 400 hours.  Question is where will it be in March? Could be back down in the 2- 3K range or maybe up into the 7 to 8K range.

Time will tell.

 

lol. AoC has more than 6100 Xfire gaming hours, something the game have not had since end October or Beginning of November. I fail to see how this somehow is bad news. Also the no. of Xfire players are +9% compared to last Saturday. Very good news.

And another thing that I just became aware of. These numbers are with some downtime on the EU servers. Will probably see that on todays numbers also.

ok, so now that AOC has once again fallen back in the 50's, like I said they would..  you are changing your 'red' number?

The game got a temporary bump because of the $2 box sales and because  of the hype of mergers, but things are going back to normal very soon.  It's exactly like when they  launched the 'pvp' patch a few months ago.  For a week after the patch, AOC was busier than normal, but then dropped right back down to normal.

Same thing " OMG, let me see if my character survived the merger, and let me run around a few zones to see if populations are increasing'.  Like I said very early in this thread when you posted the 'jump in xfire'.   It's very temporary and will die fast.  And look I was right.. back to the 50's for AOC.

Excpect another 'jump' if AOC gives away a free month for returning players.

By the way.. WOW launched another 3 new servers in NA this weekend.  That is 35 new servers since November.

Originally posted by Aragon100

Originally posted by Kurt00

Tasos never said anything about any kind of Beta for 15'th at this thing... and actually nothing new at all was said.

 

Confirmation that the 22:th of january still stands as release date was something i appreciated alot.

Yeah.. 10 days before the supposed release date, he was still saying it was on schedule.

Any takers on when the February 25th date will be cancelled?   Feb 18th is my guess, exactly 5 days AFTER they take pre-order money from the fools

Originally posted by pencilrick

One thing new servers do is give everyone a fresh start in a new world.  If you are a player who is tired of emptied-out noob zones and flocks of level 80's hanging out in their welfare epics, a new server might be just the thing to breathe some life into the game.

Think of this sort of like the progression servers in EQ, but without the actual expansion progression.  I think every MMO could benefit if they had a yearly release of a new server or two.  (Except Vanguard.  A new server release in that game would be a 25% increase in their servers, hehe.)

Blizzard has released about 35 new servers since November.  Most of them are 'transfer to' servers because of excessive queues to get into older servers.  There have only been a handful of 'new' servers released.  New servers are fun, but they also are the ones that end up empty in a month when all the 'first' people go back to thier old character.

Originally posted by metalhead980

Originally posted by Zorndorf

Originally posted by metalhead980

Oh give me a break already, first we have bodypass getting all upset and emotional now AZ writing this shit.

The only reason you think Wotlk dungeons are harder is due to only counting the boss encounters.  A dungeon isnt only about the boss fights. This is the problem with WoW players today they just want to rush through a dungeon, they don't remember the trash only bosses.  Oh and bosses in vanilla WoW were just as challenging if you did them at the right level, not like the Ezmode players that wouldnt take anyone into a 5 man without being 2-4 levels over every mob in the place.  want me to bring up a hard 5 man? Pre-nerf scholo ran 5 man not 10. That dungeon was considered harder then raid content at the time.

Oh and what boss required you to move pre-60? lets see Princess in Mara? yeah you wow guys forget those leveling dungeons pretty quick huh? "wow doesnt start until engame" bullshit!

 

 

Give me a break, because I don't understand your anger and attitiude....
 

Hardly two weeks ago you were screaming in this forum you couldn't play Wow anymore because of the "time" it was needed to gather the best gear in the game... The raid schedule ... remember ?

You wanted to have your life back and Wow raiding was just too much time consuming and you only wanted to have the "very best gear" in the game,... So you decided to stop a year ago because of time management and the long raids.

Now these guys above say they have fun with smaller raids and less time ... and

you come back complaining that the raids and dungeons are less time consuming.

You sound like my old uncle complaining because the day is too warm or too cold.

I have a remedy: just play WotLK.

Saying that i can't play a game anymore because I dont have the time for schedules is totally different than complaining about how hard a dungeons is. people grow up man.

I never once said I wanted raid content to be dumbed down like it is in Wotlk did I?

That whole other thread was about raid schedules not the challenge of dungeon content and blizzard gutting it. I never Ever! wanted WoWs dungeons to be easier Ever!

Also if blizzard kept the dungeons challenging and made them shorter that would be fine but they didnt, Everything is Ezmode now. Short, Aoe fest, simple dungeons thats not what i was talking about in my other post.

Not liking schedules and disliking Ezmode dungeons are two totally different topics.

Nice try on calling me out though, was kind of funny.

Yeah.. you've basically been busted.  You held up the 'old' style 4 hour dungeons as your standard.. now someone has called you on the fact that you were complaining before about having to schedule stuff in WOW.  Do you even play the game.

I really don't think you do.   People are still wiping very regularly on heroics.  My guild does the daily heroic and occassionaly we still wipe if someone isn't paying attention.  The boss encounters are MUCH more challenging for DPS than anything before BC.  You actually have to pay attention to what is happening, not just spam your dps rotation as fast as possible.    The bosses got harder, and the hour of  clearing trash between bosses was removed.

Originally posted by Jackdog

For what it is worth the XFire hours are 400 more between last Saturday and this one.

Could be the server merges, and people taking another look see

Could be the low new low price, hey for less than 10 bucks US cant be beat

Could be the XFire threads on the forums and fanbois starting to use it to artificialy bum the numbers

Most likly all the above

Whatever the reason at least the trend is upward not downward. What I keep asking myselfr though, is the game interesting enough to retain those customers for several months? For me it isn't. Not that I think there is anything terrible wrong with the game, just for me there was not enough to do and all my gaming buddies are busy playing another game that also happens to be very very good and offers me more for my time.

Except that the trend is now DOWNWARD.

AOC FALLS TO #50    LOSES 5 SPOTS IN ONE DAY

Jackdog.. you forgot one other option.    Xfire fell drastically on Saturday because Funcom wasn't in the office running xfire on all it's machines  :)   JK... but yeah, I agree it is a combination of all the things you said.  Add in that warhammer is hitting some rough spots so with the server mergers and nearly free 30 days, there are probably a lot of people checking out aoc.

I dunno, i play on one of the lowest population PVE servers, and horde always has 2 raid groups going (80 people) and most of the time we get the tenacity buff for being outnumbered.

I just don't get the whole "DK being overpowered".  My main is a moonkin who mostly wears cloth, and I really have no trouble against them.  It may just be a class by class thing, but there classes that I think are much more unbeatable than DK's ( enhancement shammies for one).

Originally posted by metalhead980

So people that like long challenging dungeons have no life now?

The stupidity that come from you two flaming fanbois is truely amazing.

Reality check guys if you cant plan ahead and do one normal dungeon in wow (2+ hours) why are you playing MMOs?

 

And yes! bodypass you make me sick because you like quick non-challenging dungeon runs. Its sickening to think such a flaming fanboi would agree with raping one of the best features in WoW its dungeons.

the thing is..  dungeons were NOT more challenging back then.  They were just longer with lots of repeat trash mobs.  The 'hard' part was getting people who were able to play 4 hours straight.   MC required vent just so the raid leader could yell every once and awhile to wake everyone up.

How many fights pre-60  required the dps characters to even MOVE their character let alone react to anything the boss did?

Can't you do a little reseach.  Check the official website, it has the ERSB, system specs,  pricing information and servers.

/sarcasm.

Actually, this is also probably proof of the scam.  The people who rate the game would have to actually play the game to determine it's rating.

I wonder if their are fines associated with releasing a game that hasn't been rated, or if that only applies if they have a physical box on the shelves.

Originally posted by Vistaakah

Generally speaking, game forums are just one big cry baby fest where over 50% of the posters don't even play the named game anymore. Sad part is they are not going anywhere.  WoW players have to have an active sub to post to Blizzard official forums. WAR on the otherhand doesn't have official but warhammeralliance seems to do quite the business. One thing i like better about single player games is that they are what they are. This leaves the game to the minds of the developers instead of allowing them to be influenced by game whiners which generally ruins the game for everybody. People that enjoy the games they play don't visit forums very much. It's when they begin to dislike something about their game that they start playing the FORUM game more then the actual game itself.

Question:   Do you think the average poster on a non-official forum is more mature than on an official forum?

It's really just a 'shift' in what people cry about.  On forums like this, it is ' your game sucks'... on the offical forums it is ' my class sucks'.

Official forums are great.  Here is a list of posts made on the official forums.  Ghostcrawler is the lead game designer for WOW.  Look at some of the indepth conversations he can have with real player.  Those type of conversations could never happen between a developer and a player on a 3rd party site.  Look at MJ's 'posts' (warhammer).  He'll make 1 big post/speech, and then disappear for a week.

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/3.html

Originally posted by Elikal

Originally posted by x_rast_x

Originally posted by Quizzical

It seems that we have here an example of someone who hasn't played a very wide variety of games.  Go play Puzzle Pirates.  That's not like WoW.

Or EvE, which does its absolute best to the be the anti-WoW.  It's quite successful at it, too.

 

Ok, maybe EVE. It just not my type of game to gaze most of the time at black space, but thats another story altogether. -  It wasnt serious, but I am so FED UP with almost every thread leading at some point to "WoW-this-WoW-that" - I cant hear it anymore! I dont care about WOW. I dont hate WoW or love WOW or play WOW and for the love of mother and child I am SICK and TIRED hearing WOW every frigging post as if the frigging world revolves around it!

There, happy now?

Don't you think the genre would look much better if a game like AOC was what everything got compared to?  WOW makes other games look bad, AOC would make other games look good.  If we all just said how much better Warhammer/Darkfall/EVE/LOTRO were than AOC.. everything would seem so much rosier.

Originally posted by Jackdog

here we go trying to use player made polls and XFire to determine overall population again. Guys any number you come up with this method is going to be shit. The best XFire can be used for is trending and even that will not be all that accurate when thread liek th OP were referencing are on the front page of the official forums since a few fanbois will install just to bump the numbers. It's good viral marketing though so any shills reading this keep bumping it LOL.

Server merges, quarterly stock reports, long term monitoring of XFire can all show a trend and that's about it. I have been watching the game closly since release and I was data miner for most of the 90's and the best estimate I can come up with would be around 75 - 125 K and I would put a plus or minus 25K with that.

 

Yep 75-100k... probably on the high side of that since the drop in EU retail price.

But I just don't see why people are so against using Xfire more precisely when all of the major games 'line up' the way you would expect them.  What is the general consensus on Warhammer? (300k), what is the general consusus on LotRO? (200k)... if you do the Xfire proportions from Xfire and WOW ( 5M), they ALL work out to nearly perfect.   AOC is showing 1/2 of Lotro,  1/3 Warhammer and 1/50 of WOW (NA).  And if you use the 'old' xfire numbers from Warhammer when it announced 400k  (in september) it was identical to where AOC was at on June 30 when they announced 400k.  It has just worked out too many times in the past for it to be coincidence.

WOW has 5 products in the top 20?  I would think BC would have dropped off that list since it is bundled with the battlechest.

Yep, Congrats to the Funcom marketing department.  They did a heck of a job in April.