Good:

The game as a whole is really good all around. It has entertaining arcade combat that feels like your skill and actions matter, with moves flowing naturally into comboes (without artificial combo measures like in EQ2). It is jam packed with lot of short CC skills. It is quite different from your average MMO combat on surface and in depth, but very easy to get into.

For other good stuff, well, look at pictures and vides and imagine it just works well, because it does. This paragraph may be short but that does not mean there is little good in game, it would be just listing features and nodding "yes, thats well done too".

Bad:

The game does not lag much, but when it does,  it really shows, due to the arcade nature. It is not failure as such just a bit optimistic expectation from devs. They rather risked it then water down the great combat they had.

Cash shop sells gear. It may not be obvious at first glance (to hide it from casuals as well as professional writers who cannot spend days reviweving one game, when they write for living). It sells gems to purchase set parts from in-game NPC. The costumes it sells are worn in addition to normal gear as usual - but they can be crafted to have stats. The crafting mats to improve said costumes as well as your standard gear are as well sold in cash shop (some drops in game in abundance too, some rarely, some crucial never). Plus it sells gamebreaking "convenice" items like pots healing you to full with short CD. Also, I was told, by very endgame, you need cash shopped gear to even be able to hit a boss.

It gets grindy relatively soon. I do not mind F2P games to take forever to get to level cap, it is valid school of MMO design. But Dragonica starts to get grindy shortly after you decide on your class (4 archetypes with 2 classes each, chosen at level 20) and gets only worse and worse. First the contents thins and you find yourself re-running the same place over and over and then levelling gets unbelivably slow, holding you back way before such slow down would be reasonable.

Edit: The correction to the above poster for mission map score: You score increses slowly if you keep hitting mobs, increses more rapidly if you interrupt mob casting or hit them from back (this is big as you can ramp up score back on boss; you need party though) and decreases a lot if you get damaged (this is my pet peeve as a healer as I would not mind taking controlled damage othervise and have less CC moves); combo counter does not matter at all. Seriously, why have tank and healer class in game when your party gets severely punished if your tank takes hit and when healer is obsoleted by consumables. In the end, tank is PvP class and healer is boss DPS.

It boils down to the DnD paradigm of *hitpoints*.

Essentially, in most MMOs you just club the mob with nerfbats till it drops dead from exhaustion - or your group gets exhausted. A wolf pack hunting, in more romantic words.

So we have a class that can deal damage and class that can take damage, with the revolutionary idea of dealing negative damage aka healing thrown in to spice it up (and introduce all kinds of issues). That is all you can really do to heath bars. (Well you can healing mobs too I guess but that is really all.)

The benefit of this paradigm is that it allows very easy scaling and gating of content. Other mechanics are present but get discarded towards endgame when tight tuning is requested.

The OP can hardly express what is his precise issue. He probably wanted to PK or something (which would get him as new player dead over and over) instead of participating in quite good PvP league and make his way into open PvP later.

The community is very good for current MMOs and especially for F2P MMO. His issues with community is basically he could not effortlessly PK first guy he saw without realizing what retaliation would mean for him.

AO is much better executed and polished and managed than RoM but it is quite simple game at core and not your usual MMO.

RoM is free WoW, until you get to endgame and you see below the thin polish. It is not worth attaching yourself too but the fact that you can compare F2P to WoW at all is accomplishment.

Also AO has worthy PvP.

It is very cash shop dependant. That is if you want to stick with the game. If you just want to have fun for a short while, it is free. Basically this game is quite different between two kinds of playstyles.

- Play some, get barely if ever to 50, move on. Great fun, no real need to use cash shop. You will die to random elites and find instances overtuned and have no clue why (no CS, doh) but no biggie. RoM lets you basically replay WoW levelling and is almost on-par. Spending is entirely optional.

- Play for keeps, optimize character, stick to the game. If you read forums like this you are probabably this kind of player. Bad ballance, too heavy on cash shop, glaring issues everywhere (PvP, AH, craft.. you name it). Spending money or slaving away a lot is needed to take part - and in the end not worth it.

As a sidenote, MMOs can have good PVP. GW had it, Atlantica has it (and is cash shop game to boot), ofc EvE has it but it is completely different from anything most know or expect. Those games are build with PvP in mind.

The issue is most MMOs do not offer much besides the gear/level grind. Once you take gear upgrades and fast levels out the games they feel empty.

You need to find a game that has a lot of varied and interesting content. Back then the concept of MMO was new to us and we were exploring the genre. That is long gone, now we need AAA content - or the fast levels to fool ourselves that we are actually doing anything new.

Any asian grinder will eventually slow down a lot but I doubt that is what you are looking for.

If you want something totally different, EvE has a lot of different things to do and old stuff does rarely get obsolete. But while it is MMO it is not much of a game.

On very basic level - setting and interactivity is wrong. Feedback to your actions does not feel right and the setting is unnecesarily dark all over the place.

Then they put in unfinished features vocal minority demanded - like keeps and PvP servers.

And lastly they tried too hard to make the game fun. Yes, that's right. It is too tiresome to play for long.

It is a sad story of MMO. It could be an incredible game. Maybe next year. MMOs can attract new players for years so there is still hope the heads of Mystic realize what is really wrong with their game and fix it eventually. WAR is one MMO I can imagine joining late and not feel left out.

Crosspost:

It is great game , it only lacks:

- class ballance

- meaningfull PvP

- working economy

- usefull crafting

- community

- advertised features

Unfortunately, that is rather crippling list. Also it has very expensive cash shop. The game mechanics are good and fun though.

Solo one class to 50, dont give them a penny and quit is the way to have most fun in this game.

It is great , it only lacks:

- class ballance

- meaningfull PvP

- working economy

- usefull crafting

- community

- advertised features

What is does not lack is cheap naive attemp at viral marketing. Spend some penny on real advertisement if you are so succesfull as you boast.

Edit: Your "fair just faster" cash shop means that free customers will get *essential* items years after the game closes. And the paying customer will pay what amounts to two years of WoW sub to get first set of lvl 50 gear for RoM.

Big raids were good stunt you can pull off once before the novelty wears off.

Smaller group (but still large enough to not cripple encounter design) content where everyone matters is much more hardcore. Big raids are nice for PUGing where having 70 or 80, skilled or not, AFK or not hardly matters.

WoW had it the other way around and it is highest time it finally dies as the EQ veterans on team grow up. Now if they actually cared to bite the bullet and bring dumbed down raids for PUGs.

Yes, I miss raids. But not for the hardcore elitism. I miss them for the fun and giggles we had where half of people died and the other half was too busy telling jokes to care. I miss them as something easy to do together because doing stuff together is fun.

It is much more accessible and iteractive which is good.

But it mostly boils down to wrestling with the clumsy UI EvE is notorious for, which is disapointment for me. There is not much else to it.

Originally posted by JB47394

I don't want twitch combat in my MMO experience. Twitch combat can be fun, but I burn out on it after a fairly short time.

If anything, I want to go in the other direction. I want to slow down combat so that I can see every detail of what's happening and really savor the action. Half speed medieval combat where the players control the movement of the characters a la Euphoria/Endorphin technology. It turns combat into a lethal dance, and every nuance of a battle can be etched in your memory because you can see it all happen at a pace that lets you understand what's going on. When everyone can keep up with the pace of combat, everyone can participate and make it interesting. Instead of players needing lighting reflexes to block a sword blow with a shield, anyone can do that block - if they've been dancing the dance well enough. If their body is turning the wrong way, or they lowered their shield as part of another move, they'll be unable to get the shield into place. They'll need to parry, dodge or just accept the fact that the sword is going to intersect their body.

It's 10 years out, but that's what I want to see.

Good dance requires certain intellect so my guess is it will not happen on mass market unless dumbed down to repetitive patterns (and then macroed - so it is a lot of effort for nothing at end).

Currently you can get something similiar in EvE. The game has about 1 second response time but due to (simple) physics engine, dogfighting in small spacecraft is possible.

If EvE had better controls and visual clues and more ephasis on smaller ships it would be almost there.

Actually, good physics engine and you get your dream today. I should get paid for this.

Edit: Be carefull about how much skill you really want in a game where everyone plays on the same level. Playing friendly match against all star team may not be fun for you and lead to realization of you true skills. Or the realization that you are wasting them away.

In most cases quest text is just long rant. In say WAR it may be awesome but it is long. In most other games it is just long. The only game that got me and alot of players to read texts was F2P Antlantica. The quest text there is very short and has kid book formating. At times you also get "quests" to retype word from quest text and the fastest way to do that is to actually read the few sentences. It has all the downfalls of poor translation and repetitive content but  people still read the childish soup opera quest text.

What is kind of getting lost in WoW talk is original WoW was quite ballanced. You were getting about the same XP questing or just killing. The biggest downfall were dungeons which did not give enough XP originally and had too large spread of mob levels (literary from zero XP to unkillable). When they fixed that they also bumped up quest rewards a ton so the whole ballance was lost before it was realized. There are parts in WoW like this where fixes came too late and mistakes shaped the game the way it is now. The quests were not clearly the best way to level and the gear was not so dominant and not everything was easy mode. It was all introduced later, due to mistakes becoming popular. Blame the players. The powerlevelling guides were getting more popular as the audience changed. Oh and there was this AQ opening quest line which was quite involved (lets put stupid guild grind aside) and long while only aimed at a few players and this Rhok quest which easily took a week and quite some preparations. They are things of the past.

As for big arrows pointing to your target - there are hardly any tools to find the target other way like tracking or gossips or logical lay of the land. And as for people asking stupid questions: "Mankirk wife" is notorius but is not asking around the natural way to solve such quest?

It is hard to tell what people want from MMO. What I wanted I guess is teamwork without social investment. But i guess times got too competitive and/or crowded. Hosting strangers became thing of folklore too.

I have just tried PW for very short time and blatant grinders are not my cup of tea so i cannot help much. (I have nothing against mob grind per se, just in PW it even lacks the relaxing trance state for me and it lacks other options in playstyle.)

But I can tell you that Runes of Magic have worst PvP you can imagine. Unbalanced classes, long duration crowd control, broken CS items, no incentives. Otherwise RoM is basically PvE game with great levelling (almost WoW quality), broken endgame, crippled market and nonexistant PvP. It is truly free game because levelling can be easily played for free and no reasonable individual will stay after that.

Community? That is strong word for what you find in F2Ps or even WoW.

F2Ps need playerbase to populate the world. They need to recruit new people to sift out those big paying fish. They need to put peer pressure on them once hooked.

They do not need any kind of safe social net that would make you comfortable and feel needed. Actually quite opposite. They create needless competition. The community is fabricated illusion.

What the article talks about is that games need playerbase and good new player experience. Doh.

Edit: Oh the article does not really need to be correct. It just needs to generate page views. And I fell for it. Meh.

The game is... attractive. Colorfull, blinky, cute, collectible, safe.

The combat is shallow and there is not much more to it than that. Also percents of percents of hundreds do not strike me as particulary kid friendly.

Machines with blinking lights, false interactivity and random drops belong to Vegas.

Originally posted by Sixpax

 

This is all just an opinionated spew of crap made out like it's fact and reeks of WoW fanboism. You mention lag several times.

What part of "i despise it" reeks of fanboism? You are imagining things. I give credit where due, not one bit more.

I mention lagspikes once. In instances, where it can be easily controlled and should not be present at all. Rest is issue of game design where they should not have complicated models and bottlenecks and mass events if the engine can not handle it and make better use of channels - but that is more complex issue I can understand.

It is not that RoM has some issues with botting and ballance. It is completely out of whack. Bots are easy to make via in game scripting - not even addons (though those are publicly avaiable too) much less some external programs. Ballance just does not exist - you can have certain class with top DPS, range, AoE, instants, heals and bubble - and everyone can have high HP and defenses. The only thing that prevents RoM from being complete trash is that it is not massively successfull else the goldsellers take over it and turn it upside down. It is not that they get banned - they just don't care much about this game and you can bet the professionals have a good reason. Some minor whines about class ballance are omnipresent in MMOs but in RoM the issue is destroying the basics of economy and party play, or rather completely destroyed it already.

Like every F2P I tried, making honest alts is very expensive. At the same time creating endless accounts as mules, bots or for free giveaways is unlimited and free to powerlevel. As if they wanted you to cheat them.

Also as every F2P it ends up more expensive on average compared to P2P. They need to make more to make up for the instable income. Or in other words, you pay extra tax for the priviledge to decide when and how much you want to pay.

No big issue with that until they start to make parts of game crap to sell more stuff. When it comes to decide between better game vs more money P2P goes one way and F2P the other. Well, most do.

In the end, EvE online is probably the best model - there is limited option to play for free with subscription cards being tradeable in game and you can branch your main into alternate paths. It is way to special in all other aspects though. F2P really needs to get out of scamming mindset if they want to compete with P2P. RoM does not try at all and is run of the mill F2P scam scheme as far as cash shop goes.

Btw: Do not come to F2P with "max" mindset. The ceiling is high to give you the freedom to pay as much as you wish (and in the end too much for what you are getting).

You had to post one insulting picture as a response to my rather coherent post not even bothering to read it or the thread. Or was it response to OP? I doubt even you know. You just mashed some buttons. Fitting for RoM fanboi.

"Grind" is overused term. But countering it with how fast levelling is as much dumb. So what. You reach level cap. You deserve a medal for your accomplishment. Oh wait.

RoM used to replace endless mob grind with basically restricted quest grind. It is like Lineage that will boot you from game for a day after an hour of combat and give you xp in batches every ten mobs. Now that's revolutionary change!

Recent updates added enough quests (some lame "free xp" ones but still) that the daily grind is confined to higher levels of secondary class. More "grindy" games actually allow for more freedom of choice but besides this  the issue was largely fixed.

The game will never get mass success as it is anyway, basically because getting sucessfull would make it into horrible mess - with in-game botting, absolutely botched game ballance (ah forget ballance, that's distant dream, half of classes even serve no purpose as of now), buyable gear, owerpowered yet boring cash shop, instances filled with lagspikes, old content getting less accessible over time, money laundering, direct copies of wow code, you name it.

Every new MMO just shows one thing - how good WoW really was even on release. You may not like the "MMO for dummies" premise (i absolutely despise it) but you cannot deny that companies fail to even copy it properly after years passed. RoM got responsive combat (it is just looks, it lags in backgroud) and seamless world - and stopped right there, exhausted and unable to comprehend core design decisions Blizz made years ago and put on display for everyone to see.