Official MMO News And Information Thread of Etoilet Jacking Off Over Shitty GW2

[Phoenix Dark]

I started playing WoW again, 32 Prot Warrior. I also bought a copy of TERA I found at Wal-Mart to get the ~uguu Founders benefits. It's pretty neat but I'm really loving WoW again. I'll get back into GW2 eventually...

Prot War

Prot War

leveling prot warrior 1-60 in vanilla

[ManaByte]

Largest raid in the history of WoW...

[Phoenix Dark]

fuck me...fuck



how big exactly?

[ManaByte]

Only about 13 bosses in a HUGE raid instance:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/8778639/Patch_52_Raid_Preview_Throne_of_Thunder-2_25_2013

[Cerveza mas fina]

I started playing WoW again, 32 Prot Warrior. I also bought a copy of TERA I found at Wal-Mart to get the ~uguu Founders benefits. It's pretty neat but I'm really loving WoW again. I'll get back into GW2 eventually...

Prot War

Prot War

leveling prot warrior 1-60 in vanilla

Leveling resto drood 1-60 in vanilla

Always wondering why my mage friend was so quick

[Cerveza mas fina]

Only about 13 bosses in a HUGE raid instance:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/8778639/Patch_52_Raid_Preview_Throne_of_Thunder-2_25_2013

How many players?

[ManaByte]

Raids in WoW are now either 10 or 25.

[Cerveza mas fina]

Oh man, when you said largest raid I thought they brought back 40 mans and went beyond that.

That would have been killer

[etiolate]

Always preferred the 10 man raids. The more people in the raid the more it turned into a giant office meeting.

[Phoenix Dark]

I remember when our server would have a big 25 man Naxx raid each week; later there would be a 25 man Ulduar, and it continued into the early months of ICC. I prefer 10 mans but those 25 mans were some of the most fun I had with the game. It was basically two guilds plus noteworthy people from the server. I got my earliest raid off-tank experience by doing Naxx; holding down that tank spot each week just felt awesome. And when I got to main tank for the group...it was like the culmination of lots of hard e-work.

Around the Naxx time I was in a small guild that could barely put together 10 mans, so getting to run with the big boys in their 25 man made me feel important lol. But tbh I loved those 10 mans, even when we struggled on shit that was pretty easy. I got pretty frustrated at the time when we would start a raid at 11PM or 12AM due to people getting off work around that time, then spending an hour on an easy boss. Then we'd have other nights where we blew through everything easily.

One time on Heigan it came down to just me and our pally healer being alive, then I died with the boss at super low health. Healer threw down a hammer and one shot him lmao. One of the most awesome things that ever happened in WoW to me

[etiolate]

What I liked about the 10 mans is that they felt far more adaptable. I had a lot of memories of first clears on Alliance side in BC on my Resto Druid. Same at start of WOTLK with Naxx and the Dragons, but on my Ele Shaman.

After tiring out of the zzzz that is healing, I retired my Resto Drood and worked on my Shaman. There was like one other raiding Ele Shaman alliance side, but from my experience playing with Ele Shamans, I knew they could help dps. There was also a lack of Shamans on Alliance side because they were still relatively new. So I went Ele and started rolling heroics with this group from another guild, eventually forming up between four guilds to create this pug to run 10 mans. We ran the quickest Zul Amans alliance side with a Prot War and Feral Druid tank, plus an Ele Shaman, Hunter,  a Boomkin, Shadow Priest, SMITE Priest, and Healing Priest, Holy Pally, plus a Resto Shaman. The two Heroisms did provide cheese, but our raid setup was so unconvential that it was just a lot more fun. Who the hell rolled with a Boomkin, Ele AND a Smite priest? We did and we melted faces. Our Bear run times were starting to outdo the major raiding guild alliance side and I think we just enjoyed proving everyone wrong.

But 25 mans involved bringing in semi-strangers and all their drama.

[Momo]

Guys whats an arena.net? shill to me

[Cerveza mas fina]

40 mans were amazing.

Going to 10/20 mans afterwards felt like some kids game.

[etiolate]

I found Kara runs and bear runs in ZA and 10 man Uldy far more a real challenge than the 25 man stuff.

Really, the real increase in challenge from larger raids comes in organization, politics and prep. You here, you there, etc. Raids that large are designed just to include as many as they can. What becomes difficult is play-space scarcity rather than personal play level.

Momo: ArenaNet are the makers of Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Founded by former Blizzard folk who worked on Diablo 2, Battle.Net and the early development of WoW. Basically, they make kickass games and kickass network tech to go along with them. They brought in some DAOC folk for GW2 to help with their World v World v World mode.

[Momo]

I may jump in at some point, the dude next to me plays guild wars 2 an hour ever day looks fun (except looks kinda furry)

[Cerveza mas fina]

I found Kara runs and bear runs in ZA and 10 man Uldy far more a real challenge than the 25 man stuff.

Really, the real increase in challenge from larger raids comes in organization, politics and prep. You here, you there, etc. Raids that large are designed just to include as many as they can. What becomes difficult is play-space scarcity rather than personal play level.

Momo: ArenaNet are the makers of Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Founded by former Blizzard folk who worked on Diablo 2, Battle.Net and the early development of WoW. Basically, they make kickass games and kickass network tech to go along with them. They brought in some DAOC folk for GW2 to help with their World v World v World mode.

This is really not true.

Plus large raids require real guilds, this is the stuff MMO's were founded on. Organisation, politics etc.

[ManaByte]

I found Kara runs and bear runs in ZA and 10 man Uldy far more a real challenge than the 25 man stuff.

Really, the real increase in challenge from larger raids comes in organization, politics and prep. You here, you there, etc. Raids that large are designed just to include as many as they can. What becomes difficult is play-space scarcity rather than personal play level.

Momo: ArenaNet are the makers of Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Founded by former Blizzard folk who worked on Diablo 2, Battle.Net and the early development of WoW. Basically, they make kickass games and kickass network tech to go along with them. They brought in some DAOC folk for GW2 to help with their World v World v World mode.

This is really not true.

Plus large raids require real guilds, this is the stuff MMO's were founded on. Organisation, politics etc.

25 man runs are still kind of like that.

Etoilet preferring 10 man runs and makes his his viral marketing of GW2 make sense.

[Cerveza mas fina]

I never see etiolate post outside of this thread, is he really a viral marketeer?

[Phoenix Dark]

Raid politics is an art, a delicate dance. You have to juggle so many egos, concerns, and situations...

-The Parent: Often one of the nicer people in the raid, they constantly go afk to attend a crying baby. I've found that nearly every WoW parent I've met plays the game a whole lot, and is pretty damn good; perhaps it's an escape from the boredom and demands of children. Our raids were constantly delayed due to one, who happened to be our best enhancement shaman

-The Girl: Not every female WoW player fits this stereotype, but in my experience there's often a chick in your group who is a semi-casual player/somewhat hardcore raider who hates drama. She'll bail the minute a fight breaks out between raiders, meaning leadership has to keep her happy. Ours was a raid healer shaman which made it even more important to keep her. If people were bitching about The Parent, she would get quite upset and threaten to leave if he left

-The Huntard: Doesn't know the fights, doesn't know the trash mechanics, doesn't know where the raid instance is, etc. All he knows is what loot drops, which he continually links in raid chat alongside his high dps meter reports. Impulsive and inconsiderate, he is often the most hostile towards The Parent.

-The Glue: IE the dude or chick who keeps everything together. Our raid leader was quite an asshole and not good at raid politics, so it was left to our MT and his wife to keep as many people chill as possible. Eventually I moved into that role, constantly sending messages to see how potential problem players were feeling, how folks felt about progression, etc.

-The Professional: IE that guy who knows what everyone should be doing, how long fights should take, how far other guilds have progressed, etc. Arguably the biggest asshole and most contentious, but at the same time helps make your group more effective by weeding out folks who just want to be carried

[etiolate]

So glad I don't have to deal with any of that nonsense anymore. No fighting over loot or gear or tank/healer didn't show up.

Though I'm curious how Guild Missions go. The press that got a preview said some of the stuff like Challenges takes 15 or so people coordinated together to complete. Hopefully not a source of drama.


Momo: It's a good game. $30 on amazon right now if interested. It does have the Charr race, but I imagine the Furries are all on the RP server. Plus, Charr storyline is one of the better storylines so I can't hate.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

[ManaByte]

People are starting to realize how stupid they were for the "lol Kung Fu Panda" jokes:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/03/01/second-wind-world-of-warcraft/#continued

That was when I realized that Mists of Pandaria is about so much more than Kung-Fu pandas and revamped skill trees. It's about more than new dungeons, a new loot crawl, and a new class. The real core of Mists, the main idea, is that the Horde and Alliance have become so wrapped up in their own hatred that they're completely unaware of how it affects the world around them. The Pandaren turn out to be excellent foils to this narrative precisely because they are so cute and unassuming. All they wanted to do was hang out and brew beer, but we had to stagger onto their shores and turn our conflict into their destruction.


The story of two warring factions crusading to claim land they clearly do not own, land with a peaceful, intelligent population already present, is strong stuff. Seeing Pandaria's peaceful culture uprooted by the almost-mandatory fighting between the Horde and Alliance evokes sharp memories of real-life colonization and its effects. And most importantly for the game, it calls into question the entire original plotline of World of Warcraft and forces the player to think about why we're so intent on fighting in the first place.

I'm not super far into the story. But watching Blizzard so masterfully turn its original concept upside-down by asking players to experience the Horde/Alliance conflict through Pandaren eyes gives me great hope for the content to come. I misjudged Mists of Pandaria because of its cute characters and colorful art design, but the savvy quest writing, innovative dungeons and clever tweaks to a game that's nearly a decade old combine to make it quite possibly WoW's second-best expansion (I still loves me some Wrath).

Mists of Pandaria is good. Excellent, even. And if you, like me, have been avoiding the expansion because of an irrational hatred of cute things, it's time to give the new content a look. Perhaps you'll be surprised as well.

[magus]

do you guys know of any good monster hunter clone's? i tried vindictus but all i got was a somewhat repetitive hack & slash which also was mostly played solo,i heard dragon nest might be closer to what i want but there's no european version?

EDIT: oh apparently the ghetto version of dragon nest get released next week so impression would be nice

[Cerveza mas fina]

So glad I don't have to deal with any of that nonsense anymore. No fighting over loot or gear or tank/healer didn't show up.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

What you call nonsense is actually the core of a mmo, social interaction, grouping.

Without all that its just another grind.

The fact I don't have time for this anymore is whats keeping me from really playing one too. So I have to settle for stuff like Diablo.

[etiolate]

I liked Dragon's Nest, but its full of F2P cash shop ads and limited inventory. Vindictus is actually rather good, so I don't know what to recommend you if you don't like that. Tera sort of feels like Monster Hunter but with loli anime.

Kosma: Social interaction doesn't have to involve painful work-place-like politics and squabbling. I'm glad I don't have to hope a drop lands for me, that I win the roll, or that I have the DKP. I'm glad that we didn't lose a member because they didn't get an item and rage quit. I'm glad we aren't all moping about because our tank had a fight with our female healer or that the female healer is flirting with the Guild Leader to get extra benefits from the Guild Stash. I'm glad I don't have to schedule my life around a raid time.

There's still plenty of social interaction beyond those things. They're just far more pleasant interactions.

[ManaByte]

League of Legends Mac Client is out.

Probably going to delete GW2 since it's just wasting HDD space.

[Great Rumbler]

Beta signup for Elder Scrolls Online:

http://signup.elderscrollsonline.com/

[ManaByte]

Beta signup for Elder Scrolls Online:

http://signup.elderscrollsonline.com/

They've been taking signups for a long time.

They're just doing weekend beta events.

[Cerveza mas fina]

I signed up now, curious as always to a new mmo.

[FatalT]

55 in WoW now. Come at me bro!

[MyNameIsMethodis]

fatalt add me to your buddy list im levelling a 51 goblin healer if ur horde

tc2001@roadrunner.com

[etiolate]

Tried out the first Guild Missions today with the GAF guild. The first unlock is the bounty missions' tier 1. When you activate these, it pops up a Mission in your guild tab with a selection of bounties for NPC bosses out in the world with a clue as to their location. You then have to scour the world for them and defeat them. Defeating one per week gets you your weekly bonus. Defeating all of the bounties in the time limit gets your guild merit rewards.

The first Bounty we tried we failed because we couldn't find the targets. Tier 1 was two bounties in 15 or so minutes (I believe). We only found one of the targets after time expired. So we tried it again and got two new bounties, found them and zerged them down. The bosses aren't that hard themselves. Only one of them gave us trouble because it spams confusion onto everyone. We also had like 30 people doing this so we overwhelmed the bounty bosses. So it needs some increased upscaling as is. 

The real challenge was in finding and hunting down the bounties, so in that sense it really felt like a bounty hunting mission. The bosses spawn in random locations with separate paths they follow. You are given a textual clue to the zone they're in when you get the bounty and then fifteen minutes to find and defeat all of them. We did tier 2 afterwards, but prepared for it by splitting up the guild over all the known bounty locations to hunt down the NPCs int he world before starting the mission. Somehow I picked the most annoying of all the bounties to try to track down. It was an escaped prisoner who runs all over the Iron Marshes and you cannot stop her. It's like chasing down Forrest Gump. I had to follow her while the rest of the guild killed the first two bounties, and then I had to refind her as she slipped away from me while I was checking the map. Then when you find the bounty, you can link a nearby location and have everyone waypoint in to fight.

Apparently, they're trying tier 3 tomorrow which is 5 bounties in 5 different zones within 15 minutes.

Overall, I really liked it and I like the improved rewards they have on meta events and zone bosses. You get a rare nearly every time from downing a world boss, but the chest only drops once per day per character. This has increased the activity at dragon spawns quite a bit.

I don't like the attrition of time and gating of the Guild Mission content though. They're gating it behind influence and build queues, so much so that smaller guilds are shit out of luck for getting any of the rewards, and the rewards suck if you're not in the guild doing the guild mission. You can still help and fight the boss since it's all open world, but all you get is regular dynamic event credit.

[Freyj]

Largest raid in the history of WoW...

Already with the Zandalari "please come back" raid? Looks decent, maybe even a little Ulduar-ish. Would like to see maps.

How have raids in Pandaria been?

Plus large raids require real guilds, this is the stuff MMO's were founded on. Organisation, politics etc.

I dunno, around Wrath release our core group had been condensed either by choice or circumstance to around 13-14. Naxxramas, despite being easy as shit, was a lot of fun with that core group of players, unencumbered by drama and politics. The only thing that broke up that party was Blizzard's grand idea that 10 man loot should be a degree shittier than 25 despite 25 being easier in a lot of respects, and gear in WoW is the ultimate carrot on a stick so everyone split off into various servers/guilds, only for Blizzard to realize that 10 man was just being used for late-night alt runs a patch or so later.

I still have a lot of good memories of 40 man raids, it certainly provided a lot of entertaining server drama, but thinking back I never really played with a 40 guild that I really liked more than 15 people in. Maybe, at best, 15 I was neutral on, 5 I didn't care for and 5 more I REALLY didn't care for. Well, there was one, but that was a rare thing and the introduction of the only PVE -> PVP free server transfer ever (Shadowsong to Black Dragonflight) happened about 2 months after I joined and fucked everything up.

10 was a good fit for balancing fun and challenge. The only real problem I saw was the 2 healer standard run made certain fights more of a pain in the ass than really should've been.

[Phoenix Dark]

Few things are more fun than getting a solid group of 10 for a raid, preferably folks you've been playing with for ages.

And yea Naxx was easy but generated a surprising level of competition. Basically with a lot of "who's gonna die on this easy boss lolol" challenges

[Freyj]

And yea Naxx was easy but generated a surprising level of competition. Basically with a lot of "who's gonna die on this easy boss lolol" challenges

Most of those challenges involved alcohol. Good times.

[etiolate]

Yeah, whenever it was alt run night and I got stuck healing with my friend, we both would get a hefty supply of liquor to maintain ourselves through the whack-a-mole marathon of Naxx.

[Phoenix Dark]

And then when Ulduar first came out oh boy, fun times. Hard modes were my favorite shit. We spent so much time on Firefighter that we never really focused on the last boss; eventually we got the Firefighter achievement and cleared everything else except Yogg

It sucks because if I kill Yogg now and get the achievement everyone will be like "haha welcome to the party newbie." God dammit I was farming hard modes before you were born

[Cerveza mas fina]

We'll catch a "tiny" glimpse of vampire MMO World of Darkness at this year's Eve Online Fanfest in late April, maker CCP has told me.

The secretive MMO is being played internally, CCP CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson said, and has benefited from the restructuring that once looked like it had killed the project.

 "It's going on very nicely," he told me. "A great example of focus and clearer priorities.

 "We're playing it internally at CCP. It's actually a problem that some of our employees are losing themselves already in the World of Darkness as we go through the playtests.

 "And we'll be showing a tiny piece of that also at Fanfest. So that is all I have to say about that at this time."

 The last we heard of World of Darkness was in summer 2012 when the game was classed as in "active development".

 The game's senior producer Chris McDonough had, months earlier at Fanfest 2012, taken to the stage to proclaim the project not dead after restructuring at CCP seemed to hit the World of Darkness Atlanta office hardest.

McDonough offered some detail about the game as well. He said it will feature real-world city locations like London, Paris and New York, and will be built on a sandbox philosophy with deep political systems that can put player Princes in charge of cities.

 Those Princes will also have the power to inflict permadeath on other players, gulp.

There will be complex hand-to-hand combat and blood will be used as a currency. Inspiration is being drawn from Vampire: The Masquerade.

[ManaByte]

Guild Wars 2 bomba, no expansions planned:
http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/05/no-guild-wars-2-expansions-currently-planned

"Expansions are definitely something that we’ll potentially look at in the future," he explained. "We don’t have a timetable on it. We’re open to it, but I think our major focus as a studio is making the living world concept as strong as possibly can for the players that we’ve got."

That's the PR-friendly way of saying "our game has entered maintenance mode".

[etiolate]

If you closely read my comments earlier in the thread, you would have seen I sort of got wind of this thing. I first heard whispers of this a month or two back.

"We want to be able to have teams that are literally developing new, innovative features that change the way that you play our game and grow that experience so it literally feels like you don't leave Guild Wars 2," he explained. "Guild Wars 2 becomes Guild Wars 2.5 or Guild Wars 3 and it continues to grow.

They're basically considering having what their expansion team has been working on become live content without the need to buy an expansion. You can sort of see this with their Living Story feature, though that content has been really minimal. They say the big stuff hits next month, but right now its just a few events and a parade of refugees walking through the world towards the Norn and Charr city. It could be that the Living Story acts as a prelude for what they plan to release later.

I think their logic is this: We (ANet) are making money with this game. Our profits have increased since launch. We could launch the expansion and then sell it to those who are playing the game, but that means new players will need to buy the GW2 + expansion.  So we will have to discount GW2 earlier than we need to in order for new players to feel less inhibited price-wise. The thing is that we don't need to launch the expansion soon to make money with the way things are going. Considering that, we could just release a lot of the expansion content we're working on as a patch, advertise that your getting a free expansion, and keep the cost to new customers the same as it is now. Essentially, have a second launch-like atmosphere and keep the new customers coming. Since profit comes from box sales and gem sales, we might get more new customers to match the lack of box sales from charging for an expansion.

The other possibility is that the launch team's content just isn't ready to release as a paid expansion. But from what Daewoo said and from what I've heard, it seems their plan is to expand the world without the need to buy an expansion. They did a similar thing in GW1 with Sorrow's Furnace, a brand new area and item type put into the game for free.

[etiolate]

Mana posted a thread about Garriot's new kickstarter, so I don't need to bother with that news.

http://www.swtor.com/info/news/blog/20130307

New blog about the Hutt stuff in SWTOR. I think pushing a chaotic entity within that universe is good for the game. As I haven't heard any doom and gloom since the F2P transition, I assume the change has steadied the game.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/03/07/how-guild-wars-2-plans-to-survive

The rest of the IGN interview Mana posted. There's a video interview with Chris Whiteside that I haven't seen before either.

Here's the only part you folks care about:

An industry veteran of over 15 years who’s worked on other MMOs including the original Guild Wars, Johanson admits that the decision to make an MMO shouldn’t be taken lightly; failure comes at a high cost. “It takes some serious balls to jump into the MMO industry and go after it,” he admits.

“You’re basically betting your company any time you decide that the thing you’re going to make is an MMO. They take so long to make, and they take so much money that either you’re successful and you’re going to do really well, or you’re not and your company’s toast. If you have a really big backer, maybe you can survive that but it’s a huge risk.”

The fact that such a gamble appears to have paid off not once but twice for ArenaNet is not something to be sniffed at. Aside from managing to shift over 3 million copies in the six months since it launched, Johanson also informs me that Guild Wars 2 has bucked one of the main MMO trends by seeing player numbers continue to rise during what would usually be a post-launch slump. The six weeks following Christmas saw increasing numbers of people eager to explore the world of Tyria, making Guild Wars 2 one of very few MMOs to launch, settle into its core playerbase and then actually start to grow again (EVE Online would be perhaps the only other prominent example of this unusual trend).

He also touches on the Ascended gear debacle, but I am still highly wary of what they're doing there and with the gating content on Guild Missions. I can buy that they meant for Ascended gear to be in at launch, but horizontal progression needs a certain ease of access that Ascended gear doesn't allow, and if they really want people to play their natural way, then the limited ways to get Ascended gear doesn't fit that. (Nor do Guild Missions.)

[ManaByte]

Brad McQuaid is working on EQ again.

[ManaByte]

Been playing a lot of PlanetSide 2 this week:

[etiolate]

I tried Planetside 2 the other week. I am going to need to watch some tutorials on it, because there's a lot going on once you hop in and it didn't all make sense. After I finish moving, I'll probably try it again.

[Freyj]

Didn't Planetside 2 have a bunch of pay2win bullshit or am I thinking of the wrong game?

[Dickie Dee]

From what I'd heard it's one of the cheaper "free" games to play

[etiolate]

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/03/13/f2p-doubles-tera-playerbase/

Whether it is because of the lure of the action combat model, the graphics, the fact that no content is locked behind a payment gate, or something else entirely, folks have flocked to the fantasy game since it went F2P a month ago. In fact, TERA's playerbase has swelled by over 500,000, doubling the number of registered users to over one million and causing En Masse to open up six new servers in order to meet the demand.

F2P working well for Tera. Not sure about the economic impact for them. I'd try it again sometime but the questing and the pervs hold me back.

[etiolate]

Wildstar looks to be the most interesting MMO coming up. Their player housing stuff sounds pretty cool.

[Cerveza mas fina]

Looks too much like WoW graphics wise

[etiolate]

F2P works well for the current market. It's not really a judgement of a game's quality.

The market is going to change from the string of "I wanna be WOW" nuclear budgeted MMOs to more and more variety of MMOs with more modest budgets and different price models and business structures. MMOs will go from a singular monolith and a bunch of attempts at being that monolith to multiple varients. People think there's no MMOs coming in the future, but just visiting Massively everyday will show you there's a ton of MMOs in development. They just aren't all big license big budget hype machines. TESO is probably the last of those types.

When SWTOR didn't do what Bioware and EA wanted, but Guild Wars 2 did what it wanted and more then it changed things and probably changed investor's perspectives. Stuff like Camelot Unchained and Wildstar are more in line with the future of MMOs. If you are a MMO looking to be made right now, you're either going in a new direction or you're going in a real old school sandboxy direction. Nuclear budget wow-clones with sub models are dead. Even TESO sounds more and more like GW2.

[ManaByte]

They just aren't all big license big budget hype machines. TESO is probably the last of those types.

Uh, EQ Next will be pretty big. But it'll likely follow all of the SOE games in being F2P while still having a subscription option.

If you are a MMO looking to be made right now, you're either going in a new direction or you're going in a real old school sandboxy direction.

Which is why they scrapped the themepark EQ Next and the game is a sandbox now. Beta isn't this year, but "something" will be out after SOE Live in August.

[Cerveza mas fina]

Eq next is sandbox? Hottttttt

Where do you get this from mana?

[ManaByte]

Smed announced it at EQ Live last year:
http://eq2wire.com/2012/10/18/soe-live-2012-welcome-reception-live-refresh-for-updates/

"I have to be honest with you. We have completely blown up the design of EverQuest Next. For the last year and a half we have been working on something we are not ready to show. Why did we blow up the design? The design was evolutionary. It was EverQuest III. It was something that was slightly better that what had come before it. IT was slightly better. What we are building is something that we will be very proud to call EverQuest. It will be the largest sandbox style MMO ever designed. The same exciting content delivered in a new way. Something you've never seen before. The MMO world has never seen before. We didn't want more Kill 10 Rats quests. We didn't want more of the same. If you look at the MMOs out there, they're delivering the same content over and over again. So are we. We need to change that. When we released EverQuest, we changed the world. We want to do that again with a different type of game.

What I will commit to is, at the next Fan Faire, not only will you get to see it but you will get to touch it. Most of the EQNext devs are in this room. If you get them drunk enough they might tell you. They're led by Dave Georgeson. Terry Michaels. Vets from EQ and EQ2. We are remaking Norrath unlike anything you've ever seen, but you'll recognize it. I'm sorry we don't have anything to show for it, but I wanted to be honest with you and tell you a little bit about it. Keep the faith."

[Cerveza mas fina]

Sandbox is exactly what I what would make me interested in investing some time in a mmo again.

[ManaByte]

Sandbox is exactly what I what would make me interested in investing some time in a mmo again.

That and SOE's F2P setup is probably my favorite, with Turbine a close second. I just pay the $20 a month for everything (gets you unlimited access to EQ, EQ2, PS, PS2, DCUO, FR, etc) but even as a free player you can play to max level. PS2 is probably the best F2P model of all their games, but they're patching EQ and EQ2 this week to match it.

[archie4208]

Apparently EQ1 got rid of all the race/class F2P restrictions.  Might download it again for a nostalgia rush.

[etiolate]

EQ Next will be hyped, but we don't really know anything about it except for vague promises of sandbox and revolution. I am waiting for some more solid info on the project.

SOE is actually set up well for the changing MMO landscape. Curious to see what Blizzard does with Titan. They can't go the WoW route this time.

[Great Rumbler]

Apparently, Elder Scrolls Online is going to have a working first-person mode.

[ManaByte]

Elder Scrolls Online is TOR with a fantasy skin pack. Same stupid distinguished mentally-challenged engine that instances EVERYTHING.

[ManaByte]

Played Neverwinter today. Did the highest level dungeon currently open in the beta weekends and some PVP.

It's the F2P game GW2 wishes it could be. Very impressive.

[ManaByte]

Played more Neverwinter. Compared to DDO it's the best D&D MMO. Loving the combat.