Official MMO Thread

[etiolate]

omg the male regard's /dance

My dude runs like a stiff and then suddenly I'm Beyonce on the dance floor.

[doctavius bonbon]

omg the male regard's /dance

My dude runs like a stiff and then suddenly I'm Beyonce on the dance floor.

Dancing like I got the biggest dick in all of Nirn.

[Positive Touch]

http://i.imgur.com/K7EN7YV.png
http://i.imgur.com/iNJPnT5.png

that on a pentium iii, breh?

[doctavius bonbon]

http://i.imgur.com/K7EN7YV.png
http://i.imgur.com/iNJPnT5.png

that on a pentium iii, breh?

with a 3dfx Voodoo5 5500 AGP

[Freyj]

Old Man River 

[etiolate]

Final thoughts on TESO beta:

Good
-Music
-World seems expansive
-Lots of Elder Scrollsy stuff is nice addiiton. Reading certain books will up skill associated with their subject matter. Read a book about mace fighting, have your sword n board increased. You can sneak around to go undetected. There's stealth quests and you can choose to don a disguise rather than fight to get through an area.
-Skill system has lots of different lines to go down, allowing for lots of customizing.
-Minimal UI

Pretty good
-Graphics are pretty good. Some areas better than others. I think ES bland art style holds it back a bit.

Needs Work
-Combat and movement is floaty and lacks feel. Jumping is like you're in space.
-No Combat feedback via numerical values. You don't see damage numbers. It's really hard to tell what buffs or debuffs you have going. How long is the poison lasting? Which attacks are hitting harder? Who knows. I repeat, there are NO damage numbers, only shrinking health bars. Against certain bosses, this was frustrating as hell.
-Quests NPC spawns are very slow and leads to bugged quests and XP gains drying up fast. I slogged my way to level 10 to try Cyrodil. Quests began to dry up and leveling became much slower.

Iffy stuff
-It has shared mob tagging and loot. That's good. However, it lacks the art of convergence GW2 has to fully make use of this advantage. The quests are designed with single player in mind and it shows.
-Cyrodil, the RVR map, is HUGE. However, it may be too big. I finally got to level 10, took forever to get to an actual fight, and then the game bugs out when I die and I can't rez anywhere.

[Phoenix Dark]

[etiolate]

I'm kind of tired of the idea of "sandbox will solve everything". There's been other sandboxes since Eve. There's others now. Many of them have struggled. Ones like Wizardy Online barely lasted long enough for people to realize it existed.

Variety should exist and I agree that 5 100lb gorillas is healthier than 1 500lb gorilla, and that's sort of where things are going right now. Eve still exists, WoW persists, SWTOR is healthy in audience and money, FF14 ARR did better than I ever expected, and GW2 is the biggest MMO success in awhile. The days of the monolith are ending.

However, there may be actual solid reasons the themepark exceeded over the sandbox. It may be that a sandbox of millions of players together doesn't work. "There shouldn't be a reason concepts like Minecraft can't work on a massive scale." Actually, there is. Think of your school playground. Did all the kids play together? No? Did they sort of spread out themselves? Into their own groups? There's a reason: everyone has to buy into what the group is doing or it falls apart. If Sally comes into your pretend fort and starts turning the guns into talking bananas, everyone else's little game falls apart.

Minecraft works because it's a select group of acquaintances having imaginary adventures in their own little circle of play. Once you invite everyone into that circle of play, then things start getting messy. Everyone blowing up, building, and rebuilding the same limited amount of space will be like the history of mankind happening at a internet consumption pace. Rome will burn ten times a day.

That doesn't mean I don't want more player creativity within the MMO genre. I like player housing and open environments to do your own sort of thing. A good crafting/trade system is very interesting on a massive scale. However, not all things work on a massive scale, and that's an even dicier situation when factor in how toxic the online gaming community has become. Not everyone wants to go log into their game to hang out with hot-pocket fed psychopaths.

I also have issue with how sandbox expects the player to do all the content creation. That's more a social issue with the design though. So is my concern that this is only feeding into a bad consumption cycle.

[doctavius bonbon]

Fuck these beta key giveaways for Wildstar.

Trying to make me jump through hoops and listen to dudes circlejerk over fansite podcasts to beta test a game.  I have no problem filling out feedback surveys and whatnot during and after testing, but this annoys me.

[etiolate]

Yeah, I've been waiting on a Wildstar beta for awhile. Signed up last year. I don't really watch any Wildstar shows, so I probably won't be doing that either. Plus, those are just as much a crapshoot.





DEY GONNA BLOW UP MAH CITY

or maybe

Not sure yet, but they are taking the main city of the game out of play for at least two weeks. Seems it will turn into a battle area. What happens after that is unknown.

Also, another WvW season/tournament announced with still somewhat vague changes.  They need to alter the scoring system before doing another season. They should be testing new scoring systems right now during these weekly matches.

[doctavius bonbon]

I hope they opt to blow up the wubwub maps and their brain dead week long ppt meta game instead. Competitive, tournament style games with variable team sizes will forever be terrible, and no amount of shiny skins and other rewards will change that.  Season 1 was proof enough, with more than half of each league being complete dead weight, and people server stacking to avoid having the shortest stick.

[etiolate]

They went ahead with WvW leagues before WvW was ready for it, so sad to say but I think they'll just forge ahead with the tournament without making needed changes. It's a case where the metrics hide the underlying harm. WvW season boosted WvW participation, but it didn't improve anyone's feelings about the game mode and might have hurt it. Most of the PVE folk still have no idea that the good "zergs" aren't mindless but actually well coordinated and skilled strike teams.

Plus, EotM has sucked a lot of players out of regular maps.


Also, Zenimax lifted the TESO NDA, so we're no longer breaking it!

I'll share what I think is the most interesting part of the game: Nearly everything has a skill line associated with it, and you gain skill points and advance your character skills through those many lines. It's almost POE l ike in the amount of customizing there could potentially be. Your race has a skill line and specific skills you can buy with skill points and then level up. Your class does. Each weapon type does as well. You can be a Nightblade with stealth and also level of Restoration Staff for healing skills. The NPC factions have their own skill lines, such as Fighters Guild and Mages Guild.

It could be a balance nightmare, but its probably cool for PVE.

[Phoenix Dark]

Sounds good, despite the initial negative word of mouth impressions. Still not big on the art style which is kind of bland to me but overall this could be decent.

I'll try it when it goes f2p.

[etiolate]

It's not a bad game. People have hyperbolic, binary responses to MMOs. As of what I've played, it's not as good as the best games in the genre, but it's not anywhere near "terrible". They really need to trash the opening sequence and improve early PVE. Why does it take until level 15 to get weapon swap? That's 10+ hours into the game for what I assume to be a standard part of combat. I get the feeling if they weren't trying to pull a Sub on this that the early leveling experience would be much less of a slog.

I will give the RvR a chance once they change from Sub based. It's not worth the money to me right now. GW2 is better in about every facet and I don't have to pay a dime into it.

[doctavius bonbon]

http://www.reddit.com/r/WildStar/comments/1y2ogi/who_is_the_wildstar_nation/

what will you do for a beta key?  hmm yase show me ur ass gurle

 

[etiolate]

beta 4 beta keys

[etiolate]

wildstar keys here later today (i hope): http://godankey.com/panel/external/VURaUU1BRXg



Got Lion's Arch spoilered by Massively.


Took a bunch of screenshots last night of that area. <3 LA my digital city

Y U DRILL SCARLET

[doctavius bonbon]

thanks for the link broseph.  i may or may not have received a key.

[etiolate]

yeah the site is getting hammered

[doctavius bonbon]

When did you sign up?  Still awaiting a key here, and honestly not too hopeful at the moment.

[etiolate]

got a key, took a few hours to receive

[etiolate]

Isn't your computer like a pentium II? Will probably be a mess for you.

[doctavius bonbon]

i also received a key

lets party for the weekend

[etiolate]

Welp, they completely took out Lion's Arch as a functioning city. I am not sure how long it will stay so or what their future plans are to be for LA. Devs said that for now they're waiting to see where people go to hang out or use as a central hub now that the central hub is literally burning into ruins.

It's also a pretty cool zone and experience. It's slightly different take on the Scarlet Invasions. The entire zone has been designed around these mass-scale events, but there's also refugees tucked away in corners, and rubble with heirlooms to find as well.

Tengu still don't give a fuck about anybody doe.

[etiolate]

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/02/18/world-of-warcraft-instant-level-90-boost-price-revealed-at-60-u/

Post this here, even tho I discussed it in the gaf thread.


docbon: Which faction in Wildstar do you plan to roll?

[doctavius bonbon]

docbon: Which faction in Wildstar do you plan to roll?

I'll be with the dominion. Playing a chua as it most resembles my fursona

spoiler (click to show/hide)

[close]

[Raban]

So there's this five-minute trailer (dailymotion) for version 2.1 of Dragon Quest X and man, I really wish this would come to the west.

[Trent Dole]

DQX was discussed somewhere on here fairly recently. Best guess was when the PC version hits it might come over since there's fuck all for an active international Wii/Wii U playerbase.

[doctavius bonbon]

So there's this five-minute trailer (dailymotion) for version 2.1 of Dragon Quest X and man, I really wish this would come to the west.

It's a shame the Wii U releases were dead on arrival, since DQX looks pretty legit.    If it ever comes around to the west, I could see myself grabbing the game and a month sub at the very least.

[Raban]

If it came out on Wii I would've bought it, no joke. It's strange, DQIX performed so well in the west and Square has been completely silent about X. I get that it's an MMO/the IP isn't the most popular/the platforms are limited but I still think they could've built a decent install base had they released it in the US shortly after the Japan launch.

Not getting this and PSO2 is a real goddamn shame. Two Japanese MMOs that aren't just lazy WoW reskins and we're never gonna get 'em.

[etiolate]

hawt hawt zed pron






Bonus GIF





I still have a bunch of images of Lion's Arch Before/After that I'm uploading.

Gotta start DLing Wildstar. I think i'll roll a human esper on dominion side.

[doctavius bonbon]

A certain server looks packed as fuck on a game.  Can't even get past the initial loading screen.  Gonna make a dude on another server for now.

edit: a minute in and i see some decade old throwbacks to quest npcs with no voice and microscopic text in a box.  actually had to increase the UI size for once in my life, smh.

edit2: holy fuck the floaty movement is terrible. i feel like i'm controlling a spaceship instead of a character.

[doctavius bonbon]

Isn't there an NDA?

ps: is there a way to hide text like gaf's email tag?

[etiolate]

why is the text so small

[Freyj]

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/02/18/world-of-warcraft-instant-level-90-boost-price-revealed-at-60-u/

Post this here, even tho I discussed it in the gaf thread.


docbon: Which faction in Wildstar do you plan to roll?

Yeah I don't even know anymore.

Feels like they should reboot WoW as a DOTA/LOL/Modern FPS kind of multiplayer game with MMO trappings, no levels, no overworld, no professions or anything else that "gets in the way" of content like Dungeons, Raids, Scenarios, BGs and Arenas.

Not what interested me in MMOs eons ago, but sure as shit seems to be what the vocal majority wants.

[etiolate]

I think Blizz gave up on getting new players, so they're trying to milk the Blizz faithful for whatever they can. I'm amazed at the people who said they'd pay $60 to skip to 90. You're paying the company that made the game additional money to skip out on playing a majority of the game all while still paying monthly just to have access to the game. Anyone doing this needs to go to the corner of shame. I realize third party sites were offering this anyways, but that's always been a testament to the meat of the game being 80% boring work.  If you're at that point where you would pay to avoid playing then just quit the game.

[doctavius bonbon]

I was going to dedicate some time for a certain game over this weekend, but after ending my night with a round of PVP in the arena i have come to the conclusion that this game fucking sucks. 

I honestly can't believe I found ESO to be way more enjoyable than this game.

MMOs are dead.

[Freyj]

I think Blizz gave up on getting new players, so they're trying to milk the Blizz faithful for whatever they can. I'm amazed at the people who said they'd pay $60 to skip to 90. You're paying the company that made the game additional money to skip out on playing a majority of the game all while still paying monthly just to have access to the game. Anyone doing this needs to go to the corner of shame. I realize third party sites were offering this anyways, but that's always been a testament to the meat of the game being 80% boring work.  If you're at that point where you would pay to avoid playing then just quit the game.

WoW has been melted down into "get to the most recent raid as quickly and painlessly as possible". This seems like suicide from Blizzard's perspective; more dissatisfied customers sitting around waiting on the next set of content who skipped the content you spent 90% of your time making.

[etiolate]

Consumption cycles are out of hand. I have long felt that people who grew up playing mostly/only an MMO have had their perspective on gaming stunted. They don't understand playing a game simply for the fun of the experience. It's all about reward cycles and general psychopathic behavior.

[Freyj]

Which is sort of hilarious, gear and rewards mean shit on a game's 4th expansion and 10th year. You know that shit is going to be meaningless within a year. It's just a means to an end of having fun.

So you skip all the fun to get to the gear and max rewards as quickly as possible and oops, there's no more fun to be had.

[etiolate]

Which is one reason why having a poor opening experience in your new MMO *COUGH*NDA'd*COUGH* is such a bad idea for the current market.

You shouldn't be ashamed of your open world. These hour long instanced tutorials are a pain. Put people into the open world and get them together as soon as possible. GW2 goes balls out from the start and then releases you to the open. WoW just plops you right down into the world.

[Freyj]

So Wildstar isn't even a passable WoW clone? I fully admit to not really keeping up with the flavor of the month MMOs anymore.

[Damian79]

I was going to dedicate some time for a certain game over this weekend, but after ending my night with a round of PVP in the arena i have come to the conclusion that this game fucking sucks. 

I honestly can't believe I found ESO to be way more enjoyable than this game.

MMOs are dead.

Which game are you initially talking about?

[etiolate]

It's a passable WoW clone. It's WoW with a space theme and MOBA style combat. It's just not passable anymore to just be a WoW clone.

[etiolate]

I'll add this: I was interested in WildStar. I posted Wildstar vids in here before and thought it looked better than TESO and other MMOs on the horizon. I have lost interest over time, and my lost interest has to do with how close to WoW they stayed. I understand what Carbine is doing. They are going after the WoW raider. I just wished they had stayed away from that. The questing is not a great experience. They offer variation in paths, but then close off every path option but the one you choose. So you essentially get a quarter of the PVE play experience you could get.

I was interested in the game's combat, but I found it too MOBA-ish for its own good. Even though we're dealing with a 3d game, skills and attacks play out on a flat overhead 2d plane. I played a ranged caster class. If I went up to 0a higher floor in the pvp area and targeted a foe below me, I could not hit it. My projectile would go straight forward. There is no Y axis within skills. There's no tab targeting style, but there's also no way to hit anything above or below you. It's a bunch of flat circles and rectangles you line up or get away from. They make every main attack a skilshot with a telegraph, but it just adds clutter. I don't need a conal shape in front of my melee strikes. I can tell from the swipe of the attack that it will hit foes in front of me.

And even though its action combat, they still have old diceroll stats like a hit check stat. Why? Why do you need this in action combat? It's just a stat to grind to make the attack function like it should appear to function on screen. Very odd. They also fought their own community over mob-sharing, loot-sharing and quest contribution sharing. It's so weird to stay in the past for no reason other than to stay in the past.

[etiolate]

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/02/24/elder-scrolls-online-will-give-option-to-bypass-starter-island/

good move

[doctavius bonbon]

Also heard they implemented collision detection in PvE for enemies, which is much needed.  If they decide to implement it for enemies in AvA, it'll be a game changer for front line / back line formations. Hoping they'll be able to fit in some weapon impact / animation improvements before the game launches in April, but I'm not holding my breath.

[etiolate]

They're putting in screen shake. They aren't putting in collision detection for RvR because they would have to lower the amount of players and see performance hits in order to do that.

Which is fine by me. Never liked body blocking in Guild Wars.

[doctavius bonbon]

Some dude from Force Strategy Gaming went over some of the recent changes to ESO. He seemed overly excited about no longer being able to walk through solid objects, and made some distinguished mentally-challenged jabs at Warhammer Online for their choice to use collision detection in PVP, but he also revealed some of the changes to this week's build.



What's changed so far:

• Start zones changed.  you now begin in Daggerfall (Daggerfall Covenant),  Davon's Watch (Ebonheart Pact), or wherever the Aldmeri Dominion starts at. Zones rescaled because of this. The original starting islands can still be visited to complete the quest lines and obtain skyshards.
• Combat animation updates, added screen shake effect on hit.
• Collision detection added for all friendly and enemy npcs.
• Combat difficulty increased for pretty much all stages of the game. Dark Anchors much harder to destroy now.
• Leveling curve readjusted to be quicker in the beginning, slower towards the end.
• Addition of dark fissures, which are similar to the anchor events, except meant for solo players.
• More loot in chests and crates and vases and shit.

I'm really curious as to how the fuck they found the time to make all these sweeping changes during the past two weeks. The last test must have been using an older build than we thought.

[etiolate]

I imagine many things were already in the works, such as the dark fissures.

[etiolate]

http://atlas.guildwars2.com/en/#/map

This is actually kind of cool. A lore website for that game that is an interactive map of the game world's map.

Actually, nevermind. There's barely anything on the map at this point except small pictures of art from the Living Story. It needs to be far more extensive than this.

[doctavius bonbon]

http://atlas.guildwars2.com/en/#/map

This is actually kind of cool. A lore website for that game that is an interactive map of the game world's map.

Actually, nevermind. There's barely anything on the map at this point except small pictures of art from the Living Story. It needs to be far more extensive than this.

Yeah, uh... it's garbage atm.

[Phoenix Dark]

Sounds like they need to get rid of the 'starter island' all together.

Wouldn't be a bad idea. Everyone who plays ESO is familiar with MMOs and the tropes that come with the territory now (kill 5 rats for me!).

[etiolate]

There's another TESO beta this weekend. I have a key if someone else wants it.

[doctavius bonbon]

Thinking of rolling a character in the Aldmeri Dominion this weekend since some yootoobers were praising the design of their whole region. That, and I've already exhausted most of the quests in Glenumbra, minus the group dungeon.

edit: It's funny seeing MMORPG.com unable to clear their stock of beta keys for ESO.  Launch is going to be interesting.

[etiolate]

TESO has had repeated negative press and yet I still don't doubt the franchise name alone will give it a sizable launch. It'll be interesting to see how post-launch goes.

Also think Wildstar may be pushed back a bit. There's no release date for it yet, but people were thinking May. It doesn't look ready right now and I am sure they'd like at least a couple months space between their launch and TESO launch.

[doctavius bonbon]

PC Gamer had 1,000 keys available for this weekend's Wildstar test.  Managed an extra key for a bore user during the ten minutes it was still going. If anyone is interested in checking the game out for themselves, send me a PM. My first impressions weren't very positive, but I'd like to see some other perspectives.

[Phoenix Dark]

There's another TESO beta this weekend. I have a key if someone else wants it.

how big of a download is it?

for whatever reason I still haven't uninstalled WoW, even though I haven't played in ages. Subconsciously holding out for f2p I guess.

[doctavius bonbon]

There's another TESO beta this weekend. I have a key if someone else wants it.

how big of a download is it?

for whatever reason I still haven't uninstalled WoW, even though I haven't played in ages. Subconsciously holding out for f2p I guess.

I think it's like 28 gigs.

[Yulwei]

Not going to lie, Wildstar does look pretty fun and I dig the art style. Could be a fun game to play till level cap and then just drop.