MMORPGs

well all data is a few months old . Last i heard it had held steady for 2 months nov - dec . But when it was climbing sony was making tons of anouncments . That was a crap game .

Well last night during an end of the world party a group of 5 of us (lvl 18 , lvl 21 , lvl 25 , lvl 25 and another guy that was lvl 20ish) were killed by a lvl 33 very quickly . That is with out the second profession in the game .

I don't know about ac . But it sounds like while you keep getting more xp you don't lvl thus your capped .

Lineage 2 even though u get sp after you get all the skills you can the sp becomes useless unless your blood pack leader (guild) and use it to up the guild but even then you can only go up to lvl 5 and then sp is useless once again .

So they do cap .

I want quick lvling because with school and a job i don't have 6 hours a day to play the game anymore .I have an hour or two a day if less. Mabye on a sunday 4 or 5. I want to make progress and not go yey this week i got 15% of lvl 10 . I want to say wow i got to lvl 12 this week and i started at just lvling 11 .

I also want my friends who have even less time to be able to keep close to my lvling speed.

I don't want it to be that if i have 6 hours a day and he has 6 hours a week that when he comes on he is lvl 10 and i'm lvl 80 and if we group and kill monsters his lvl (no fun for me other than his company) he wont get any xp or i wont get any xp. Or if we group and kill monsters my lvl he will die often and barely get xp (Because they are so high up)

I also don't want equpiment being ultra rare drops . A d grade staff drop in lineage 2 is .0045% chance of a drop . Or i can spend 400k . Which is half of what i made from lvl 1-20 which had all been spent on gear to get to that lvl . THen forget it if i die and loose that staff .

My friends wouldn't play if the lvling took weeks to move. The gear was very expensive and at any second someone can kill you and get the gear you worked your ass off for .

I'm sure there are people that love that kind of game . I am sure for those who like to pvp and gank others they will love lineage 2.

But for someone who wants to be able to log on and do quests and role play with their friends it is not fun having that amount of down time .

THe system in lineage 2 is old . Ancient even carried over from a game that was meant to be pay by the hour and then went to a standard monthly fee. That is where the down time and grind came in . They figured more hours you spend doing stupid things like hunting bats for 5 hours to gain 1% of a lvl the more money they would bring in .


It shouldn't be needed .

Gvg , dueling . They are both great if you actually want a challenge. You know who your fighting. You can use the ladder system to see who is to high for you or to skilled and who is to low .

You can wager items at the start . Even in guild vs guild everyone can wager something .

There are a ton of pros to this system .

Now if your a ganker I can see where there are alot of drawbacks .

As i said last numbers i saw were 80k (down from a 100k in april) it could very well be down to 50k or less right now . They closed down enb after they found out that most of the uxo staff wasn't moving to LA . The enb devs have posted saying it was a surprise to them and they only found out a few days before the news . So i believe it went down like this . Uxo looses most of its dev staff . Enb doing badly is closed. Experianced devs go to uxo . Enb even at 80k is a far cry from the 6 year old uo that just hit its highest subscriber rate ever. They figure another ultima game will be able to get around that number too. With enb continuing to loose players it seems like a no brainer to me .

 

Ty's right. SWG plateuad at about 300k subscribers and is now probably closer to 250k. They lost a lot of people in the past few months.

Well, I don't have 6 hours a day to play a game either. That still doesn't mean that I want to ruin a game by demanding that I should be able to max my char with little time investment in a short time.

Frankly, what's it to you? So it will take you 1.5 years to max your char while the hardcore gamers might be able to do it in 6 months. Does this bother you or something?

As long as I am be able to experience all content at my own pace, I don't care if other players are faster than me. Or is there some game design commandment that says "All players shall advance at the same pace, so spoketh the Lord"?

So trivialze the game to the point where everyone can max their chars with little effort? Sorry, that's a crappy solution for games built around the idea of character advancement. If those games aren't for you, well, there are other choices. UO, Horizons, SWG... hell, even DAOC lets you max your char pretty quickly and after that it's all PvP.

That's inevitable unless you do away with the whole concept of vertical character developement and levels and such. And it is utterly pointless to complain about this problem in a game built around vertical character developement. It's how the game works and letting people max their chars in a few weeks destroys that basic gameplay concept.

It's kinda like complaining that you can't strafe jump in a point-and-click adventure. If you want to strafe jump, play an FPS. Likewise, if you want to get rid of the level division in MMORPGs, play an MMORPG with horizontal character developement like SWG.

That being said, upcoming games will look into the level gap problem. EQ2 will have a "fellowship" system in which players can split EXP with other players even if they aren't online. It won't be effective enough to drag someone who barely plays through the levels or to powerlevel someone but it will help friends to stay closer in level to each other.

Again, in the context of an MMORPG it is 100% pointless unless it contributes to character developement or at least has SOME tangible in-game effects. Being first on some ladder list means nothing unless that is actually the goal of the game. In that case, everything BUT the ladder competition is kinda pointless.

This has zero to do with being a ganker. I merely made an observation that PvP that has little to no in-game consequences won't work. Why waste time with it? In DAoC you can't just gank anyone and PvP has a meaning. DAoC's realm based PvP let's you advance your character horizontally even after you hit the level cap. There is actually a point to it (like capturing relicts which strengthen your realm).

100k in April? Funny, considering that EnB only sold about 53k boxes...

Games with 50k subscribers don't get closed down. EnB peaked at 40k subscribers and that was in April/may 2003. Since then the number of subscribers has decreased dramatically. Considering that most companies tend to overstate their subscriber numbers, even the latest estimates of 25k subscribers seem to be a bit on the high side.

25k subscribers would have meant that EnB generated about $4 million in revenues a year. You don't blow $4 million in the wind for no good reason either unless cash flow becomes negative.

Nice theory, highly unlikely though.

The problem is that EnB never even had half of the 80k you mention.

Hm, personally, I think UXO will fail. It's too different from UO to attact the gamers that enjoy UO type of gameplay. And if they want to attract those potential customers that are more into an EQ-like game they will have to compete with 800-pound gorillas like SOE (EQ2), Blizzard (WoW) and Microsoft/Sigil (Vanguard).

UXO will get stomped and will become just the latest of EA's MMO failures (remember Motor City Online and Sims Online).

 

From http://pw1.netcom.com/~sirbruce/Subscriptions.html

Supposed to be the most accurate data available.

 

Hard to tell how accurate those numbers are but they are the best we've got.

Especially the Asian MMORPGs companies sometimes publish outright ridiculous numbers (like 5 million Lineage subscribers or 17 million Ragnarok subscribers).

The numbers for western MMORPGs seem to be a bit more accurate but they aren't too reliable either. There is no way AC2 has 25000 subscribers. From what I have heard, player population peaks at maybe 1000 during peak hours and rule of thumb is that ~20% of the subscriber base is playing at peak hours.

 

Anyone here anything good/bad about dark and light??

later,
epic

 

Those numbers can't be right uo just announced its highest subscriber rate ever which is above 275k . Which according to that chart it had to gain 50k people in 2 months .

Still doesn't mean what i said isn't true. That whena game is climbing in numbers is the only time devs talk about subsriber rates for their games . When swg was climbing they were making noise and now they are silent .

No one said you should be able to max a char in a week.

But there is no reason why there should be so much down time and so much grinding in the game. They can at least make leveling fun and interesting as well as quick (compared to lineage 2 / uo early days / eq)

There is no reason it will ruin a game as the advancement is still there its just that instead of a week or more to gain a lvl you need a few days .

There is no reason that from lvl 19 -20 my exp from wandering eyes drops from 700xp to 500xp and all i gained was one lvl . I don't kill them any faster even with full d grade weapons and armor . Mabye a half a spell faster . I can still easily die against them though .

But yet the lvling just became much much harder and time consuming. Why is that ?

personaly i don't care waht anyone else is doing except my friends. A power gamer will come max out and leave and is never my problem unless there is open pvp.

You don't have to trivalize anything . There can still be other ways to go about it than to make all chars lvl insanly fast . Like more xp for a lower lvl char fighting higher lvl mobs even grouped. Special quests that will help you lvl quicker . There are other ways to fix the problem than just have those lvl insanly faster .

But to make them lvl so slow only casts more light on the problem .


I don't like pvp . I want quests . I want to have a mmorpg . Not a mmofps .

I want to get on and adventure with my friends and role play . Something that is lacking in those games you mentioned even in lineage 2 .

There is barely any story and your char doesn't affect it at all .

The only thing a mmorpg has in commen with a rpg is char lvling .

and there is a game that lets you gain xp while your logged off . Nice ideas but not the right idea . The eq 2 idea sounds easily exploited. ! big guild of about 80 people all pick the lowest char in the guild to send xp too and vola quick power lvling .

So how is pvp a goal of lineage 2 ?

So one game where the point is pvp. Still where is the point of pvp in lineage 2 .

Yes good reasoning except you forget the fact that for months it was part of an ea game pack with the sims online , it was avalblie to download free of the net and it was included free with pc gamer and other mags 4 times . Not only that but all the game codes they sent players (I was sent 5) which means all someone had to do was download the client put the code in and they have a weeks free play . Many many people did this. I had 3 friends subsrbie because of this .

fits with info we have .

Why would they make it like uo. Uo is still making tons of money why kill it ? Yes they are going after more of an eq game and eq is going more after a uo game type play with eq2 . But that is smart. Keep the current userbase while using the brand to get in another type of subsriber .

Uxo has many advantages to eq2 and wow and we all see how important mmorpgs are to ms .

As for mco that was free. I never payed to play it so to compare it to other games like eq isn't fair. I agree that sims online failed. But then again it was just a bad idea .

and how much do you think the servers were worth. Those servers and connections could be used in another mmorpg and save money on start up costs . Oh and its funny but uxo is now supposed to come out october - november just a month or two after enb goes down for good .

 

Dark and Light is one of the games that sound very interesting on paper. Same with Trials of Ascension, Mourning, Darkfall and Ryzom.

Problem is, when I read through what's available on their sites I'm getting the early Horizons/Shadowbane vibe all over again.

Horizons initially promised a ton of really cool things (aerial combat, blood feuds etc.) and now look at the POS that was released. Same with Shadowbane. Nowhere near feature complete, the cool stuff never made it into the games and both games were released with a ton of bugs. And worst of all: very little content.

So it's really hard to tell. After all these horrible mmorpg releases we have seen in the past few years I have become a bit wary of mmorpgs done by small, unknown and probably unexperienced developers. I don't think they have the ressources to create an mmorpg that can truly compete with what's already out there, much less with whatever the big guys have up their sleeves.

So I just assume that all those games will go the way of Horizons and Shadowbane (it's not that huge an assumption). That way I won't be dissapointed but I can still be pleasantly surprised.

If you're interested in MMORPGs, have a look at EQ2, WoW and maybe Lineage 2 and City of Heroes. I doubt we'll see Vanguard earlier than 2006. Everything else will probably fail. Doesn't mean you can't keep an eye open on those games, I just wouldn't get my expectations high.

 

The sources for those are press releases and interviews etc. The latest number I managed to find on the UO site was 250k in September 2003. Do you have a link for that 275k number?

Who said one week? Sorry but if you want a casual gamer to max his char in, say, 4 months while playing 10 hours per week then a dedicated gamer will eat through the game in one month and then quit. What's the point?

Then go somewhere else and kill bigger stuff instead of killing the same shit over and over again. Didn't you just complain about grinding?

Because that's kinda the point of a persitant world. To keep people playing (and paying subscription fees, of course). MMORPGs are supposed to last a long time.

I don't think MMOGs can be designed to have their content consumed in even as few as 1000 hours and be successful. What draws me to the game is that I can log on at any time for basically any amount of time and have something to do. It is an entertainment venue that is able to replace something like a TV or any other mundane entertainment that is prevalent.

I log in and the same people that I talk to are also there day in and day out. Year after year. Can't have that if you design your game so that you can eat through the content in a manner of weeks or a few months. People would just get bored and quit.

Excuse me but how do "Special quests that will help you lvl quicker" not make you lvl faster? How does giving more exp not make you level faster. You're not making a whole lot of sense right now.

So what if there were 200 levels instead of 50 levels but you would reach individual levels 4x faster? Would you still complain that it takes too long to get to 200?

Jesus, why they hell aren't you playing UO? Seems like the ideal game for you. Maxing you character doesn't take too long and then you can roleplay or do whatever you like.

Do you think that the people who are currently running the most successful American MMORPG (EQ) are inept or something? How about limiting fellowship size?

Maybe you should read up on the game before having an opinion about it. Clan/alliance and castle siege based PvP is what L2 is all about. The possibility to gank is just a secondary feature (which is btw. highly discouraged by their pvp system).

Yes, clearly a sign of desparation, don't you get it? You don't give a game away for free when people are actually buying it. And granting a couple of tens of thousand players a trial period with a free game client doesn't mean they are subscribers.

Someone who signs up for the game and gives it a try isn't a subscriber. Obviously, EA gave away the client and game time for free in an act of desparation, lured tens of thousands of players into the game and then took a "subscriber" snapshot. 100k subscribers my ass. I wonder how many of those 100k actually paid even a cent in subscription fees.

Obviously, only few people became _real_ subscribers (as in paying customers) after the trial period ended or the the game would still be around. Your three friends aren't a valid sample.

Compared to the developement costs the costs for hardware is trivial. It just doesn't make sense that you shut down a game just because you want to reuse a bunch of servers. EnB was shut down because it was losing money and it was losing money because it was a huge flop.

I know that UXO doesn't try to cannibalize UO's subscriber base. I was trying to make a point that whatever UXO does, it won't have a chance to succeed in my opinion. Maybe they can attract enough subscribers to not lose cash and keep the game running. I hope they do. I don't think they will become a major player on the market though.

By the way, EQ2 has absolutely NOTHING in common with UO. You seem to talk an aweful lot about games you obviously don't know anything about.

I don't think you know enough about EQ2 to make that assessment. Either way, I'd like to hear about the "many advantages" UXO has to EQ2. If it's anything like that "click-to-swing" abomination of a battle system then I'm not interested.

MCO was $9.99 per month.

 

I agree ... but I also think 3 lvl25s should be able to take down one lvl50.

So why did enb cap you so hard you maxed out three characters in 3 months? Capping is merely the ultimate slow down (a dead stop).

Marco

 

WRT to EnB closing:

I disagree completely. Your theory assumes EA made this decision in a vacuum. It's as if EA decided, "Hey, let's move everyone down from EnB". Then enough of the EnB staff go, "No". Then EA goes, "Hey, let's close down OSI and move them onto taking care of EnB". And enough of the UXO staff go, "No". And then EA goes, "Whoops! Guess we have to shut down EnB because we weren't thinking enough to ASK them ahead of time".

That just does not make much sense to me. More likely it went like this. EA looks at the numbers (trending downward) and says, "We're closing EnB down. Some of you folks can relocate but we're not extending offers to everyone".

 

I never said there weren't any other factors . Yess the loss of subsribers and the dwindling numbers affected their moves . Yes I"m sure sure that the time frame made for the ending of enb was done to pass the two year mark and to line up with uxo being released.

The loss of devs on the uxo project meant that ea could easily move the enb team to uxo with out having to worry about new content for enb .

There are alot of reason why uxo loosing devs is connected with enb closing down. There are also alot of reasons why enb being shut down is connected to uxo moving .

with out a cap then epics will quickly become un epic .

Its as simple as that . With out a cap at some point someone would be able to take the gate by itself . A feat that normaly took about 100 people to do .

That is why your capped in every single game be it lineage 2 , enb , uo or everquest .



L233- I don't want to arguee with you. We both want diffrent things from a mmorpg. I want something i can have adventures in with my friends and a good story line with quests and things to do besides killing bats or fedexing crap . You want a constant grind so that there will allways be those lower than you to pvp.

I can see you wanting pvp. But thats not the only way a mmorpg has to be made . A mmorpg can also focus on the rpg part .

I know alot about eq2 . I keep an eye on all mmorpgs and read about them all . Yes its not a clone of uo . But it is much closer to uo than uxo is and is moving in the uo direction where as uxo is moving towards the eq1 direction .


As for advantages why don't you see the questing sections of the uxo site .

Perhaps then I got it at the end of its life. MCO is the one where you build cars and race against others while getting money to buy new cars and parts ?

Well I can download planetside from fileplanet and play for 15 days free and then just sign up and not ever need to buy the game . I could do the same with uo and a few other games too .

Late in a games life if no expansions are coming out its a smart way to get more subscribers . After all they make more off a subscriber than someone who buys the game and plays it for only the free month .

Not all games are eq that when sales stop going and the playerbase starts dropping they ready a new expansion pack.

 

The thing with this is that you could not make enough content to keep up with players.

Typically what's done is you can safely kill things +10-15 of your level in a group. Then there are cut off points where if it's +20 you cannot kill it even if you bring mass numbers.

This helps keep content flowing and you can predictably manage how much the players can consume and when.

If a game has a max limit of lvl 100, and 10 lvl 50s can kill that lvl 100. Nearly all content from 51-99 become no challenge and useless.

Some games Lineage 2, that "ability to kill" higher mobs is at 5+. Horizons it was 15-20 depending on class. EQ it was pretty much 3-8 depending on level range...

Speng.

 

Of course you could allways just add in content that would take 10 - 20 lvl 100s to kill . That way it would take a 100 lvl 50s to kill it .

 

The higher up on the curve the less players there are, at some point you simply cant justify developing content anymore for such players ... once you get there you might as well switch to a linear increase in power, better for PvP IMO.

 

One thing many EQ players, myself included, became jaded about was the escalation of raid size. It's a variation of MUDflation.

What happened was that players would trivialize content by bringing enough people to make sure a raid (on a dragon or god or whatever" succeeded.

So initially it took like 30 people to take down a dragon and it was a gamble. The enounter was designed to be challenging for that number of players. Once enough high level players were available, they just brought 36 or 40 and the encounter was trivialized. The developers had never thought that players could organize raid forces so big.

So in the next expansion, they designed the encounters to be challenging for 40 players. The players brought 50.

This escalated with every consecutive expansion and at the time of the Planes of Power expansion 80-120 man raids (which turned out to be the technical and practical limit) weren't uncommon.

And this was bad, to say the least. It made me quit EQ. First of all, people who weren't in a big guild couldn't progress anymore. It also killed the sense of achievement. Being one face in a crowd of 100 zerglings isn't fun. It wasn't challenging either because if you screwed up there were 100 more people to correct your mistake. The raid size escalation was a major problem in EQ which they only managed to address recently since instancing became viable. The last two expansions centered around instanced content for limited raid sizes but IMHO EQ is already broken beyond repair.

What you are proposing is to make raid size escalation a basic design feature and it would mean instant death for a MMORPG. Players will bring as much manpower as neccessary. So if you make it possible for 100 lvl 50 players to kill content designed for 20 lvl 100 players you will end up a large part of the player base consuming content not designed for their level. And that would make virtually all non high-end content pointless.

I get the impression that you didn't really think through the ideas you are proposing, be it fast leveling or mid level players being able to consume high-end content. You should take the overall balance and the effects gameplay into consideration. Some things are simply neccessary to ensure the welfare of the game.

 

But remember not everyone wants pvp . I don't want pvp .

THat kind of thinking is bad for pve

 

ok so here is a 'small' list of future mmorgps:
-eq2
-wow
-lineage2
-vanguard
-city of heroes
-uxo
-ffxi (out already)
did i miss anything big?

Anyone want to give me a quick heads up on what is good/bad about the games listed above. Ive only just started reading up on some of these games, and would appreciate a more seasoned perspective.

thanks
epic

 

I can give you some information on L2 if you'd like to have it. I've played all through the closed beta.


Honestly the art direction of EQ2 sucks.


You missed Ryzom. I doubt the game will take off though. Its being produced by a French company that i doubt can compete against the already widely established American, Korean, and Japanese titles.

 

yeah any info/opinions would be greatly appreciated. Please be as specific as you want (id prefer as much as possible. ).

What do you mean the art direction for eq2 sucks? Some of the screen shots look nice. The enviromnent doesnt look as good as dark and light, but not every game can be awesome in all fronts.

later,
epic

 

I can provide you quite a bit!

First off the PK system is rather unintuative. If you kill a player who hasn't aggressed towards you you name becomes red. This means you have murdered some one. You are now open game to anyone who wants to attack you. For a game that incourages racial hostilities amongst the world 4 races it makes no damn sense if i kill a light elf as a dark elf that my name would become red. Being that this is so i now would become a target for everyone.

Furthermore the title doesn't keep track of who has PKed you in the past or who recently aggroed you. If you aggro and attack some one your name turns purple regardless if you are defending yourself or not. Turning purple allows anyone to attack and kill you without their name turning red. However, if you name loses the purple and some one kills you they become red which means they have around 30 seconds to kill you if you do not continue attacking.

Here just one idiotic example:

I was in a group
one member was attacked
i returned fire
the attacker ran
later he returned
i killed him after his name went back to white from purple
i became red

Look at the character design. Its awful.