rian_frostdrake
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Posts
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Joined
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going to salute him as well, good presence of mind, great resolve, company of heroes was an apt title for being around this guy's work.
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Quote:coh has done so for over 6 years, and still has not fallen beneath 50% of its launch population, a trick a lot of recent large budget games would envy. and you are missing my point, sam and i arent desirable because of short play spans, we are desirable because we have been paying customers for over 6 years, that is considered unusual in the mmo-sphere, and its the customers that devs want, the loyal ones that can make nice static income numbers for the company.Originally Posted by GKaiser
However, less than 7 hours a week is like way beneath casual gamer expectations. Sure, developers like it since it means they dont have to work too hard to maintain those kind of players, but as I pointed out it is hard to maintain an online community who supports both casuals and hardcores if you don't satisfy the hardcores.
as the former lead developer said when he became an active competitor to coh, the game has a high retention rate of players that we "will not leave" you have no idea how much other mmo devs would like that, you dont need expensive advertisement campaigns to get us because we are already here.
edit, jaz, lets not go for physical appearance shots, its mean,please? thanks. deconstruct his reasoning, instead, it is currently set on -1 X 0 difficulty -
Quote:completely wrong on every level, you get exp from every opponent, in fact i leveled my night widow from level 38 to level 39 last one and some teammates leveled several times. the rewards are whatever drops(rikti bosses are plentiful, thus a rare drop is possible) and vanguard merits, which you can get from regular content but at a significantly slower pace, that you can turn in for expanded salvage space, a very large and powerful pet(a vanguard heavy, a big honking robot), or some temp powers, i think there isa grenade and a psi defense thing, but im foggy on those two. as well as some costume pieces. oh, and its could not care less about, if you could care less then you are saying that you do care some..eh, im not going to fix the hindenberg with a soldering iron.Originally Posted by GKaiser
If I recall correctly, it's one of those random zone events where you don't get xp for killing anyone until you have wasted an hour of your life and actually completed it. And the rewards are random salvage otherwise obtainable from clearing missions with enemies who do give xp, or costume pieces I could care less about.
Am I close?
in fact, we dont have any content where you get no exp for beating enemies, even pvp and exemplaring, what the hell are you on about there? -
what he is referrign to is you played 7 hours a day, many of us with jobs, families and fitness regimines dont have that luxury. It is an interesting point though, as you mentioned how casual gamers are not a good group for a game to target, and sam's presence here leads to an interesting point, sam is casual, he also is a 6 year+ vet, i'd be ahrd pressed to find a mmo developer who wouldnt be thrilled to have a player who stayed on for over 6 years, usual attrition rate(back when nick yee was still updating project daedalus) was 3 months, not sure if that has changed. but sam is the guy an mmo dev wants, and he is casual. I too, in balancing a job, social life, and weights am unlikely to spend 7 horus in a week on an mmo, let alone a day. so your long raids where everyone has to have their dance charts memorized and go on for several hours, both of us would have ditched. So yeah those dreaded casuals that you made out to be soem parasitic leech community, we have been here and paying for over 6 years, we have not been over at the cellar dweller's game for that time, because the hardcore gameplay style is incompatible with a lot of adults lives. and the best part is, from what i have been reading even wow is moving to the casual gamer, less 50 man molten core raids, more smaller 5 man instances, so wow is coming to sam and me, not the other way around.
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Quote:you dont accomplish anything in a game, that is what jobs, education and relationships are for, games are fun diversions to play. but i digress, so the Variety and curveball is simply that your team might goof up and screw things up for you, and you have to talk them through the standard action template? excuse me while i trip the light fantasticOriginally Posted by GKaiser
Everyone knowing how to do the puzzle, and getting a whole party of people to do all the steps in the correct order, are two completely different things. It's the difference between throwing a ball at a wall by yourself and playing football with a team. Totally different experience because the mechanics are different.
I know a substantial portion of MMORPG playerbases like to solo. That's fine. However, online games biggest selling point is the multiplayer aspect. I do not play online games to play by myself; I have a vast library of single player videogames for that, all of which offer more challenging solo gameplay than any MMORPG to date can offer. I believe this is true for most gamers.
However, teamwork gameplay has a totally different appeal because it's a team. I can rock hard in a single player game, but I can't share that experience with anyone else. In an MMORPG you can. However, if the challenges aren't appropriate for a team, it becomes boring really fast. The game becomes more of a graphical chat room, where people spam buttons and talk, and you get more xp but you don't feel like you've really accomplished anything.
. sorry but that is utterly unconvincing. telling me that fun content is content that throws needlessly convoluted boss switch games at me that i then have to bludgeon people into following is, to me, less of an impetus to team up than having everyone providing some viable addition to the team but nobody is required or its a no-go. instead i can pick up a group of my choosing and not worry that, dearie me, we dont have a preset amount of dps, therefore we cant pass, instead i can pop on LB tell anyone who feels like teaming that i'm running an x and can pick the first 7 people who seem fun, not sweat over constraining gameplay limitations. you do seem to fear socialization, were you bitten by an rp'er as a small child?
flawed analogy, the toaster does not fulfill its most basic function, coh does, its a playable video game. if it were that binary you would not be having this discussion. now if you said the toaster didnt work because it doesnt have a specific browing function, then your analogy would be less off.Quote:Originally Posted by GKaiser
Okay, let's try this again using an analogy.
I review a toaster called Toastinator 500. I give the toaster a bad review because the ******* thing doesn't even work.
You point out that my review is bad because the newest model of the toaster, Toastinator 500-A has an additional setting just for toasting bagels. I point out that Toastinator 500-A still doesn't even ******* work, but you don't care because I didn't talk about the option for toasting bagels.
Does that make sense to you?
Going Rogue did not address any of my complaints, so it doesn't change my review in any way, shape or form. -
Quote:do the puzzles change each time? or is it a puzzle once and then a repitious act to template. we have a "puzzle" boss in reichsman, but once you figure out the puzzle, the variety vanishes. That is the point, a puzzle works one time, then you figure it out and it becomes grind. anything is grind if you dont enjoy it, and nothing is grind if you do. grind is an entirely subjective term, meaningless unless adequately defined as to why it is not fun. define curve balls, how often do they happen?? are the constantly happening or just in a few showcase events. i did play wow on a trial, i mentioned that in an earlier post, i killed 10 specific enemies, i got 10 low drop items, i was entirely unimpressed. it was the same old as i had already done, but with next to no customization and, at the time, a garbage teaming mechanic.Originally Posted by GKaiser
You've never played World of Warcraft, have you? Even in vanilla WoW, many of the instance and raid bosses were designed as puzzles. It was sometimes a little overboard, but it at least kept things interesting.
In well designed games, the game is not one huge grind. There are breaks where you have something interesting happen, enemies throwing curve balls. Like puzzle bosses. -
Quote:well, yeah, its a single player game, of course it will, no latency to deal with, link only has a specific set of powers that the player has no control over, its not surprising. offline games simply a re too different from mmos to have really engaging boss fights, whether they are big bags of hitpoints or coordinated efforts with specific roles for players, neither will be as engaging as an offline game because they simply cannot. if youa re looking for that in an mmo, you will be forever disappointed. if i want crazy twitch fights, ill pop in a ninja gaiden game.Originally Posted by GKaiser
I've become very intolerant of MMORPGs that have poor boss encounter design. I was already fed up with it 14 years ago when I first got into MMORPGs, and now I'm completely unable to not be highly critical of any game that can't offer more of a challenge than games which came out when I was a child. If you really think about it, something as old and simplistic as The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has more challenging boss design than most MMORPGs on the market. There is no excuse for modern games made for adults (like CoH is) to not be at least that challenging.same deal in any mmo, kill 10 rats, get 10 rat tails, go to location here or there, click some resource node, and drop this named rat. regardless of exp or any silly reward, those are the nature of the beast, all the rest is, as you say, flavor text. funny thing about flavor text, a lot of us call taht story, setting and progression, and view wether we have the blue word of stupidly high damage or the purple sword of slightly higher damage as a somewhat pedestrian part of gameplay, indistinguishable from one mmo to the next. as such, "flavor text" is yet another thing that you seem overly contemptuous of, when in reality it is one of the few distinguishers between several of the games out there that otherwise follow a fairly standard template.Quote:Originally Posted by GKaiser
To be perfectly honest, having done all the quests I did level 1 to 50 and several of the Villain quests, I would not be surprised if the majority of CoH quests had been created using a menu based tool not unlike the AE tools offered to players now. There is way too much cookie-cutting and randomization (such as the precise location where objects, escort NPCs and enemies appear, making it difficult to fine tune an encounter) for my taste and it bores the heck out of me. The only thing making the majority of them different is the flavor text in the windows and what NPCs say, and what the clue is.given the nature of mmo's as something that one plays for months if not years, that is difficult if not impossible, and i challenge you to provide a specific example of any mmo doing this. Again, the issue is with the genre, it exists to be played for months if not years, repetition is simply inevitable in those case, and outside of making a few situations where players just have to pull specific enemies(hardly what one would call a higher function) they simply cant have the game adlib too often or they risk ticking off the players who view it as an unfair escalation of difficulty that they couldnt have planned for.Quote:Originally Posted by GKaiser
As much as it might be "unrealistic", I much prefer finely tuned encounters where you might have to run the dungeons several times to get what you want, but enemies at least throw some curve balls at you and can't just be steamplowed through, and the party has to use some of their higher brain functions to survive the battle. -
er, watch the vid before proclaiming anyone foaming. more recently the moderator "the ocho" posted up a video review that fairly discussed gr,both the positives and negatives. the points were motly valid and properly backed up with facts as the player knew them, the reviewer was mostly professional, and the back and forth was fairly cordial, this is a garbled, careless train wreck.
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yeesh, glad i never played that then, i rage quit the boat game so hard it left a crater
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Quote:even better, ffXI's boat, only came every half hour, took over 10 mins to go to port, and you could be attacked either by some fisher pulling up a monster or a pirate , both of which were stupidly above your level, get killed, and be sent back to the stone you were bound to..and lets not even get into deleveling from said death. also, star wars galaxies and their space shuttles. think they were 10 min timers, compared to coh's click and go trams, its a difficult connection to make.Originally Posted by Oliin
Oh no. Travel times in CoH are downright speedy compared to every other game I've ever played. I'd get on a horse in DAoC and go off to make a sandwitch, and I distinctly remember getting a group in EQ after much trying ... down in the Overthere when I was in Freeport that was easily 45 minutes of travel for me. I'd be a little leery of saying it took 30 minutes to get anywhere in CoH once I had travel powers, but of course I've never really tested that.
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holy irony batman.
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Dear john, Dear john
by the time you read these lines, ill be gone
life goes on, right or wrong
now the sun is dead and gone, dear john.
since we've sung love's last song, dear john
(repeat 3x)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2NbaSlPS6Q -
1. yes..and they were games that followed your ideas, pvp emphasis, loot grinding for successive tiers of power, and then they collapsed to fractions of their populations. why we are saying that a 6+year old game would be ill served by following a drastic design change to follow a number of games that have pancaked.
2.i'm saying that calling a player a subscriber is different than comparing them to a paying
customer. i'm a "subscriber" to about 5 games that likely still count me, i havent played them in months, in fact i barely got past the lower 25% of levels in most of them. alo, server costs are scaleable. I will let chase or someone more familiar with the costs go into detail, but they really go in a curve, particularly when there really isnt a significant release of content that would require a large maintained development house. hell, horizons is still around with only 10k players, they manage it with a smaller development house. -
Quote:so a bunch of f2p games, which make accurate player counts impossible, the sequel to the most popular game in korea, a game that has just gone through drastic server merges, and wow. you see, here is an issue that aion, as well as conan and warhammer have had, they all launched with massive numbers and then completely collapsed. the big pvp centric games had content issues and lead heavy server merges and plummeting server populations. proportionally coh has been very steady.Originally Posted by GKaiser
Off the top of my head, Lineage 2, Ragnarok Online, WoW, Dofus, Aion, MapleStory, and Dungeon Fighter (oddly enough).
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ok, first thing to jump out at me, you could tighten up the tiem a lot by rehearsing a bit more, the um's and ah's around the 3 minute mark were really distracting, i know that can be tough, but tightening it up can really make it easier to listen to. the start was kind of weak too, you really have to make the viewer want to watch, and if you werent part of the community, i wouldnt have lasted past the intro, it kind of was indifferent, why should the viewer care?
other stuff is generally just disagreements, you complain about the travel tiem in the game, but just about every mmo i have played has had travel time as a component, most have not had the cell phone system. furthermore, in newer zones and almost all of cov, contacts send you to other zones far less. it seems like you really didnt research much for the review
next enhances. again, you overlook that most enhances are sold within level appropriate zones, if you need a 25 enhancer, you are likely at or around the level of that zone, so really it only takes basic preparation to keep up with enhances, plus you complain about enhances graying out, but io's do now grey out, basically they answered your concern and you didnt acknowledge it. firthermore, after level 35 if one insistes on using so's on both sides, they can use the store at the rwz for all origins, so there really is not that much problem. I really have no idea how it took you 30 mins to simply upgrade your enhances, but that really is less an issue with the game. ok i see you got back to it at the 12 min mark, but that pretty much contradicts what you said, at the beginning. makes the review seem inconsistent.
your tanking thing only dealt with defense based tanks, resist based tanks are more akin to standard mmo tanks, but its important to acknowledge that most tankers use other power, like damage auras and unique powers like ice slick or shiver.
the build criticism thing really was just silly and uninformed about, really, go to the specific subforums if you want to see, but scrappers really arent sacrificing much dps for survivability to the degree that it is hampering teams, so your comment seems odd to the point of a non-sequiteur.
on av's, have you faced nocturne or ghost widow yet? or reichsman? a lot are bags of hit points, but there are some who change the game.
for the love of god, enunciate! by the goku example, the slurring is getting distracting
ok, the swearing..you know how yahtzee swears a lot and its funny? thats because he makes it fit the reviews for emphasis or humor, in this review it just feels whiny. swear if it works, but in here it feels silly and gratuitous.
about the market, i i'll let nethergoat handle that one, but you are intensely wrong, and minimal research would have shown you how to compete on the market and get what you need.
as per endgame, research again, rikti mothership raids, hamidon raids, rsf, stf, lady grey, cathedral of pain.
interesting you mention casual gamer retention. you do know that the game has been cited by previous and now antagonistic devs for having a devoted longterm fanbase. also, up to date info is centralized on the paragonwiki, easily accessed information, many posters discuss it freely, and the guides are also centralized on the forum, head to the section right now, we have a fairly active guide writing community.
ok, at 17 mins, we basically are complaining coh doesn't copy wow?
ok, at 19 minutes, now you are abandoning a review at all and have turned it into a preachy rant with flawed reasoning. really, this may sound nasty, but GET OVER YOURSELF. I cant see anyone enjoying this review. -
ok so, back to the movie, apparently pulled in 14 million. not disastrous, was beat out by "the american" at 16 mill.http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies....office-reuters
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babs, he was where i trained my first level(ap was lag hell around issue 1. and the conversations were dumber than a yahoo news comments section), and made sure to train with him when that guy hit 50. plus the fact that the real dev has done a lot to retain me as a customer, so while in reality it doesnt mean much ingame, its kind of an underlying vote of confidence. mirror spirit looks cool, as does foreshadow, given my manga fandom big surprise there, but babs is generally the "milestone" guy.
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Quote:did you get his book? its a good read.Originally Posted by Manofmanychars
With all the "Dear Arcanaville" threads I've seen, she should start her own advice column. It'd be like The Financial Times' The Undercover Economist's column, "Dear Economist" (much more helpful than you'd think).
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it is s striking thing, isnt it?, praetoria takes coh out of the golden/silver age, things get gritty, i like it. sometimes in a schadenfreude way, sometimes it gives you harsh decisions which would be, as golden says, ones that dont have a feel-good answer, its harsh but it feels lived-in.
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Quote:If anything, that is one of the bits of info that i liked from the panel. The developers did the additional work to flesh out the praetorian content based on player feedback, thats not a bad thing to know. from what i gathered, the addition of stuff at that stage was not an insignificant amount of work.Originally Posted by Nethergoat
when did listening to player feedback become a bad thing?
I'm glad they're taking the time to improve the system rather than shoving it out the door before it's ready. -
Quote:some people have slotting concerns.Originally Posted by abnormal_joe
Not wanting inherent fitness is like not wanting free sex*. I'm sure some would make that choice but I will never understand why.
*now watch 100 posters attempt to craft bizarre scenarios to justify their nerdrage. -
ok, and as per the pax tweets, we know that we will be getting more tip stuff. woo.
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hmm 75% of active players made praetorians, so that confirms gr did sell to a significant portion of players.
ok, just noticed inazuma said the same thing, but still i was slightly concerned, hopefully this will make an agreeable roi for ncsoft. -
well it was an experiment, given the popularity of tip missions , i'd be surprised if this were the last we see of them., but for now, its like mayhems and safeguards. If anything it is the one area the devs have kind of put themselves into a tight spot with, when making content they have missions for the two alignments, oroboros missions, paper missions, mayhem/safeguard missions, ae special guest content, tf's and tip missions. Its kind of hard for them to not look like they are neglecting some side of the game with this many separate avenues of content, and now it looks like incarnates will have exclusive missions as well, its a lot to do. as stated upthread im hoping that ww distributes resources to filling out the spaces.
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Quote:it does appear they are learning. tonight i was doing a level 50 vill to rogue morality mission that had an outdoor component, and once you overcame that component you entered a warehouse within the mission and continued it there. you still were using an existing map(though the layout was unusual), but it was a change in pace. This is one area that could be useful, they never are going to have the art resources to churn out new maps as fast as people go through them, but by varying the objectives, like i have seen in a few morality/tip missions, they can shake up the feel significantly. one are a think people overlook in the argument of the lack of maps is that a problem that is more striking for me is the uniformity of goals. you enter, you fight through a number of staggered spawns that tend to always be distributed in the same way, you then either find a set number of glowies, beat up a guy with a different name, or find a hostage to escort/kidnap out, that is a good 85% of the content.i have seen hope in some of the variety of the tip missions, im hoping that under ww's tenure we may see some more varied and engaging mission content, like we are seeing now in the tips. (no disrespect to posi, but as myself and a friend were discussing, matt was a tech guy, he added lots of new and unique tech to the game, and that did grow the game, but not a whole lot of missions. we expect ww, the zone designer, to give perhaps more missions and less tech upgrades)Originally Posted by Xanatos
The problem is that on one hand we have these massive intricately designed zones that no-one ever explores in depth, and on the other hand we have boring maps we recycle over and over again.
The solution is simple and painfully obvious:
Create more "instanced outdoor maps" using cordoned-off areas/parts from existing underutilized zones. (Kings Row would be ideal.) Villain zones could also be used.
I know this is currently done to an extent. But the ratio of instanced office/warehouses/sewers
utdoor maps is too far towards the former.
Once these new outdoor maps have been created you could sex them up with trigger points, cut scenes, alignment options, and inter-mission dialogue/mini-mission tree.
If the devs are reading this I can put together a proposal.