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Role Playing (Games) Quickies

Massively Multiplayer Games Quickified 90

Posted by Zonk from the try-the-quickified-steak-it-is-delicious dept.
It's the last day of the first month of 2006, and already there are plenty of new things brewing on the Massive front. World of Warcraft's community is abuzz with news of the Raid content Jeff Kaplan mentioned over the weekend, and details on the 1.10 patch, which is to feature priest updates and weather cycles. City of Villains has big changes a-coming as well, with content for levels 40 to 50 going in, as well as new zones and a new mission type. The Mayhem missions sound like they're finally living up to the promise of 'being a villain'. The EQ2 server combines are the least of the changes occurring at SOE. Chris Kramer did an interview with GamerGod about some of the sweeping changes inc, touching on the free Planetside scheme and mentioning the Sony Station blog, which so far just has an intro from John Smedley. More romantically, FFXI is rolling out information on its Valentine's Day event. Valentione's day is the chocolate and hearts holiday as only Moogles could imagine it. It's fun to play for love, but also fun to play to crush. Guild War's world championships are taking place in about two weeks, with the first place purse weighing in at $50,000. Vanguard's own brand of hardcore lost a little bit of mystery this week with the release of a features list. Finally. Even though you can't win big bucks for playing them, Eve and Ultima Online continue to please their players with updates and releases. Eve's Creative Director spoke with OGaming about plans for outer space in 2006, and UO will see a new player tour and seasonal spring items. It's a good spring for Massive gaming. Update: 01/31 20:30 GMT by Z : I knew I would miss one. A reader wrote in to mention that Anarchy Online is gearing up for some great new stuff in the 16.2 patch, as well as in the upcoming expansion Lost Eden.
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Massively Multiplayer Games Quickified

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  • And eve online has some upcoming faction wars.

  • Finally Some Casual Content (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Quaoar ( 614366 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @04:45PM (#14610369)
    I'm happy that the new patch is including things that will please almost ALL players...namely, weather effects and an upgrade to the blue sets which casuals can obtain. I don't play anymore, but when I did I was a priest, so I hope that whatever changes they make to the class are decent enough to make me want to come back to the game. However, Naxxramas is stupid and a waste of resources. I am so sick of the 40 man raid content. There are now 3 zones for the hardcores, which are maybe 5-10% of the server population. 5 man stuff is absolutely the most fun for me...the 10 man places are OK, but anything more than that quickly becomes a pain in the ass. I know SOME people like the huge raids, but I would have thought the current content would have placated that crowd for a long time. Give us more 5 man dungeons!
    • How about some content for *both* the raiders and non-raiders? That's what Blizzard wanted to offer all along, anyway. There are enough people that do like the raiding instances as well as players that are more into the smaller instances. Stop prolonging this war.
      • The gp is right. Blizzard gives far too much love to the under-working dweebs who can afford to waster their lives of 10 hour long 40 man raids to the dungeons of utter tedium.

        The problem is "the raiders" aka "no-life dweebs" have been getting it all and it's time Blizzard re-focused and concentrated on the majority of their paying customers instead. Let's face it, "the raiders" happilly run through a dungeon that consisted of a single straight corridor for years if the boss at the end had a) sufficently

        • I've seen so much debate about this whole mess and both raiders and non-raiders always sound one-sided. The truth is, of course, that there are many more types of "casuals" and "hardcore" players than this. I could be described as a raider. I wouldn't like the raid in your example and I would think many more would agree. Sure, there are some that are only out for the loot, just like there are casuals that are addicted to it. I, for example, couldn't be arsed to grind the instances for those blue sets. And I
        • If your arguement is time consumption - saved instances are a counterpoint
          If your arguement is size constraints - join a large guild. The best things in WoW will require the efforts of many people.
          If your arguement is that there aren't solo alternatives - What are craftable epics? I admit they need to work on improving craftables, but you can make epic level gear, get high end enchants on items ... what about that doesn't equate to phatlewts? Sorry if it takes you a long time to farm the arcanite - you w
  • Is pretty damn obvious to anyone who has had a priest for a long time.

    They nerfed the class entirely too hard pre-release(particularly disc and holy, shadow is fine it just falls into the same pitfalls all other casters do), and now they're hopefully rectifying it.
    • I've got a 60 priest with full tier 1 gear, half of tier 2, plus some nice pvp gear from the battlegrounds, and I can tell you that I can give most any other player a run for their money. Hell, I can beat a rogue even if he gets first strike and they're DESIGNED to beat down casters. Mostly specced for disc too, with only 11 points in shadow, so I don't think they were nerfed too hard at all. If you recall the beta, pretty much every class got nerfed down across the board.

      I used to be full holy spec whil

  • Eve Updates Do Not Please (Score:5, Informative)

    by aldheorte ( 162967 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @04:55PM (#14610447)
    "Eve and Ultima Online continue to please their players with updates and releases."

    This sounds like uninformed marketroid speak to me. CCP, creators of Eve, released a patch in late December, which was pretty disastrous. Many basic elements like buddy lists, some basic agent services, and other things were broken and some still remain broken. Furthermore, lag remains very bad in central areas, often to the point of not being playable or characters getting 'stuck'. It is true that CCP has announced an upgrade to better hardware in February, but so far that is a future promise, not current reality, and the lag problems have been going on for months.

    Most concerning is that significant gameplay problems continue to be ignored, making the player versus player experience very difficult (especially in the finding and pursuing) and exposing most non-expert characters to totally arbitrary destruction at blind gate ambushes (transitions between solar systems - you must 'jump' blindly through a gate and if there is a fleet on the other side in the next solar system, you just die unless a pro with properly designed ship), an issue that has never been satisfactorily dealt with. Also, there is a serious problem with the use of instant bookmarks, allowing people to jump directly to gates and avoid any fleet defending the gate, which feeds into this blind ambush problem as defenders must then go to the other side and hope for a blind ambush. The side effect of the need for bookmarks is that everyone wants to carry thousands of them for safe and shorter travel (travel times have soared with one of the patches), and this is apparently saturating servers and performance.

    Finally, a most pressing problem that has the player community in an uproar is the advent of ISK (the currency of Eve) farmers, some using bots, that are mining continuously in the safe areas and in NPC corporations not subject to player attack. Many of the ISK farmers are suspected of selling their ISK for real life currencies in violation of the EULA, and many are thought to operate from Asian 'sweatshop' outfits. These players are routinely reported to CCP, who apparently does little about them since the same players are seen doing the same thing week after week, nor does CCP seem to be taking the problem seriously. In fact, groups of vigilante players started taking it upon themselves to engage in 'suicide' attacks to destroy farming ships.

    CCP has furthermore somewhat legitamized the transfer of real life currency into ISK by allowing the sale of time cards, bought from CCP, for ISK. The buyer lengthens their subscription, the seller gets ISK. Since it is allowed by the EULA to sell characters for ISK, this means that anyone who wants to get a quick edge up in Eve can simply sell time cards, buy a well-trained character, and buy all the ships and equipment they want. Now, people have different opinions of whether this is a good thing or not, but it underscores the fact that CCP is exercising an inconsistent principle, on one hand claiming that ISK sales are not allowed on the principle of fairness of in-game competition, but on the other allowing out of game actions to affect in game rewards when there is a profit motive.

    Eve has its good points as well, but I cannot let that uninformed platitude fly. As for what's the worst problem of all, well, all of them, but buddy lists not working and not being fixed for over a month is pretty much up there as it was broken in the December patch and its dysfunction compromises the social fabric of the game (are your friends online or not?) and player versus player fighting (are your enemies on or not?).
    • Speaking from personal experience I am quite pleased with the recent patch. And from the continually growing subscriber base and repeated topping of the concurrent player numbers I gather that on the whole people are pleased with EVE.

      The points you bring up are certainly valid, but they are relatively small details. The initial patch problems were resolved quickly, as usual. With regards to the gameplay issues: EVE is quite massively complicated, much more so than any other game I've played (and I've played
    • Oh no! Somebody call him the WAAAAAHMBULANCE.

      Speaking as another EVE player, there are niggles and annoyances, yes. But as CCP continue to take positive steps to resolve the issues Im going to agree with TFA.

      err!
      jak.
      • hmm. i thought I would try this today.. but the account page is down, is this sort of stuff the norm and to be expected?

        First impressions...
        • There was a small burst of outages late last year, but other than the daily maintenance, its not usual that the account pages are down.

          They have a downtime every day from 1100 to 1200 UTC that sometimes runs long like yesterday (if they are deploying hardware upgrades or bugwrangling the cluster).

          err!
          jak.
    • Well as a fellow player let me give you some informed non-marketdrois speach. You call the December release disastrous. You have not been playing many mmo's then. It was a fairly pain free update compared to most of their competitors. Lag-I've never had many issues with it. its certainly not a major peice of my experience. The game is suffering some growing pains, but lag is not horrible or bad like the above poster tries ot make it sound. NO ONE in my guild of 30 has ever had a character stuck as yo
      • Eve is the only MMO that contains one Shard(server). There are no mirrors, nor are there any subservers that you transfer to for missions(dungeons). Within every MMO that's I've played there's been lag from the server, but considering the size of the system and the number of users, CCP has out performed Sony Entertainment and even Blizzard.
        • So what you're saying is that if you take out the fact that others (Sony and Blizzard) designed their game well and off-loaded dungeons to separate servers then CCP are better than them?

          Well I suppose if you ignored Da Vinci's genius then he was a lot more stupid than I am.

          • They didn't design the games better, they designed them differently. Eve doesn't use instancing because it goes against the fundamental game design of their persistent world. It's a design choice. They want everything to happen in the same space, and it does. No other MMO provides as unified a game universe as Eve, and the players are quite grateful for that.

            Go mention instancing or sharding on the Eve forums and see what kind of reaction you get. The players don't want these things, and are making
  • I tried looking up Quickified [m-w.com]. It couldn't find anything, but it suggested quizzical which seems appropiate.

    P.S. Stop making so many good MMO's. My time and money are unfortunately finite values.

  • Also left of the Karazhan preview (WoW) (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/town hall/karazhan.html [worldofwarcraft.com]

    Some information on a 70th level instance from the WoW expansion...

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @04:57PM (#14610467)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I know I'll be modded down for this but... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Miraba ( 846588 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @05:41PM (#14610870) Journal
    Zonk, it would be much easier on the eyes and brain if you broke this into several stories. I know that some people might complain about the lower content density, but 16 links in one paragraph does not entice me to see what that content is.

  • WoW 1.10 Patch Notes: Addendum (Score:5, Funny)

    by TJWitz ( 719055 ) on Tuesday January 31, 2006 @06:26PM (#14611286)
    * Priests and Paladins have been removed to keep in line with our policy about not bringing religious/political/sexual mentionings into the game. I imagine this would actually be a thing players would appreciate, since Blizzard can't balance classes anyways.
    • Oh darn, might as well remove those warlocks too, those pagans. And all Tauren's, since they worship the "earth mother". Hmmm, lets change the plot too, and remove all references to the "Titans" and the "Burning Legion", which are clearly references to angels and demons. We'd better remove those spirit healers too, cause ghosts can't exist unless we have spirits, which implies an afterlife which implies divine beings.

      Lets change the name too, how about "Politically Correct Adventures"

    • since Blizzard can't balance classes anyways.

      This is hilarious... one thing Blizzard is well known for, back to the first days of Warcraft, is producing polished, well-balanced games. Having played EQ1 for many years, I can guarantee you that WoW classes are FAR more well-balanced.

      • One of the reasons blizzard has publicly acknowledged for a lack of new classes in the upcoming expansion is their diffuculty in balancing the currently existing classes. Go to their forums and do a search for 'expansion classes' or perhaps 'hero classes' - I've lost the reference since I stopped playing WoW.

        Believe what you will, but War2 wasn't balanced - the races were practically clones of one another, yet the ability for humans to micromanage the paladin's heal ability wasn't interfaced well enough
        • The fact that you still see plenty of every class in WoW shows that the classes are actually balanced quite well. If there were a superior class to all others, everyone and their dog would be playing that class. This has been evidenced in other games ( Jedi in SWG ) in the past.

        • but War2 wasn't balanced - the races were practically clones of one another, yet the ability for humans to micromanage the paladin's heal ability wasn't interfaced well enough for it to compete with the fire & forget nature of bloodlust. Blizzard has learned since then, but their best balance was probably hit in Starcraft at or after the time of Brood Wars, but it certainly wasn't balanced at release

          Balancing the races is clearly extremely difficult. It's interesting that you bring up the micromanag


  • www.eve-online.com

    Please, come a little closer to my Thorax, my "blaster-rax".
  • I'm not surprised that there is no mention of the PvP addition to EQ2, but it is definately the most interesting of all of these announcements.
  • Also an announcement that "Lord Recluse" no longer works on City of Villains was sneaked in in the last day or two.

    NCSoft subtle announcement [cityofheroes.com] that Zeb Cook no longer works for Cryptic and they wish him well in future endeavors. Still we're all wondering what those'll be?

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