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Role Playing (Games)

2005 MMORPG.com Reader Awards 54

Posted by Zonk from the so-many-worlds-should-have-sent-a-poet dept.
MMORPG.com has announced the winners of its 2005 Readers Choice Awards. Interesting to mention, because the MMORPG.com users have a unique outlook on the genre. Eve Online leads the 'Favorite Game' category, and Saga of Ryzom nets the 'Best Story' prize. From the site: "Ryzom is set in a science-fiction universe and in addition to its story, it also boasts crisp graphics and a loyal and supportive community. The game also boasts PvP and is on the verge of a revolutionary expansion called 'The Ryzom Ring'. In this expansion, players will be able to take story-telling to the next level as they introduce player-created content tools. The original category included Horizons instead of Asheron's Call and managed to produced a dead split between the top four games (22% each). Oddly enough, this didn't carry over into the finals, where The Saga of Ryzom emerged on top with 31% of the votes. City of Heroes / Villains grabbed 19% for second place. They were followed by Anarchy Online at 18%, Asheron's Call at 15% and Star Wars Galaxies at 14%."
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2005 MMORPG.com Reader Awards More

2005 MMORPG.com Reader Awards

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  • Eve Online cleaned up these awards, and all it gets is a "Oh yeah, it won best game?" I mean, no offense to Saga of Ryzom, but why does winning best story determine who gets the full paragraph on the /. summary? I mean, Eve online won some of it's four or five awards on write in's for pete's sake! It beat out WoW for PvP! It won best MMORPG! And all it gets is one of it's awards mentioned once?!?
    • Cry more, noob. :)
    • That's probably because there's more /. readers familiar with EVE than Ryzom.
  • 1. Does anybody know of a MMORPG that isn't addictive in the sense that it requires hour upon hour of repetitive tasks before the best parts of the game are available? Or maybe that's the whole point of these games?

    2. Does anybody know of a Space trading game like Eve, that is free to play? Even a well done single player game would be cool. I've tried a lot, and Starknights and a 1 year old shareware game are the best I've found.
    • 1. In my experience? City of Heroes. There's no rat-killing, and you begin with super powers. 2. I only know of a well-done singleplayer game, but it's soooo fucking good. Escape Velocity: Nova [ambrosiasw.com]
      • Looks perfect. Thanks!
      • > In my experience? City of Heroes. There's no rat-killing,

        Yea but all the baddies are more or less the same until you hit level 20. No rats but plently of Trolls, Skulls, Clockworks.
        • City of Heroes has done a lot of things correctly.

          - Travel powers at level 14 -- very early. Compare vs. level 40 (unless you're a mage, in which case 20) in World of Warcraft -- AND WoW's "travel power", i.e. a horse or something, is very slow compared to an actual horse, to say nothing of CoH's travel speeds.

          - Magnificent character customization. Yes, this is needed since there is no item loot per se, but I found it refreshing to have this many options.

          - No items to loot = no camping to get the best stu
    • Guild Wars is pretty quick to get started in, compared to other multiplayer games. You have the ability to create a max-level PvP character immediately at account creation. At first, you can only make the pre-designed characters, and none of them are amazingly well set-up, but you can unlock new skills through the course of normal PvP play. I've sometimes been surprised at the amount of faction (the coin you buy access to new skills and items with) I've earned just by PvPing for an hour or so.
    • 2. Does anybody know of a Space trading game like Eve, that is free to play? Even a well done single player game would be cool. I've tried a lot, and Starknights and a 1 year old shareware game are the best I've found.

      You could try out Starport: Galactic Empires [starportgame.com].

    • All and yet none (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Moraelin ( 679338 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @04:06AM (#14497597) Journal
      Actually, it's the exact opposite of what you seem to assume. Most games start with the "best" part, and gradually, slowly move you to the worst parts.

      They're built upon studies saying that the average account is cancelled after 6 months (some sooner, some later, but that's the peak of the Gauss curve), by which point all that keeps you there is some mis-guided "but I'll lose my uber-character and all my online friends if I quit!" illusion. I.e., the fun is long gone by that point anyway.

      The hard part is getting you hooked in the first place, which is why they start with the best parts. The end-game grind isn't the grand cake at the end, it's one last-ditch repetitive grind you're thrown. Its only role and purpose is to give you something to do at all while you're still in denial about quitting the game.

      So, to give you a metaphor, they're built on the boiling a frog alive model. They say that if you drop a frog in hot water, it will hop out of the pot. But if you put it in cool water and very slowly warm it up, it will stay there and get cooked. (Mind you, I haven't actually tried it.) That's the model MMOs take. The have to make sure you don't hop out from the start, and from there it's just a matter of going downhill slowly enough so you don't mind just a little more grind, just a little more travel time, just a little more farming for your next weapon, and generally just a little more time-sink and less game.

      Let me use WoW as an example: in the beginning you're seriously more powerful than the opponents (the newbie wolves in Northshire do 1hp per hit), you level up fast, quests are plentiful, and they don't require you to move travel more than one or two hundred ft. And you see new content all the time. It's all game and no time-sink, and you're happy as a frog in a nice (if cooking pot shaped) pool of cool water. And that's what gets people addicted.

      And it gradually changes into something that's more and more time-sink and less game. At the end-game you pretty much pay the monthly fee just to sit there for hours getting enough people for a raid you've done a thousand times before, and then riding for half an hour to it. Not only it's a lot of time-sink, you're not even seeing any new content. You're doing the same repetitive crap, pulling the same NPCs, in the same order, using less spells/skills/whatever than you used at level 10... in the vain hope than you'll hit the 1% chance that this time the boss will drop the armour piece you need. And that someone else won't roll higher for it.

      Or take the reputation quests, say, the Thorium Brotherhood. You need, what? To farm some 1000 pieces of medium leather just to get them to talk to you? And that's just the ante. Then you get to farm dark iron residue for the next stage.

      Again, the hard part is getting you hooked at level 1. After that, chances are you'll take care of deluding yourself, and keep yourself coming back anyway.

      The illusion that there's some massive reward at the end is all psychological, all a self-made illusion, once you got hooked in the first place. You just have to keep with the virtual Joneses. You just have to believe that anyone actually gives a damn about your having a bigger player house (in games that support that) than the Joneses and an epic horse (the virtual equivalent of a car with a big wing at mid-life crisis) before the Joneses got one. You just have to believe that having reached level 60 will make you _someone_. There's an unspoken illusion that once you've reached that apex, newbies will speak in admiration of you, TV shows will be dedicated to your self-made-man success, and random (elven) women will beg to have your child, etc.
      • if the game gets repetitive at the level cap, then why do so many people pay for power leveling services to start with a maxed out character already?
        • Because they're probably the same people who play a game on God mode then complain about how easy it was. They're not looking for a challenge, they just want to "beat" the game.

          OTOH, there are some people who PL just to reach their friends' levels, since they didn't start at the same time.
        • There is a large contingent of MMO players who feel that the game doesn't start until max level. In WoW, this means everything Pre-Molten Core (40 man raid instance) is just filler before the real game.

          And then they complain about lack of content. :facepalm:
        • Before I even start, please realize that you're talking about people who don't know this. If they already had first hand experience with playing that MMO at level 60, they'd already have a level 60 character, hence wouldn't need to pay to have their main character power-levelled to 60.

          The people who, in your words, "pay [...] to start with a maxed out character already" (my emphasis), are the extreme case who doesn't know _anything_ about the game or what they're paying for. Pretty much by the definition of
        • In WoW on high-pop PvP servers you get to look forward to getting ganked by characters 20+ levels higher than yourself every fifteen minutes or so. When this happens you have absolutely no chance to defend yourself You are simply going to die without any means of self-defense (let alone retaliation). For a person who is primarily interested in PvP the grind up to level ~40 is simply not enjoyable.
      • While I guess this goes for the majority of an MMORPG's playerbase (which will be the reason they complain so much-- they both hate and love the game at the same time), there are people playing for other purposes: challenges. Specifically, challenges in large groups. Progression through the game becomes the goal, not progression of your character's strength per se; of course that will be one of the necessities of achieving your goals. The people that are the loudest, most obnoxious players in any online ga
      • Subscribe! I couldnt have said it better! I play WoW and im still a puny "below 60" player. Im amazed how many lvl 60 players that try to explain me, that the my World of Warcraft gaming wont start before I reach lvl 60. :) Although i must say , there ARE some ppl who really do have genuine fun killing the same uberboss for the 500th time. That isnt me though...

        • I would say perhaps that at L60 the game changes significantly from a largely solo leveling experience to a team based faction rating/equipment gathering experince.

          Some people enjoy the questing of L1-L60, some people enjoy the teamwork required to effectively raid. Some enjoy both.

      • Wow! That is one fantastic comment. As someone who quit FFXI after 6 months, I couldn't agree more with everything the parent said.
    • 1. Any RPG (Single player or MMO) generally requires repetitive tasks before the best parts are available. The main difference with MMORPGs is that you could be doing those repetitive tasks with friends as well.
      2. Actually, you are in luck (mostly). There is a great game called VegaStrike [sourceforge.net] that is free to play and available for Windows, Linux, and Mac. The game is still in development, but is in working condition. They are currently working on moving the 3D engine to Ogre from the custom designed engin
      • What single-player RPGs require repetitive tasks?

        Oh, you may fight similar types of monsters through the game, but the environment is constantly changing. The games are designed for you to "clear the world", and hence the experience is tied to doing just that.

        Indeed, in Knights of the Old Republic (I), it was to your benefit to refuse to level up until after you trained to be a Jedi. Normal progression would have you complete the first half of your career at level 10. However, you never actually had to t
        • I've never played the KOTOR games, so I can't speak from experience there, but nearly every Final Fantasy game (which some may debate are not true RPGs) required at some point, some devotion of time to increasing the level of your character and the collection of whatever money or item is required. A well-designed RPG would arguably ensure that you cannot progress faster than you should be levelling, but on the other hand being open-ended is a great experience as well. The main difference between single-pl
    • Have you tried looking into http://www.puzzlepirates.com/ [puzzlepirates.com]? Of all the mmorpgs i've played so far, it has been the only one lacking that deadly boring grind. There are no levels and so no artifical level barriers; new players can party with old players without problems.

      Although it is not a space setting, the game also features a trade-driven, player-run economy.

      It doesn't cost anything to give it a spin, the client is a free download and there is a free trial account. Even better, it runs natively on linux a

  • Easy to figure out... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by heartless_ ( 923947 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @05:51AM (#14497966) Homepage
    If you've ever played EVE you would know why it would be easy for them to cast votes on an out of game website... because there is a hell of a lot of nothing floating around in space. Hit the go button and a couple hours later you'll arrive. Sure if you are going through low security space you may run into problems, but overall its rare to run into other people. Even the combat is a rather dull affair. Now go to a bunch of people playing WoW. They are banging away at the loots so fast that they don't have time to alt-tab out and vote. EVE has a dedicated internet fan base that will zerg under any site where they can bring in the awards for their beloved underdog. Its like American voting... only with those with something to gain tend to vote. If it doesn't really affect them then they just don't get off their fat asses to vote.
    • "Hit the go button and a couple hours later you'll arrive. Sure if you are going through low security space you may run into problems, but overall its rare to run into other people."

      When exactly did you last play the game? The only time I can find systems with no people in them are border systems in 0.0 space. Even playing at 2-3am in the morning there are people around.

      They have one sever that has an average of 18,000 people on it peaking at 22,000. Lowest I have seen while playing is 9,000 people

      A

      • Maybe I should of just stated that a lot of the action in EVE takes place outside the game... in spreadsheets, message boards, and web sites.
        • Which isn't true either.

          If you are new to the game then about the first two weeks you can probably claim this. You can set your craft on auto-pilot and come back later to continue playing. But after you have a fair bit of skills under your belt and a good craft this isn't this case unless you sit in core space for all that time.

          Once you get into a serious corporation and PvP in general being AFK means you are most likely dead when you come back to your machine.

          I take it from your comments that you either ne
  • During last week I run a poll on my MMORPG related Website. The poll question was "Which MMORPG currently offer the best PvP?" EVE Online won this one also. If you want to see the results more in detail here is a link: http://www.ogrank.com/content/view/141/33/ [ogrank.com]
  • Everytime WoW gets a patch upgrade, even a minor one, Blizzard get a story. Eve does a content service pack, for free, and CCP gets a small mention during the holiday patches with 6 other games. We just seem to get the shaft in the major media.

    No mention of the 22k people on at the same time, concurrently, without different servers. No mention that in Eve PVP you lose basically everything to the other person, giving a real incentive to the other party. Just bothers me that it gets marginalized because

  • Endgame (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Pinkoir ( 666130 ) on Wednesday January 18, 2006 @11:19AM (#14499592)
    I'll tell you why EVE won for favorite game over a title which has about 100 times more subscribers. It's the endgame. All over the net you see people talking about the Lv60 cap and the grinding to get top level gear. I've been playing EVE since a month after launch and I am nowhere near any kind of level cap. That's because there isn't one. Because there aren't any levels. I admit I haven't played WoW but it seems like it has the same failing as in other titles I've played where once you cap-out there really isn't anything to do except engage in some relatively pointless PvP. In EVE the more skilled your character gets the richer your experience becomes because the endgame isn't against some bajillion-person raid instance but against the rest of the playerbase. In EVE it is the players themselves who are developing the storyline through the alliance conflicts and with the addition of even more complex levels of play-controlled structures in the (free) cold-war and red-moon-rising expansions this empire vs empire interaction becomes just that much more meaningful. I think the fact that everybody lives in the same universe is a great aid to this. In addition, PvP has real impact because you can actually lose substantial virtual assets (both "material" and political) on failure as opposed to games like GW where there are no negative consequences for loss at all.

    Anyway, if you like rewarding PvP and haven't played EVE yet you should really try it out. And if you do drop me a line in-game :) AWM is on the move again and we're always looking for new recruits.

    -Pinkoir
  • That freaking website tells me I have to enable cookies to use it. I only allow cookies from whitelisted websites.

    How freaking incompetent do you have to be to require cookies for a bunch of text???
  • Wow, that's just stunning.

    Eve may have some nice graphics, but I thought GW and WoW had better. Otherwise I found it to be boring. Mine, travel. Mine, travel. Join some Corp. and be told what to do. "Harvest more so we can be Uber!" Yeah, whatever. I couldn't get into it. If you enjoyed it, more power to you. But, subscription numbers are what they are for a reason, and Eve's numbers are low because it doesn't appeal to that many.

    Ryzom wasn't all that great. The graphics were not bad, but I've see

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