SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

zzeris_sl said:

Putting players behind an artificial time wall is no different than a paywall.

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Go fuck yourself.

Malakriss_sl said:

He's likely talking about champion mobs and heroic areas which had better drop rates for the stuff. They've only added a new planet per expansion aside from daily areas, and they're still lacking the extras from the original release including those things.

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Sort of. Makeb has quite a few of these mobs, they are actually part of a larger achievement, and they are definitely something of a challenge to take down, or at least were prior to the Revan release. I can't speak for their drops but it wouldn't surprise me if they weren't anything to write home about.

These days there are three places to get moddable gear. The first are Reputation Vendors. The second are Basic/Elite/Ultimate comm vendors. The third is the Cartel Market/GTN. Wait, sorry, four, the armor/weapon crafting professions have at least one moddable set they can create.

One of the best things BW ever did from a development standpoint was emphasize moddable gear. As a business they have a steady stream of income from people buying packs and hypercrates to get this stuff, and as a player it let's us customize our look without sacrificing our gear in the process.

Oh, and again I have to state that SWTOR is a subscription game with a F2P option. I don't know specifically what their ratio of F2P to Sub is, I don't have Ut's industry contacts, but I don't know anyone specifically who's F2P. It's too restrictive, by design, so I don't know why anyone would willingly subject themselves to that type of gameplay. If you can't afford the ~$15/m then I wholeheartedly suggest playing a different game. Unless you like torture, in which case I suggest professional help.

H1Z1 team is doing a Q&A on twitch live atm and I would really like to know what is really going on. Every single of them is frowning and looks very pissed off.
It's like a room of angry hornets.

Mughal_sl said:

The entire picture is that the moment WoW was released no other game has been successful in the sub market. Not a single one no matter how popular the franchise or big the dev budget.

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Eve players would disagree with you.

mkopec_sl said:

But lets not forget what this did to SWTOR. I played that game at launch for about a year or so. Back then they had these mini bosses all over the fucking place, and they all pretty much dropped orange gear, the type that you could put the mods into them. Anything from armor, to guns and light sabers. It was cool to search for and hunt these fuckers down. Even to equip your alts.

Well here comes the F2P and cash shop and what do they do? They remove all this sweet orange gear from these elite mobs loot table and place all the shit in the cash shop.

This is what F2P and cash shop does for games....

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This is what F2P and cash shop CAN do to a game. It doesn't have to. What one game does with their F2P model doesn't invalidate the entirety of F2P. Personally, I think the SWTOR method sucks. I'm still against selling power or enabling pay-to-win.

Elidroth_sl said:

This is what F2P and cash shop CAN do to a game. It doesn't have to. What one game does with their F2P model doesn't invalidate the entirety of F2P. Personally, I think the SWTOR method sucks. I'm still against selling power or enabling pay-to-win.

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Yeah but if you're a business trying to make money those people who are pay to win are the same type of people who sit at slot machines and piss money away just for the sake of having that little feel good moment. Granted I wouldn't want my game to be seen this way but having a server or two where people can piss money away all day long is good for business.

zzeris_sl said:

Exactly. F2P isn't some big, bad scary monster. On another note, I haven't seen CCP release sub numbers in quite a while and I've heard they have lost seemingly significant numbers. Maybe the single outlier success story needs to shake things up like WoW?

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They did, they banned input broadcasting so people can't command 20 ships with single key presses. Lost a lot of subs, PLEX (30 day subscription item) sales bounced up and down. EVE has a small cash shop with pilot clothing but it has zero impact on the game and barely any on the user experience except when you afk in a station.

As to the bashing on bad Bioware/SWTOR decisions I'll add one bitter point: Color crystals. I was an artificer. Fuck them in the ass, fuck that vendor, fuck collections.

Elidroth_sl said:

Personally, I think the SWTOR method sucks. I'm still against selling power or enabling pay-to-win.

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Completely agree here and that's the one saving grace to their cash shop. It'sallcosmetic with the exception of any of the unlocks F2P have to buy (which you get as a sub). The one time they did put up something that affected player power (PvE starship components) they got a huge backlash and eventually pulled the items. And everything you can buy from the market can also be bought from the GTN, assuming another player bought it and is selling it.

Malakriss_sl said:

As to the bashing on bad Bioware/SWTOR decisions I'll add one bitter point: Color crystals. I was an artificer. Fuck them in the ass, fuck that vendor, fuck collections.

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Yeah, Artificers got boned with the Crystal market. Though I know a few who made bank off RE'ing and selling high end Relics and Enhancements.

Elidroth should lead eq3 project

Looks like Dave "Qixter" Georgeson is a guest columnistwriting articles for mmorpg.com

Draegan_sl said:

As usual Tad is arguing with people that don't exist.

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As usual you're shit posting.

zzeris_sl said:

Tad, the ability to get a character from 1 to 80 instantly in certain programs for WoW does indeed seem to say the timesink is unnecessary.

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No, it says to me that WoW must now have a dreadful 1 to 80 leveling experience.

Its an old experience that is outdated.

Pretty sure CCP sub numbers are fine. Seemingly had a bit of a dip in summer/fall but recovered for winter. Maybe the IS boxer ban has hurt them a bit.

Personally I really love the way CCp does the Plex system in eve, There is no way I would have 3 accounts otherwise. I think EQ "Kronos" is essentially the same thing?

I was specifically saying that in regards to WOW's 1-80 content. It's very very old and outdated. The 90-100 experience is really entertaining and returning and/or newer players should just skip to 90. The other stuff is just legacy that you should do only if you really want to look at what used to be there.

Draegan_sl said:

I was specifically saying that in regards to WOW's 1-80 content. It's very very old and outdated. The 90-100 experience is really entertaining and returning and/or newer players should just skip to 90. The other stuff is just legacy that you should do only if you really want to look at what used to be there.

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I thought the whole point of the Cata expansion was to re-do the leveling experience (at least 1-60)? I only check out Cata very casually, and messed around with a Worgen character to about mid 40's pretty much just doing old zones I had leveled through on my main back in the day on Kalimdor. It was all like Wrath quest hubs but like x3 the cheesiness. You had the usual quests, along with one or two of the "special vehicle/etc quests where you had the separate control bar pop up for whatever actions that machine or beast could do for the quest". It was all way, way too fast. I'm sure that isn't the worst thing for alts, but for a main leveling experience it's just sad.

One thing SWTOR got right was the main class stories while leveling up. Obviously some were far better than others, but I've never had as much fun leveling to cap in a game as I did in SWTOR. Only thing that came close was EQ (and for very different reasons). That said, it did get tedious doing all of the random planetary side missions while leveling, even if some of the main planet story lines were interesting. This is from someone who didn't spacebar through anything until we got to dailies at cap and were doing them for the Xth time.

The problem with leveling in MMO's nowadays (and to some extent most of the games aside from raiding) is that they're almost all designed to be completely single player. There's extra stuff you can do with groups/etc, but mostly you're semi expected to just level up solo and need for other people only starts at cap.

mkopec_sl said:

Well some feel that way, but I dont. I think leveling up is RPG at its core. Its what an RPG is. Gain skill and power through time and experience. Its not our fault that the modern iterations of mmorpgs cannot do "leveling" in the right way. Its raids and the shitty instances that are new and should go away. Get back to the roots of the RPG, make the game BE the leveling and gain of power through time.

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Tons of RPGs exist that are not level based systems.

Level based systems translate pretty poorly to MMOs since they are designed to gate content and limit pace in relatively short games. No one thinking up the rules for like DND in the day thought at all about how levels would translate to games that last decades instead of hours.

@Merrith, ya cata was supposed to revamp all that old content. It's a shame it was the real low point of WoW and they botched it so badly by making everything a cheesy unfunny joke, instead of using it as a chance to actually streamline and quicken the leveling experience all the way up to 85.