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*sigh* You are being pedantic. For the sake of brevity I didn't explain that hosting costs varies for many reasons including volume, server requirements, time-frame, and hosting type (up-time guarantees, etc). I used the subscriber numbers I already estimated, assumed technical requirements...

Yep. It varies, but server, hosting, bandwidth and other infrastructure costs around about $6 per person on average, which means out of a $15 dollar fee you make about $9 (60%) to cover everything else.

Not everyone, just people that deserve it. I'm ok, I enjoy trying to be funny when I write, sometimes it works usually it doesn't.

So both? The state wouldnothave benefited by how much money 38 Studios made. The only thing that matters is how much economic activity the business would generate for the state through staffing levels over time. That is the all. So what you have to do is figure out how many people 38 can...

I get that you don't understand the goal of the loan, and the concept of ROI, what opportunity cost is, and how MMORPG finances work, so I am going to lay it out for you. Firstly, KoA:R is basically irrelevant in monetary terms to the MMORPG. It was a successful game, but they way overspent...

No, they did the right thing. I highly, highly doubt they would have recovered even the money needed to finish the project (and really who knows how much that would be). I also am extremely skeptical there was any significant private funding, Curt was just making excuses to shift the blame...

I hadn't even noticed that. Yea, my last computer had a Core 2 Quad and I built it in... mid 2007. The 400 series is the first DX11 SM5 card and those came out in 2010. So yea, it is about time.

I have to assume then that the 360/PS3 versions are massively cut down. Essentially what you are looking at are the kind of systems requirements you would expect for a game revolving around some sort of important simulation. Simulation games are very CPU/RAM heavy but they multi-core very...

What would you expect it to run? I really like the Surface 2, generally I don't have to actively stop myself from buying expensive things but man I want it pretty bad. Next year I keep telling myself, you just built a brand new desktop. Also, for someone interested in a Macbook Air...

Yea, no. The original game is fantastic and was well worth a full box price. It is a steal now at a sales price.

Except that, the thing I was commenting on (the province/squalor/food system) is the one major change that brings much more meaning and impact the the empire management part of the Total War series, which is notoriously weak. It makes perfect sense that the empire management part of the game...

I just looked them up, they don't seem ridiculous. I assume this is a next-gen only game.

No, you still build the buildings you want in every province, you just can't fully upgrade everything everywhere. It forces you to make tough choices about what you really need and where you need it.

It's exactly the same as the religion mechanic in Shogun 2. It is a mechanic which punishes you for expanding to quickly and ignoring managing your provinces. I seriously wonder if CA drastically overestimated the intelligence of the type of people that play their games.

Umm... the point of the squalor and hunger is to make you consider what you want the province to be based on its strengths and weaknesses along with what you need in your empire. To take full advantage of the game you have to specialize provinces BECAUSE of this mechanic, not in spite of it...

Nothing wrong with the UI. Order and Food are clearly displayed under each city in the province, in the province window and a summary is in the province sheet on the right. A mouseover tells you exactly what the + and - for public order are.

It actually isn't changing THAT dramatically. I've got 84 hours in on the game so far with one campaign spanning the edge of patch 1 to patch 3. The biggest chnage was that I was able to reconfigure my Empire a little when they nerfed the penalties on Tier 4 buildings a bit. It is very much...

The food and happiness mechanic is one of the best new changes to the game. In fact they nerfed it slightly in one of the patches which I think was a mistake.

Right. I think, ultimately, the problem with the games industry is that it is overall very, very unprofessional. It grew up in a different time than say the movie industry did, without any of the trade guilds or unions and therefore doesn't have the same sense that design, art, and management...

The funny thing about this is that you should basically redo a zone over and over for a while until you get the game right. This is also known as pre-production and you do it with a team of like 10-15 people so it isn't so expensive. Unfortunately, the way it usually goes is that kind of stuff...

I guess? EQ is still running, as are lots of games that depend on the Trinity, I don't really see the point in literally remaking a game. We should improve games by learning lessons from them and incorporating those lessons into newer games. Developers certainly don't always do this, and...

Hmm, I have never seen or even heard of that happening. Is it a walled city? Are you certain it is the enemy slingers that are hitting you and not the Wall towers. I don't remember the prologue/tutorial very well, but I don't recall the main Roman army having slingers in it, just javelins...

All excellent points. The thing about this topic is that it is extremely broad, and we could talk forever about different ways to have fun and interesting combat/class systems. There are lots of good solutions, and some of them even have the trinity in them. What I don't like is boring and...

We'll focus on combat since that seems to be the meat of the discussion and I think we can all agree that social interdependence outside of combat is a good thing (at least I get the impression that you agree with me there). GA did in fact have classes, and I am also a supporter of a class...

You can come up with fictional conceits for gameplay mechanisms in nearly any setting. That isn't to say your setting shouldn't inform your design and your design shouldn't inform your setting, but at a high level setting doesn't matter a whole lot because high level game concepts are fairly...

I said, in multiple posts, that social interdependence and combat roles are very important even to the point where they are strengths of genre. This was a completely explicit statement, as well as implicit in the rest of my posts. How you take my dislike of the "Holy Trinity" and spin that out...

A far as I can tell it is sort of both. You can still trade through the comms, but the person-person stuff is more like running trade missions or getting missions for discounts and stuff like that. If it is like that than it adds more varied gameplay options to players that want to just be...

Try Global Agenda, that game is amazing and in my opinion one of the most underrated games out there. I've never had more fun "tanking" in a game.

Other people answered this effectively, but I'll pile on because you guys chat quite a lot while I am asleep. I think MMORPGs have 2 major strengths; their ability to create worlds, and their social interdependence. Limiting social interdependence to a holy trinity, or any hard class...

You kind of squished a bunch of different things into this post so I wanted to pull out the most salient point you had,"why grinding a dungeon in 7 minutes instead of 15 is even a fucking concern in these games". This point doesn't come up enough in these discussions. A golden rule of...

At no point did I ever say a game shouldn't have any roles. I said that it shouldn'trequirea certain set of roles, specifically the Holy Trinity. In fact, I said in the post before that I quite like roles. There are many problems with "requiring" a certain set of roles, mainly that it is more...

Double

You are missing the point entirely. Finding a different person because they have the right class means excluding one of the people you were going to play with in the first place. The point is that a good MMORPG isn't like a single player game where the game components are what matter most, the...

I really, really like support classes both in concept and playing them (includes healing). The problems happen when one class or another becomes required to do something and forces you to play or not play with apersonsimply because of the class they have. The holy grail is to have both fun and...

Mid-Low tier IPs and half finished games are generally worth almost nothing, I'd say even 250k is generous. If they set the floor above what someone is willing to pay then they won't sell it.

New Trading and Mining Video

Those trailers were a whole lot of nothing. That all they released?

This is actually part of it. There are plenty of studies that show what peoplesaythey want and what theyactuallywant are often quite different. The classic example is coffee, Americans say they want a rich, bold roast but what they buy is light and weak.

What I am saying is not that I've never seen a good idea from the internet, just I have never seen a good idea from the internet that I hadn't already seen, heard, or thought of. Your observations of published AAA MMORPGs are totally 100% right. Having personally spent years working on 2 of...