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  1. Denaut

    EQ Never

    Was it these blog posts? http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/03...source-system/ http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/04...system-part-2/ http://www.raphkoster.com/2006/06/05...system-part-3/
  2. Denaut

    EQ Never

    That sense of tension comes from the uncertainty of an outcome of a situation you are emotionally invested in. Causing pain or loss in the event of a negative outcome isoneway to illicit that emotional investment, but it may not be theonlyway to do it. You might be right, there might be no...
  3. Denaut

    EQ Never

    Great! Ok, now this is what I am talking about. Here is actually a perfect example of someone not getting it. Experience loss and corpse runs were mechanisms that elicited an emotional response. The direct emotion they bring forth is sadness and loss. People are extremely loss averse, so...
  4. Denaut

    EQ Never

    A few games have. Shadowbane, SWG, and Vanguard had non-instanced housing. Besides the obvious cost consideration (which comes into play for any feature), player housing is more of a design problem than a technical one. First you have to establish what it is for beyond just being a...
  5. Denaut

    EQ Never

    I hope EQN is great too. There really hasn't been a game since SWG that tickled me because of its world and social dynamics. Sure that game was a buggy mess, but I had ridiculous amounts of fun playing it in-spite of that. Goes to show how good it could have been. You are totally right...
  6. Denaut

    EQ Never

    More scandalous things than I'd be willing say are already public, so it wouldn't be very interesting. Do I think a game in the "spirit" of Vanguard is still viable? Absolutely. It would probably take a form radically different than what either of us would expect though. Well, this is...
  7. Denaut

    EQ Never

    Gotcha, that is fine, personal taste is personal taste. I tend to get way to curious about things I like, I've watched my Simpsons DVDs with the commentary on probably 3 times more than with it off. Yea, for about 8 years now. I worked on Vanguard and a couple of other AAA MMOs. I work on...
  8. Denaut

    EQ Never

    On rerolled we are mostly just gabbing about neat things we'd like to see, which is pretty fun and this is a good place to do it as most of the posters love MMOs and understand them at a pretty good level. You get more interesting conversations that way. I like to butt in with the "designer"...
  9. Denaut

    EQ Never

    Yea, sure, that is one expression of it. I didn't play a whole lot of TERA, but I played the hell out of Global Agenda and I thought it did an overall excellent job. Ultimately you'll always need more content for a game, I think that is unavoidable. But I feel like a got way more than my...
  10. Denaut

    EQ Never

    This thread got really good in a hurry, basically the last few pages are why I come here to talk about these things. Since this sort of turned into a "what I would like to see in MMOs" I thought I would add where I've been going with this. Essentially I think we need more movement from the...
  11. Denaut

    Camelot Unchained MMO

    I've never worked for Jacobs. I get annoyed at him in the same way you would if there was someone of your profession spouting nonsense and making your already not very well respected discipline look even worse. For someone falsely whining aboutad hominemattacks you certainly like using them...
  12. Denaut

    Camelot Unchained MMO

    Well, there are two different things there. The is knowledge of what you are getting and every way you can use it in every intricate situation are two different things. His chess analogy is a good example. You can learn the rules in a couple of minutes, and have an excellent idea of how...
  13. Denaut

    Camelot Unchained MMO

    You are completely right, there is no specific formula for making art. I mean, there are some general principles, but then violating those principles in a novel or clever way is often what it takes to achieve acclaim and success . I think you are misunderstanding what I said though, or the...
  14. Denaut

    Camelot Unchained MMO

    I am obviously not Josh Sawyer. For one I've never worked at Obsidian (only with online games) and two, I live in Europe now. Do you meanad hominem? Becausead hocdoes not mean what you seem to think it means. Furthermore, you clearly possess no reading comprehension what-so-ever. While...
  15. Denaut

    Camelot Unchained MMO

    It is ironic that in a post titledChoice Matters!Jacobs doesn't even define what choice is or why it matters. By the second sentence he is already jumping to thetoolsdesigners of the past have used to achieve their aims, without it seems realizing that those things aren't choices in and of...
  16. Denaut

    Camelot Unchained MMO

    Just a quick comment (I am in the middle of writing my post), but if you read the latest post onJosh Sawyer'sblog, he basically covers much of what I am saying and indirectly points out why Jacobs is a bad designer.
  17. Denaut

    Camelot Unchained MMO

    Alright, so I have been following this thread but haven't really read the blog posts. They didn't seem all that interesting at a glance and I guess I just didn't feel like it. Well, this is a good thread and I wanted to comment so I figured I would go read through all the posts from the...
  18. Denaut

    The Elder Scrolls Online

    I am sorry, but if you are that much of an old hat at this, and you still buy the lines being fed to you... I don't know what to say. The pattern this game is miming is near identical to all of the ones you previously mentioned.
  19. Denaut

    EQ Never

    As for the hitching, that is actually primarily server side and can never completely go away. Vanguard was constructed on a relational database, and what happens when you cross chunk lines is that the game server governing the chunk you are coming from has to pack up all of the tables related...
  20. Denaut

    EQ Never

    What is true in the rest of life is true in MMORPGs,actions speak louder than words. The changes that provided direction and activity to players DRASTICALLY increased all metrics when it came to player participation in every way, despite all of the forum chatter. The nice thing about data is...
  21. Denaut

    The Elder Scrolls Online

    I find it hard not to basically agree with everything Utnayan says in every thread. I stopped playing and enjoying these boring clones with 0 innovation long before I stopped working on them, I think the last time I actually enjoyed one was WoW (Vanilla + Burning Crusade). I have little to no...
  22. Denaut

    EQ Never

    Take what Brad said with a large grain of salt, like horse salt lick sized. The changes that were made that you complained about were decided upon internally by us, the low level content and code monkey developers, and before the rift with Microsoft. My memory is a bit fuzzy, and I wasn't...
  23. Denaut

    EQ Never

    Umm... no. Firstly, your timeline is wrong. MGS was the original publisher, when that fell through SOE finally ended up publishing the game. Secondly, that first beta was an unmitigated disaster. No one played. I can't remember the %s off the top of my head after all these years but they...
  24. Denaut

    38 Studios

    While this is true in many places, and certainly a problems in many companies, it probably isn't the main reason we see so much stagnation. There are many people that I don't blather about publicly but would never, ever work with again. And, if I were in some situation that forced me into a...
  25. Denaut

    MMO hardware optimizations (Or lack thereof)

    Not only do MMOs aim for a more general audience, and thus low requirements, but also much of what your CPU would handle is instead processed on the server, and then sent to the client.
  26. Denaut

    EQ Never

    I meant the game-space as a whole, being a 3D graphical world added all sorts of new wrinkles to the mix. As for MUDs, it depends on what MUD you played, I didn't play the kinds of DikuMUDs that EQ is based off of before I played EQ.
  27. Denaut

    EQ Never

    I specifically meant splitting, not general CC. I should have been more clear. I think, in general, WoW's CC implementation was quite good.
  28. Denaut

    EQ Never

    Splitting emerged as an Uber CC that became basically the solution to every encounter that was more difficult than "roll over it with DPS." It was not planned for or controlled for in any way, and thus was different than a more balanced approach to CC. WoW, for example, planned and controlled...
  29. Denaut

    EQ Never

    This is actually poor design. If the solution to every puzzle in the game is the same sequence of the same tools every time, then it isn't much of a game.
  30. Denaut

    EQ Never

    Events like what you described are more scripting than database design. The original SWG is probably the best example of a database driven MMORPG. That is generally what one would look like. You are describing more of a trigger/script system or an extremely robust AI system with complex...
  31. Denaut

    38 Studios

    Well, I wouldn't say that exactly. The lore is useful to design, but you need surprisingly little of it to be maximally useful for production. Things like setting (high magic or low), short descriptions of races (like a paragraph or two), a major events timeline that could go back as long as...
  32. Denaut

    38 Studios

    I feel compelled to spill a bit for somewhat personal reasons, so here is what I heard. Someone I trust interviewed at 38 several months after half of Sigil was parking lotted. I was living very close at the time and I asked him how it went. He told me to stay far away, as you guys were...
  33. Denaut

    38 Studios

    I have little inside information about the downfall of 38, other than the foreknowledge to avoid that place like the plague. Reading between the lines, what Moorgard posted sounds to me like the truth, but an extremely sanitized version of it. I am not saying it isn't what happened, just...
  34. Denaut

    Planetside 2

    I started playing when someone mentioned PS2 in another thread. I actually ended up picking the right server, but the wrong faction (VS). Couple comments and then maybe some advice. I started with Light Assault. By far my favorite class in BF2 and 2142 was the spec ops; foot mobile, C4...
  35. Denaut

    The Elder Scrolls Online

    Color me skeptical, the only game I've seen reasonably approach this is Darkfall, with players moving like disjointed stick men and sharing all of 12 art assets between them. And that net-code was built from the ground up for large battles; it still didn't quite work out stability wise. And...
  36. Denaut

    The Elder Scrolls Online

    If you are ever in Europe let me know, I could talk about this kind of stuff for hours. Fair warning, where I live the price of beer will make your wallet leap out of your pocket and run screaming.
  37. Denaut

    The Elder Scrolls Online

    Yay, engine discussion! Generally MMO engines aren't one engine, but essentially 3; Client, Server, and Database (simplifying here). Each piece is as critical as the other. Being complex is generally what causes them to have many more problems than most games. If you are making, say, an...
  38. Denaut

    Excel question, partial private sheet possible?

    Not certain, I suppose it would depend on the complexity of the sheet? As far as I can tell all the functions Excel has the Google version has as well. The reason I prefer Google Spreadsheet is that no one ever has to download anything, you can just share it with a link.
  39. Denaut

    Camelot Unchained MMO

    I think he is way off of the mark, let me explain. MMORPGs were among the first games to push forward, and combine, all sorts of new and interesting technologies; digital distribution, social networking, persistence, and so on. These core technologies came to be associated with the EQ style...
  40. Denaut

    Excel question, partial private sheet possible?

    Have you thought about using Google's spreadsheet? You can share freely, set to read only, and set of data ranges for whole sheets or even cells. I am not very familiar with excel anymore. Plus the scripting engine is quite nice.