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Of course they have. But if you're headquartered in the EU, it's very simple to pay VAT: you pay in your headquarters' country. Done. If you're a US business distributing in Europe, without a local presence, each government where you sell will ask your for the VAT. 23 countries, 23 VAT...

We'd talk about EQNext if there was any EQNext to talk about.

That's mostly the right track. A good modern game design would simply have the following progression paths: - Solo outdoor for short playtime: Yields some XP, good amounts of crafting materials and thus crafted beginner gear. - Pickup group outdoor for average playtime: Yields good XP...

And this is a problem... why? No. The guy watching the fight is doing the same DPS as the guy doing his laundry. He's not winning the fight, because winning the fight should not be about doing the DPS. Because winning the fight is all about doing the top DPS, and not doing the top DPS makes you...

Well, Simon Says (the venerable ancestor of all QTEs) was also about disengaging your brain higher functions so that your fingers reacted and pressed the appropriate button as soon as the fixed cue appeared. And there's already plenty of QTE going on. WoW raiding is all about QTE anyway: dodge...

And react to what happens. I've said that before, I'm saying it again. The need to be constantly mashing buttons in the X-X-O-+-? "correct order" is a symptom of consolitis: the idea that, if your fingers aren't mashing buttons, you're not having fun. That's what consoles brought us, and it's...

Finance and business scale. In the 2000s, SOE, and Turbine, and Mythic, and all those MMO pioneers were relatively small, autonomous structures. Basically, they had a local presence, and international sales were what happened by chance. I know, I got my EQ box by mail from a friend who was in...

And then hope to sell it on the Station Store for the lazy. The latter. You can't set spawn and stuff, only build. Basically Minecraft+, minus all the cheating tools, scripts and addons. Standalone. Your char can gate between EQN and EQL apparently. Think of EQL as the instanced housing area for...

All 12.5 millions of them? I'd think the SOE walls would be all gooey white from floor to top...

Actually, you're not "supposed" to do anything. You should do anything you like. You have a global quest line from level 1 to 80 that will send you across various zones (at lower levels, it is defined by your race and class and the story choices you made during creation, then later, all those...

My own preference for that kind of design was simple: You don't have a helmet (or any form of headgear). Period. No obstructing headgear, no problem. But the truth is that, no matter what, games don't have the finesse to let people recognize other people by facial features alone. We (as...

Nothing. I'm in Minecraft, where I indulge in massive projects (the current one began last Feb, and is about... 1/3rd complete) in SMP on my guild's server. I do pop in GW2 from time to time because it's F2P (so I don't have a sub nagging me to play as much as I can) and was designed as F2P...

The genius of Minecraft is that it gives you just enough structure to make things, while not blocking you outright from creation ("there are 15 building models for your town. What, it's not exactly what you wanted to make? Hey, us modeling those additional buildings for you costs!"). And the...

Yep. At that point, anything back is better than nothing.

Anyway, we had that discussion back in the old forums when 38S went down in flames. When people go "but devs only make 85k a year", they seem to assume that devs require 0 square meters of rented office space, their equipment is free, and they don't need utilities like electricity, heating...

Yes. In those days, you endured, because it was - litterally - the only game in town. These days? They adjust. They click "uninstall", post some scathing comments on their friends' social network, and go to the next game which doesn't try to punish them for choosing the wrong race 5mn after...

You actually never started in complete "Is this thing broken?" pitch darkness. You always started in somewhere lighted. The thing is, until you had a light source, there were starts where you literally couldn't do anything else, except waiting there and maybe having a look around until the sun...

Yep. A PVE game needs sharply defined roles in a group, or it degenerates into a every-toon-for-itself-dps-fest. What a game does not need, however, is a "DPS" role. You have between 3 to 6 core roles that are required: tank, heal, CC, pull/scout, buffing, debuffing. But nobody is "a DPS"...

Ooooh, a rip-off from the Change series byS. M. Stirling. Here's a hint for the devs: please avoid direct references, like having your main character called Mackenzie (well, better than Havel - that would be even more obvious).

Well, it's very simple. If every class does not have about equal opportunity to partake in all aspects of the gameplay there is, then what happens when the player discovers after 20 h... 50 hours... 100 hours... 200 hours... whatever that his choice when he began to play months ago locks him out...

To be correct: You need some activities that are useful available solo. The most obvious would be XP and getting craft materials, but you can include others. The idea is that, if you have time (over an hour), you can seek out a group; if you don't, you can do stuff solo. Oh, and if you want a...

PvP appears to be a straight copy of GW2, only with a single map instead of splitting it in 4. The rest... all those moderns western RPG look the same to me these days...

That was on Sebilis, the french Ubisoft-run server.

Well, you can't really figure out crafting until you've figured out itemization first, and we've got very little about it. The core ideas on classes, we know; the items... not so much. All we know is that you have the usual armor+jewelry+weaponry set, those have no stats on them but effects...

I think PVE-wise, the most memorable raid was one of our Agnarr the Stormlord kills in BoT. I don't even remember exactly what went wrong, but basically, we entered his room, got all slaughtered, and one ranger started kiting him round and round and round. Meanwhile, we rezed everyone where we...

That is almost certainly going to be the case for the 8 or so "core classes" in Qeynos. Check on wiki the trainer, see how much it wants, bring it, done. Then you're going to get the faction-based trainers which are going to require you to be on the lookout for opportunities to get faction...

There's probably going to be an intrinsic bonus in that the (common) equipment is going to favor sticking to your class skills. Remember the panel where they said "if your warrior tries to use a wizard TP in the back of the enemy then use a rogue's backstab, he won't have enough energy to chain...

No. FOTM requires a relatively small (for the hardcore-18-hours-a-day-play catasses) time to get from whatever to the so-called FOTM. When your games does not support selectable skill-based system, but lets you grind from character creation to "operational" in a week or two, then you get FOTM...

Try to gain a new skill in WoW without levelling. The distinction of horizontal vs vertical levelling is done because you have two directions of progression: vertical, giving you higher power, horizontal giving you different powers. But the main point why we're giving those direction names is...

The ability to be in multiple guilds simultaneously in A Tale in the Desert was extremely interesting, game-wise. At one point, I was in: - A serverwide french-speaking guild - A local guild with people I worked various tradeskills with - The Bedouin guild for mutual help on passing tests...

Nope. That's not horizontal levelling. That's vertical levelling. Vertical levelling: 5 tiers. Tier 1, my sword does 100 dmg. Tier 2, my sword does 150 dmg. Tier 3, my sword does 200 dmg. Tier 4, 250 dmg, tier 5 300 dmg. That's vertical levelling: your power value increase. Horizontal...

Probably. Note that you're supposed to be able to pick additional tiers for other classes while playing as, say, a Warrior, so the additional classes end up being a source of "new skills" you use for your main class, even if you never ever use that class itself.

Have you looked at the allakhazam link I did put to refresh your memory? I did play DAOC, and did questing, and I constantly had 10+ quests in progress all the time until around level 25. Fedex, collect, etc. The quests may not have given you enough XP to level just doing them after level 12...

Because tiers aren't horizontal levelling, they're vertical. The horizontal part is getting tier 5 in forty different vertical silos, each independent from the other, each that can be progressed completely independently from the others, and the fact that you're tier 1 or 5 in the wizard class...

There's however a major difference. XP is fungible. One point of XP gained killing a bear, completing a fed-ex quest, uncovering a new mini-map area, is equal to the other point of XP. As a result, you can go to the place where XP is most efficient, and do it to the exclusion of nothing else...

Because you can't trade $15 month subscription for in-game value. Remember: the guy who is buying CREDD for $20 isn't going to buy it for a 1 month subscription: he buys it to sell in-game for gold. So the question is: are you going to get more gold for $20 from players or from farmers? The...

That's from the fact that you didn't had glowing yellow exclamation marks around. There were a ton of NPCs giving you exactly the same quest systems as WoW (fetch me this; go there to give this guy this token; kill bears and take their asses)... it was just easy to forget about them since they...

I beg to differ. Dark Age of Camelot had almost exactly the same questing system. The only significant difference I can think of was the quest marker above the NPC's head. (they had a severe lack of quest content at the later stages of levelling, but the system from 1 to 30+ felt like WoW)

That's not shortsighted. That's what people WANT. Obligatory car analogy: When cars appeared, they were clunky monsters. People would endlessly tinker with them, dismantle and rebuild them from scratch; swap in and out parts to get better mileage and faster speed. Fast forward to today...

Well, considering the max sub number occurred after POP... nope, most people didn't stop playing EQ after Planes. Most people stopped playing EQ when WoW released, period. Maybe YOUR guild dissolved at that time, but in general, no, people kept on playing. Another anecdotal experience: I...