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The Mayans were off by a a decade or two.

Yeah, I"ll back off from further advice to the big Ser - this is a live and learn thing - and really, I wish him the best. I"m a big romantic IRL (if not necessarily on this board) so I dig the star-crossed lovers from two different worlds thing. I don"t know Keg from Adam, but I"ll certainly...

I can"t speak about Persian girls or Bahai girls specifically but I have dated a middle-eastern girl in my time (as from the middle-east not LA raised) and I"m going to sorta back up Ravvenn here. You"re a stranger in a strange land and if you think you"ve got a bead on what your gf is really...

Tyen, I appreciate the crazy, and we really should group up in some EQEmu down the line but you"re clueless here. Arab & Persian women (and Muslim girls in particular - but this generally goes for any girl raised in what we"d call Arabic culture including Keg"s Ba"hai girl and Arabic Christians)...

The word is Haram.

I"m going to guess someone like this won"t let you get out of your nightmare that easy. Having been through a divorce my advice is that you get yourself the meanest biggest asshole of a divorce attorney you can find before you do anything else. Because I assure you as soon as she finds out...

It"s BOE/BOP that"s the problem here - not the random nature of the drop. If the final blade had been tradeable there wouldn"t have been a problem.

It"s a good idea - but I don"t like the implementation. If they were going to make it a card game (and Lord knows I love me some MMO + CCG mechanics) and they did, they should have gone all out and made it a full blown card game. Think Legends of Norrath or MTG or whatever.

Fair enough - I shouldn"t be offering crafting advice either :-) I just don"t get it, but I get that I don"t get it.

I think most crafter types would agree that (at least initially -- no idea what status is today of either) VG crafting > WoW crafting -- whatever else you might think about the world, game performance, adventuring mechanics and etc. I think you are trying to fix some things you view as...

I do not agree with you that materials acquisition is where crafters start to have fun with the crafting game. I knew people who enjoyed beating the mini-game that was the "combine process" in VG. I did not enjoy that mini-game, but then I"m not a crafter. I had a long rant about how I hate...

Exhibit A for why you should not be designing crafting systems. I don"t understand it myself, but crafting people like that stuff - and more power to them. They don"t want the shit you"re suggesting, AFIK, they want the mini games buffed up and made into full on virtual reality. They want...

I would prefer never to craft again -- making complicated crafting systems that attract crafter types to the games I play is one way to do that -- they can craft for me whil i go do heroic and in-game monetarily rewarding things like kill giant mobs -- I don"t think a hybrid system like you are...

No. Players will go to the path of least resistance. Here they"d just go NPC.

A man can not server two masters & etc. You can not make a crafting system that is both (a) super interesting to crafter-types like Grave and (b) super accessible to crafting hating adventure types like me. The best you can do is interpose some additional element in between the two - such...

I think this is fail. I hate crafting but I know there is a solid core of the MMORPG playerbase that really digs it (see e.g., Kuro & Grave"s posts). Any good crafting system should appeal them first -- I don"t think yours will. * * * Bah Grave beat me too it.

Well, one thing that companies seem to forget is that the beta testers are also representative of the future customer base. So if that representative base starts screaming about something the company should listen.

Nice way to sidestop folks asking for more info about your game. Kudos. * * * Fruitless line of inquiry. Devs are always going to think they"re smarter/know more than the playerbase, and (depending on the playerbase) they may be right. Exceptional beta testers are going to get lost in the...

Never saw that thread but then I wasn"t in VG beta till phase 4? November 2006ish. Anyway, that"s a little quick for me. I don"t mind grinding mobs that take more than 20seconds to kill as long as I"m getting decent xp. Qucik-death mobs/small XP or Slow-death mobs/large XP. 6 of 1/ half a...

Instead of having to listen to the entire playerbase - probably better off picking 10-20 players from top guilds that have been invited to the beta and 10-20 avowedly casual/solo/duo players who have consistently made semi-intelligent posts on their forums. Keep those 20-40 as your Greek Chorus...

I hate this attitude but I"m not going to single you out because there"s a ton of people who would agree with you -- likely including Ngruk and the staff at 38 as well as the boys at Blizzard, SOE and most other game studios. * * * One of my favorite (non-game) anecdotes about fear of the...

Okay now I remember my point in moving this thread to the front page -- with Free Realms having an attached in-game CCG and with Chronicle of Spellborn apparently having a weak CCG-like ability wheel (I got this leet CoS infrom from a penny-arcade comic so don"t ask me about the actual game), I...

It was 5 concept art shots not 3 my bad. And we already got huts. Or is the treehut not hutty enough to meet the cliche?

So Moor/Ngruk when"s the first actual info/or next art update for Copernicus? In three months it"ll be a year since the 3 art shots.

As has been mentioned before, you can have fun healing in a diku-based game see, e.g., VG.

I will never understand the appeal of D2. Diablo was great for its time. D2 blew. Oh (and this applies to both D/D2) there is nothing good, right, interesting or fun about spending 10 minutes filling up your belt with as many regen pots as you can and then clicking them as fast as you can...

Class theorycraft (trinity v. everything else) gets discussed in depth at least 2 or 3x a year here (and discussed in passing much more) just search. I"m just waiting for the sub-job system to get mentioned along with the inevitable hybrid v. pure class discussion. * * * As for me, I...

Heh. Well that"s partly an issue with BoP loot - which I despise for just this reason. I like your epic comment though -- I certainly don"t think all loot should be random. Quests should give you specific loot. We"ll have to agree to disagree though since I"m not designing any MMOS anytime ever...

Zehn, I think you"re a really smart guy who"s thought about this a lot and is trying to prevent folks from being screwed the way you"ve been screwed in the past... and yet I still think you"re dead wrong with respect to your pick-an-item system. You"re just not going to get the serotonin...

I think adding a little smarts to the RNG is fine. Doesn"t have to be a purely random drop from a static list - should taken into account classes. A no drop/bop item that can"t be used by the classes present (whether in a raid or just in a group) should never drop. In general I also think...

You fail at human psychology: take some time to check out CCGs, your local horse-racing establishment, a scratch ticket and Las Vegas. People aren"t driven by the fear of "poor" chances, but by the hope that despite the long odds we"ll get what we want. Random drop (from static loot...

Badges are fail. Their worst offense? They"re a mediocre solution to one of the key aspects of an MMO: the quest for loot. Yeah it sucks, you raid and raid and raid and that one item you want doesn"t drop. But when that one item you really want does drop and you get it... it makes up for...

I wouldn"t mind a change from fantasy and space -- something that hasn"t been done at all is good pulp. I"d like to see an MMO with a world based on Indiana Jones/Mummy/Call of Cthulhu with a dash of prohibition-era bootlegging for the occasional change of pace. So yes, I would very much like...

This is pretty much where I think MMOs should go - best of both worlds. I would add that it"d be good to add a few portal stones so once you"ve run through the public areas to (for example) the group instance or raid instance you"ll be able to port directly to the start of the instanced areas...

Eh something about being able to progress your char after level-cap. Does it really matter? These days I hold out no hope for the current and coming crop of MMOS right now. We"re entering the Generation X of MMOS - shiftless, feckless and tired. All the developers are going to try to...

Wall of Text incoming. Pretty much agree with most of the points in this post -- though I"ve got nothing against adding say one or two sub-endgame full-group dungeon (with superior rewards). -- though you kinda imply that with the SM mention earlier. Majority sub-endgame dungeons should be...

This quote makes me want to ask the following question: how many of your level designers have played the really great CRPGS of the past: Planescape, Fallout1/2, Ultima VII, Baldur"s Gate. I"d say all of those games (and in particular the first) we"re extremely memorable and yes I can remember...

OMG.Hellno. This is a terrible idea. D2 is the antithesis of what I would consider a good MMO experience. You hate the diku-type class system: dps/tank/healer/cc. You postulate a D2 system - which basically means everyone is dps -- how is having everyone be dps >>> the current hybrid/pure-class...

How do you feel about hybrid classes?

You don"t ever balance 1x1 for the reason you state. The only reasonable "balance" achievable in an MMO is Rock-Paper-Scissors. Class 1 should usually beat Class 2 (1x) Class 2 should usually beat Class 3 (1x) and Class 3 should usually beat Class 1 (1x1). Assuming you ahve more than 3...