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Most mmo's are successful from a business standpoint, even the crappy ones. That is why they keep churning them out. The new business model seems to expect the biggest profits to come from the first couple of months and then go into low cost maintenance mode, where they get small dividends long...

Hey don't get me wrong, I have issues with kickstarter and think many of the projects are little more than scams. But this particular one that Caliane is railing against isn't one of them. It's main purpose was to sell a hardcover print of pages that werealready created. It was wildly successful...

Yeah, I'm sure the details have changed since the last time I cared, which was never. The point is that they are very inexpensive to make and no work is involved anymore by the band, yet they are still raking in the bucks. I'm fine with that.

Lol, goods are worth whatever the buyer will pay for it. I just don't understand why you care so much. If people are willing to give him a bunch of money for very little work then let them. It's their money. I didn't give him any cash but I don't have any problem with somebody else doing so...

I just can't get worked up about his success. We tend to reward creative and talented people who do things that entertain us. Look at how much athletes make, or the fact that bands like Pink Floyd are still making bank selling albums (they didn't even have cds back then) they made 40 years ago...

I generally agree with you about kickstarter, but the webcomic you dis is actually pretty good imo. That's why people gave him so much money. The vast majority of webcomics are really, really, really bad. Yeah, he doesn't put out much content but the response he has received gives a lot of...

It's true that Garriott hasn't done anything recently to justify his apparent belief that he is one of the "great designers". But it is also true that the mmo industry has a serious lack of them. The massive amount of mmo cow dung produced in the last few years is ample proof of that.

Lol.. +1 b..b..but Smed said it will be a SANDBOX!

MMO devs can't win this argument. If they make the game playable with 200 or more people on screen then they have to lower polygon counts and reduce graphics. So players then complain that the graphics are ass (and run back to WoW where the graphics are ass). If Devs go for all the shiny...

Open dungeons are not the problem, the leveling model is. ALL leveling content becomes a ghost town after a couple of months. Especially now with max level being so easy and fast to get to in modern mmos. EQ's low level dungeons only lasted as long as they did because leveling was so brutal...

Has anyone actually played any version of this game, or is all this back and forth just speculation? Personally I don't give a fuck who makes the game or what engine it uses, the final product is the only thing that counts. Is it fun?

Very doubtful it will be anything drastic. Star Citizen has perma death but the way it's designed doesn't really make it hurt. There are any number of ways to do perma death without it scaring the panties off the player base.

Part of the reason death penalties worked at creating suspense is it forced the player to be more aware of his immediate surroundings or suffer the consequences. I think you can do that without death penalties though. One simple way would be to vary mob speeds. One of the reasons modern mmos...

Yep, in everything from rats to raids, but not as scripted as today's mmo's are. Add rezz's idea of mobs that fight differently every time you try it. The reaction idea has been tried a few times, but with limited success. Part of what makes mmos so boring is the fact that most encounters are...

I still read his posts as more hype than design. The details he mentions are just talking points targeted at a specific audience he is trying to get money from. Which is typical of all money men. Getting funding is the most important job there is in any industry. It doesn't matter how good a...

Generally I agree with much of what you have to say, but this is where you go off the rails. Making fun games is as much a creative process as a design process. And the creative process cannot be quantified into any specific formula. If it could then there wouldn't be any bad music, movies, art...

Well that's just your opinion. As pyksel said, it just depends on the end product that actually ships. The vision is just a guide and it will change. Every game in the end looks much different than the initial design docs. As for the hype, Mark has to make people aware of the game so they...

F2P does not equal P2W though. Two different subjects, although they do overlap a bit. Otherwise you are correct. I believe Smed said all their future games will be F2P.

It depends on what you define as pay to win. For some people, just having a cash shop of any sort is considered to be pay to win. The rage that players had for GW2's cash shop before the game even came out was kind of funny. And some people still say it is a pay to win game. I just don't...

First person is just more immersive. But it has issues, because of the small fov. If they could expand the fov without having the resulting fish eye lense look then it would be much better.

EQ was a more social game. It's slower gameplay and the lack of voice chat encouraged a different type of gameplay. That's just the way it was. It doesn't matter if it was by design or not. Why that simple fact gets you andKorn Kobb Kreugan's, jimmies rustled is hilarious. It's very revealing...

Lol, you are still butthurt for being called out as a WoWtard. I'm sorry your secret is out. But it really wasn't that much of a secret. Since every post you make is just more proof that you have the imagination of a slug. You can't think of any gameplay that would work except that which copies...

Whatever. If you are going to get all upset because I used a figure of speech, then it is your problem that you can't see the bigger issues. My point was about the social nature of EQ back then. Your focus on some minor detail I happened to mention is sad. I'm not asking for a return to...

Notice I also stated that the introduction of teamspeak, ventrillo and their effect on mmo design were important. But perhaps your are incapable of seeing that. And I never mentioned anything about where split pulling came from, because everyone by now knows that it was unintended. But so...

Split pulling encouraged a different sort of gameplay than we have today. Part of the reason EQ was so social was because of the amount of downtime between the action. It encouraged people to actually talk to each other and if you enjoy socializing with other human beings then EQ was great. It...

Lol, bummer. It will be interesting to see how many times we can rehash the same subjects over and over again till then...

Yep, the new consoles will have many features that PC players are familiar with. I think playing a mmo on a console could be fun if done right. I have no problems with the concept of playing a mmo on a console, it just hasn't been done well up to this point. Being able to play the same game on a...

Surprised you didn't pull out your standard "neckbeard" response...

Different classes/races with unique abilities I think works great in a 3 faction system. Balance is always impossible but with 3 factions it doesn't become game breaking. In a two faction system like WAR though, it was a huge mistake.

Yeah, I loved that run. But I never really had to do it again. Even in EQ as you leveled, travel mostly got easier. It wasn't until the world was just too big, and players too spread out, that they had to add the PoK books. What EQ could have done though is provide more tools for fast travel...

Any game that has tons of instanced dungeons has to have a LFD tool. It's not really an mmo at that point anyways, so they might as well go all the way to crapkingdom (I hate instanced dungeon lobby games). If the game is open world, open dungeon then just some basic LFG tools are needed.

True, but only if the devs don't take those factors into account. My preference is to have some fast travel in core areas, with slow travel to outlying zones. Spread raid/group/resources out so that you have to chose. The quick travel mob with good loot, or the long travel mob with great...

The size of the world and how populated it is, really is key. EQ had to go with PoK books when they did because of all the expansions that spread everyone out too much to group effectively.

Travel in EQ before PoP wasn't that hard, even for tanks. Every tank worth a damn had their OT hammer, gate potions, etc. I loved getting my OT hammer out and then praying for it to proc. It was always fun. One of my fondest EQ memories was traveling with a friend from Qeynos to Freeport as a...

EVE has slow travel and it works for them. I don't care one way or the other, as long as it works within the game world created by the devs. The main issue with current fast travel games is that so much of their other systems are also the same. Fast travel by itself isn't bad, but when...

Obviously, the devs involved would have restrictions in the tools that prevented that. EQN isn't the minecraft mmo, Smed only uses that as an example because there isn't anything else to reference at this point. EQN will have some sort of world building tools apparently, but they will be very...

Hell, just changing some simple things in mmos would make them drastically different then the drivel we have now. Vary leash ranges and mob speeds... bingo you have a totally different game, and have reintroduced a little bit of danger. The fact that in every mmo, all mobs have the same leash...

Lol, if every game since WoW was really a failure then they would have stopped making them years ago. The fact that new mmos are launched every month just goes to show that they are still cash cows, and quite successful from a business standpoint. They very rarely shut down because they MAKE...

Hopefully, EQN really is the sandbox game Smed is promising. The style of game Kreugan loves so much is very old, and very tired. Most mmos are just a rehash of EQ / WoW with prettier graphics. We really need new blood and a total rethink of the genre.

I can agree with that. For a time, my guild had most of the server firsts in EQ and a couple of minor world firsts. We tried for more world firsts and were very close, and we worked it out on our own. That was fun. But that happened after we took over the server and left the other guilds behind...