Search results

nm

While cut scenes are good (flag them to skippable AFTER the first time through), the answer is clear. *tongue in cheek* Simply make a randomized quiz (say 5 questions out of 20 possible) after each quest text block that needs to be answered to get full exp and loot rewards. Would still be...

If you"re spending 8 hours a day playing 5 hours of single player game and 3 hours of MMOing, how is that any better/worse (to you as an individual) than spending 8 hours of MMOing? 8 hours of gaming is 8 hours of gaming. Of course the Suits in charge want folks to pay for a month and then...

They actually mentioned Grim Batol in a recent interview. Who knows, maybe they got all their coders a new batch of ADHD drugs and/or chained them the fuck down, so they"d work on existing shit rather than chasing the next "Ohh Shiny." More realistically, its probably a matter of not trusting...

Some of the R.A.S. hate comes from how he treats his characters. Some fantasy readers like having the Hero(s) survive and overcome everything. Others love the George R. R. Martin approach where no one"s safe, and everyone can just randomly die. Me, I"m in the first group, I had to give up...

Evasion tanks are simply always in a bad place. If the content is trivial, then it doesn"t matter who tanks, including non-tank classes. If the content is current and/or hard, healers prefer non-evasion tanks due to consistency of incoming damage. The raid prefers non-evasion tanks due to...

Other than the LoLRP reasoning behind it, does it really matter if you"re refilling a bar to 100 (conventional healing), or simply keeping the same bar overfilled (preventive runes/shields/whatever). In one case you"re filling a bar to make sure it doesn"t hit zero. In the later you"re filling a...

Balancing an Ogre dps caster vs an erudite: Erudite plays down whatever path he choses, nuker, doter, pet"er, whatever. Uses talents so that spells get enhanced dmg from their good primary stats. Low hps, cloth armor, standard glass cannon stuff, no surprises here. Ogre plays down same...

I"m not talking about perma death, I"m talking about the very simple ratio between "penalty for dying" and how much you actually give a shit about dieing. And how the players need slapped every once in a while, how they need to NOT get what they want and assume they"ll be given. EQ you gave a...

We"ve kind of gotten past this point in the discussion, but today"s Penny Arcade is just as applicable to MMOs as it is to tabletop D&D. Every MMO needs a Tycho. Penny Arcade! - A Perennial Favorite TLDR: Fear of death/losing is a good thing.

The EXP is shit because you"re gaining character power a different way. The new stance, totem, skill level, whatever. Now maybe the balance was or wasn"t right, but there"s room in games for quests to have alternate rewards.

If this was directed to me, no, I didn"t suggest AAs. I suggested having a high chance at getting a free point of sense heading, intimidate, parry, 2 handed Whalefin Tuna expertise, or whatever.

There are also things you can have bosses "drop" that aren"t loot, that aren"t even applicable to those at the very top of their game, yet would be nice little "everyone wins something" things. What if, on killing Raid_Boss_04, everyone who"s there earns (or has some decent/high percent...

Ahh those days. Even as a rogue I had a *full* suit of +cha gear, just to squeeze those extra copper out of every transaction. 2 fisted mug action ftw!

I may not run Alienware level crazy machines, but due to always loving newish shooters, my machine stays decently upgraded. I"ve almost never turned effects off for lag reasons. To help distinguish person A from person B under all the crazy glows, sure; and other tactical reasons. I pity...

As much as we all have become spreadsheet jockeys, most of us still have the little nuggets of stereotypical fantasy RPG mentality in us somewhere. Hell, this is the whole reason everyone wants to be The Hero, not just a hero. Crafting (or having crafted for us) a dagger from a dragons...

AO has a version of this. To get your skillups once you"ve earned enough craft exp you either: a) talk to a player with a higher skill than you and he trains you (you get skillup, he gets craft exp). or b) you go find the NPC trainer and give him gold. Almost all players that I...

While you can"t have it both ways for crafters and noncrafters you CAN have a few things to give options. NPC crafter can make stuff, it just takes longer and/or more materials and/or more expensive and/or slightly lesser quality. NPC harvester can gather crap for you, but is slower and...

heh, you didn"t click on the artists religious shit then.

Part of the rage at stuff like the node bug is that we know how tiny and silly it is, and think we know how easy it would be to fix. Loading up the zone file and fixing a z-coordinate shouldn"t take up an afternoon. Now maybe something is fucked (be it internal process, be it your toolset, be...

Its great seeing publicized bug tracker style info. Its one thing to submit something you don"t agree with and have it just disappear into the void. (And really, a significant portion of what we feel are bugs are this. The legitimate BSD or underground mining node or whatever is a rarity.)...

Its been a while since I looked into the GW"s scene, but the Devs for guildwars were pretty free in changing things up. "Well, XYZ comp has had over A% participation over the last season, and that"s higher than we want. XYZ comp functions due to these particular synergies, and the lack of...

To expand on the talk of the DDO system: You could have mobs drop items based on your class, but still have a rare threshold for a better version. I"m not sold on Diablo style purely random stats, and the endless runs for "perfect" stats; but having a normal and superior (X% better stats)...

part of the Death of "community" has to do with shear volume of players, part of it has to do with everyone being in their own sanitary instance, and part of it has to do with being required to hit a button every GCD (and thus preventing the random bullshitting that *is*community*building*)...

The idea was that, out of the 3000 possible spell options you *could* have, multiplied by the number of times your stats/level let you cast them a day; you had to make hard choices and/or accept limitations. Do you waste one of your precious spells for the day on something which may or may...

Which is made humorous with the mmo-like direction spell/skill use has taken in AD&D 4.0. Once per attack/fight/day very closely mimics your mmo spell cooldowns. No combat ability flat out fails, they simply don"t work as well if you flub your roll. I"m sure this is a much more lucrative...

Can"t remember if its an upcoming MMO, or an out and failed one, but I remember one mmo having 6 hotbars of 5-6 keys. You only had access to 1 hot bar at a time though. After you used an ability or a set period of time passed, your hotbar rotated to the next one. Since said game also...

You balance abilities/skills/player power at zero gear. If the whole package is also balanced at Endgame/min-max/crazy high number etc; then there"s a very good chance that it"ll be balanced at all points in between. This is of course assuming you"re using sane formulas. And if everything in...

I got out of MtG a while ago, but in some after-action interview I seem to remember someone saying they really expected Doomsday to break things; but it simply didn"t work out that way. And yeh, MtG is a good model for all the "coulda beens" (design idea that flat out failed), "shoulda beens"...

Guildwars (as befitting the idea they"re projecting about being a mostly pvp game) includes almost all of the "mandatory" pvp elements. limited gear, weekly skill tuning (last I checked), pve and pvp rulesets. Heck, with their pvp unlock system they use, you could even say they allow you...

Well, the Hour-a-day Johnies, and the Wear-a-Helmet-to-bed Billy"s won"t agree with you. And at this point they have more numbers, more funds. As long as Capitalist dogs, err CEOs/shareholders <G> control games, as long as everyone shoots for WoW style numbers, these 2 groups will outvote you...

The problem with interesting is that it gets stale, and then what? The first time your dude unsheathes his dagger by spinning it around in his hand, throwing it under his leg and back over the shoulder, that"s cool. After he"s done it at the start of EVERY FIGHT since day one; not so much...