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Byolante posted:That is possibly the dumbest statement in this thread. The classes are the way they are now primarily because of: Your raid sucked rear end because it wasn't designed for a 10 man, Blizzard didn't properly test their poo poo raids properly. The problem wasn't the mechanics, it was you didn't have enough friends to do it properly. Blizzard can make encounters that work in both 10 and 25 man and they don't need role clones to pull it off, they just need to be competent at their job. I want challenging, if that means developers have to put some effort to balance encounters properly then that is their problem, not mine. They were pulling in enough money to do the poo poo properly, they just didn't give a poo poo. I remember having this conversation with Ghostcrawler during the early days of Cataclysm when the heroic 5 mans were pretty brutal in terms of low margin for error, normally when you lost one person (with early heroic gear) you would pretty much wipe at the boss, it was less forgiving than the raid content in the same gear. I liked the challenge but I had to blackban pugging because you couldn't bring their average mouthbreather into the heroic dungeons, it was just hysterically bad. GC said this was their new path and they were going back to challenging for WoW and he said he would refuse to change. I said to him he has 3 months tops before some dude in a suit came by and put his thumb on his forehead. People whine like stuck pigs and left in droves, didn't even last 3 months and he was forced to dumb the poo poo out of the heroics. WoW just doesn't have the playerbase to sustain a decent quality game. Zvim fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Feb 14, 2014 |
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Feb 14, 2014 17:40
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Zvim posted:WoW just doesn't have the playerbase to sustain a decent quality game. I don't have an opinion about WoW, but I think that posts get better in terms of their impact and clarity when people use more specific language than "decent quality". It's always going to be more productive to debate specific attributes rather than the quasi-moral judgment of a game's overall worthiness. It sounds like WoW doesn't have the playerbase to sustain a game with harsh penalties for error, but it seems to have the playerbase to sustain a themepark game with just enough difficulty to make greased-rail progression rewarding for those people. Or something like that?
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Feb 14, 2014 18:01
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Zvim posted:I want challenging, if that means developers have to put some effort to balance encounters properly then that is their problem, not mine. They were pulling in enough money to do the poo poo properly, they just didn't give a poo poo. The problem, again, with wow is that its difficulty is not layered. Death does not matter. It merely relies on more and tougher twitch mechanics to make things more difficult. Its one dimensional. How do you make a wow encounter more difficult? Make it longer, make it cast more blobs on the ground to avoid, make it so that everyone has to play within 99% of their class ability and DPS or enrage. Make people do this poo poo for longer stretches of time to test concentration. Thats the only way to make WoWs encounters harder. Im loving 41 now, eyes going bad, and dont have the stamina and the reflexes anymore to jump, strafe in circles, while my other hand does a Chopin minute waltz recital with my number keys. There has to be a way to do this poo poo without resorting to CoD type poo poo and twitch to make things harder. How bout bringing back some strategy so you have to think of which buttons to push instead of how quickly you manage to do it. This is why EQs death penalty added that other layer of not only challenge, but fear and it balanced risk vs reward. You could now have 2 encounters both exactly the same, both bosses having the same HP powers...etc... Put one in the open world somewhere and the challenge is there but youre not risking much, right? If you die you just go back and retrieve your poo poo with minimal effort. But put one of those bosses at the end of a sprawling dungeon thats hard to break into and you now have that extra layer of difficulty and risk, right? Because when you die down there, youre gonna have a lovely time getting to your corpses. Peechka fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Feb 14, 2014 |
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Feb 14, 2014 19:01
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Peechka posted:This is why EQs death penalty added that other layer of not only challenge, but fear and it balanced risk vs reward. You could now have 2 encounters both exactly the same, both bosses having the same HP powers...etc... Put one in the open world somewhere and the challenge is there but youre not risking much, right? If you die you just go back and retrieve your poo poo with minimal effort. But put one of those bosses at the end of a sprawling dungeon thats hard to break into and you now have that extra layer of difficulty and risk, right? Because when you die down there, youre gonna have a lovely time getting to your corpses. This might be me but I don't think death penalties or huge ammounts of trash actually makes a boss more compelling. a tank and spank fight doesn't become memorable in as good way just because it took 4 hours of trash clearing to get to it and if you wipe everyone is spending the next week grinding mobs to get back to where they were before the raid started. To my mind death penalties sound like exactly the sort of toxic mechanic that would kill new player adoption because a inexperienced player causing a wipe will haver costed god knows how many hours of work for the entire guild. It is all well and good to say the sort of person who would stop playing after that sort of experience isn't the target market for the game but player attrition is a real problem in mmos and coupled with the last group of people who actively played a mmo like this are getting a lot older and just don't have the time or inclination to play a game where a single mistake means 4+ hours of busywork to get back to where you used to be.
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Feb 14, 2014 20:25
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I hope Brad sticks to his "vision" and ignores the Internet's suggestions, especially the ones in this thread. This is supposed to be a niche game. I like the death penalty they have planned.
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Feb 14, 2014 20:37
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returnh posted:This is supposed to be a niche game. I like the death penalty they have planned.
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Feb 14, 2014 20:50
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TheAgent posted:A niche game that they want a AAA budget for, which means they need a AAA playerbase, which isn't going to happen. How do you figure that? Hes quoted on saying he needs about $8 million. Thats far away from any AAA budget. Whats an AAA budget these days anyway? $100 mill? $200 mill?
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Feb 14, 2014 21:03
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returnh posted:I hope Brad sticks to his "vision" and ignores the Internet's suggestions, especially the ones in this thread. Well for the low price of $15/mo you can fund his vision. It'll be like playing old school MUDs but with even less (read: no actual) content.
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Feb 14, 2014 22:13
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Peechka posted:How do you figure that? Hes quoted on saying he needs about $8 million. Thats far away from any AAA budget. Whats an AAA budget these days anyway? $100 mill? $200 mill? I'd also like to point out there's no way to finish this game (as currently designed) for $8m. $20m might do it, but I think it's not hard to speculate $40m to $60m. Current costs to develop games for the last gen are around $10m to $20m, with current gen stuff being higher. There are games that come in well below or above those numbers, but that's pretty standard. Remember that 1/10th of that $8m overall budget was just getting an office together so that they could get more funding so they can start thinking about making an actual game. Using 10% of your budget just to get ready to start getting ready means you're going to need a lot more money than you think. Just doing some calculations, with the bare minimum number of employees to develop content (six artists, four to five content designers, four engine programmers, two toolset programmers, two server engineers) at the bare minimum salaries for those positions (some at $25k, some at $35k/yr) you're looking at around $1.75m to $2m in salary alone for a 3 year development. This doesn't even factor in computer and server hardware, software licences, QA, operating overhead or managerial salaries. Basically what I'm saying is a game of this scope can't be made on a shoestring budget. They either have to reinvent their goals and shoot for making their entire game for one or two million, or they get a shitload of money from investors willing to take a huge gamble on a niche game paying back their $20m (or more) investment. TheAgent fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Feb 14, 2014 |
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Feb 14, 2014 22:28
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I'm not saying that it will be good or that it can even be done, I just want the attempt made.
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Feb 14, 2014 22:58
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TheAgent posted:You're thinking with marketing. Actual development costs are well below that. LOL, im not saying THEY can do it,poo poo 3/4 of the guys on the team are "idea guys". But it can be done if you have a small focused and experienced team, good programming/engineering guys and use the unity engine which costs barely nothing.
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Feb 14, 2014 23:02
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Peechka posted:LOL, im not saying THEY can do it,poo poo 3/4 of the guys on the team are "idea guys"
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Feb 14, 2014 23:22
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Third World Reggin posted:I think someone is doing an emulated server for vanguard and for everquest 2. I would really never wish that upon someone. I can't wait until 2024 until this isn't released and his ownership of the web site expires. Where is the donate button?
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Feb 15, 2014 01:24
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Subjunctive posted:I don't have an opinion about WoW, but I think that posts get better in terms of their impact and clarity when people use more specific language than "decent quality". It's always going to be more productive to debate specific attributes rather than the quasi-moral judgment of a game's overall worthiness. It sounds like WoW doesn't have the playerbase to sustain a game with harsh penalties for error, but it seems to have the playerbase to sustain a themepark game with just enough difficulty to make greased-rail progression rewarding for those people. Or something like that? I thought I explained why, as soon as they made some attempt to go back to a more challenging type of game people raged, whined and left in droves and the suits had to come in and say no, you have to go back to making the game a glorified loot pinata. The problem is with trying to make a game that will appeal to everyone is that you have to make a lot of sacrifices. WoW for a long time maintained distinct game experiences; Raiding, Dungeons and PvP. For a long time only about 5% of their players experienced the hardest tiers of raiding, for those who didn't want to put the time or effort into it there were the dungeons and there were those that liked to just PvP, be it competitive or non-competitive for different rewards and achievements. Then came the age of self-entitlement. Why can't someone with poor skills, no commitment and no social skills get to experience the ultimate content and get the same rewards? So they systematically dumbed down the content and it just became a game of farm management, rather than having encounters which push the skill of the players you just had more and more moronic poo poo encounters which just required players to move to spot X now, and move to spot Y then move to spot Z, the game came down to just figuring out simple patterns, once you understood the pattern there was really no skill level required to execute it. That was very different to the older content, you had to have a tank who was an amazing player and you needed players who pushed themselves at every level, when we did the old Naxx and AQ there were less than 1% of the player base who saw it let alone finish it. There were some great encounters in those older raid dungeons. Raiding wasn't for everyone, it took a lot of commitment to do it well, there were usually some early encounters which were more doable to less skilled/organised groups but rather than say we are going to work hard to improve our skill and co-ordination the pressure was to make the content easier so more people could experience the content. Once you accept that lower standard you do not make find an equilibrium, you just continue to degrade and you attract more and more people who do not want a challenge and you get suits and stock holders who are looking at profit figures and if you make decisions which reduce profits you are out. WoW was a game motivated on making a better quality game than EQ, it evolved into making more and more money. Ghostcrawler tried to stop the rot and go back to some more challenge and he was put in his place, the game has gone down a path it can't go back from. Most of those who loved the challenge are long gone, the only people motivated to stay are those who make money from the E-sport level of the game, it is not about the challenge, it is about racing and being the first to bowl over easy content for sponsorship dollars.
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Feb 15, 2014 06:23
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It's like someone summoned the ghost of the official wow forums into this thread.
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Feb 15, 2014 07:37
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You are right, spending the majority of development funds on content less that 5% of your player base will ever see, let alone complete, is a great idea and should be the standard! Why does it matter to a hardcore raider who can complete the raid on heroic that the brazillian afk squad can get charity epics from a watered down version of the same raid. I have achievements and mounts that no one can ever get again to show I was there and I did it the hardest way possible, if some group of bad players or casuals or whatever can go and experience the dungeon that they as a percentage of the funding put a lot more into than me then good for them. Sub based games live and die on keeping the largest possible group of people paying 15/mo for their crack fix. The option that is a better idea if you want to develop content for the 1% is a f2p system where you fund the game based on that 1% who really care buying dumb poo poo so they can really care about the game.
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Feb 15, 2014 10:38
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Occupy Orgrimmar. 1% of the population owns 99% of the purpz and their lobby groups force Blizzard to develop content for them and oh god they're coming to break up our tent city now. QUICK vote for Nader. Meow Tse-tung fucked around with this message at 11:09 on Feb 15, 2014 |
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Feb 15, 2014 10:56
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Zvim posted:I thought I explained why, as soon as they made some attempt to go back to a more challenging type of game people raged, whined and left in droves and the suits had to come in and say no, you have to go back to making the game a glorified loot pinata.  Totalbiscuit, is that you?
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Feb 15, 2014 14:57
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Zvim posted:You used to be able to heal as a Ret or Prot Paladin which converted AP into SP, but no, it wasn't in their 'vision' so they just made things stop working, whenever you pushed the boundaries of your abilities you were an exploiter or min-maxer. It was just the only sliver of choice for individuality. http://www.wowhead.com/spell=85804/selfless-healer Also they didn't dumb down the game to make it easier or more boring or whatever, they cut out the cruft because doing four quests halfway across the world to unlock a quest for the dungeon you actually wanted to run was boring bullshit in and of itself. Sometimes the quests were fun, but for every time you enjoyed making a Scholomance key there were five groups that broke up since no one had the key.
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Feb 15, 2014 15:07
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Byolante posted:You are right, spending the majority of development funds on content less that 5% of your player base will ever see, let alone complete, is a great idea and should be the standard! Why does it matter to a hardcore raider who can complete the raid on heroic that the brazillian afk squad can get charity epics from a watered down version of the same raid. I have achievements and mounts that no one can ever get again to show I was there and I did it the hardest way possible, if some group of bad players or casuals or whatever can go and experience the dungeon that they as a percentage of the funding put a lot more into than me then good for them. I don't care if they dish out every epic in existence to casual players on login, I'd rather them mail them out than to trash the content. The loot is a means to an end, you only need the gear at the end of one tier to do the content of the next tier. Guild progression improve significantly through Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King. AQ and Nax came pretty late, the time investment and the gating made it difficult for a lot of guilds to bother doing it, they knew Burning Crusade was around the corner and a lot of guilds still found Blackwing Lair challenging. We did it because it was there, it was hard, it was fun. MMO has to give you activities to do that is going to occupy the hours you are looking to put into the game. The problem with Cataclysm was we ran out of things to do very quickly and spent more time logged off than logged in. Once that happens it becomes easy to permanently disconnect as you put more time into the other things you looked for to fill in the time void. I think Burning Crusade was the pinnacle of WoW. WotLK was more popular, it had the superior theme and zones, but it started down that slipper slope of money before integrity. Their heroics were trash. That was their motivation for making Cataclysm more challenging because the demographic that had doing heroics as their pinnacle were also getting bored by the end of WotLK. You think they are on the right track? They had 10m+ subscribers during Burning Crusader, 12m+ during Wrath of the Lich King. What are they on now? 7.5m subscribers for Pandaland? When they talk about attracting the old players back that they lost what I ask is what am I going to fill my time in with? That is what invariably results in me saying no thanks, I would be bored shitless again. People being bored is why their subs have stagnated. Zvim fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Feb 15, 2014 |
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Feb 15, 2014 18:14
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People playing the game for fuckin 9+ years has a much stronger correlation with boredom and subscription decline than it being too hard/easy at any given time. I remain thoroughly unconvinced as to what makes World of Warcraft less difficult or strategic than old timey MMOs. Its core gameplay (combat) is identical to those games but inflated with unnecessary complexity. You do the same exact poo poo but with a million more buttons to press, more timers to keep track of, more things to not stand in. All the additional "layers of difficulty" of older games discussed so far seems to strictly be difficulty as a function of time. More time spent = harder. You die? Lose hours of progress. Want to run a dungeon? Spend 30 minutes advertising in chat to fill up a group. Need to get to a town? Better clear my schedule for the next 2 hours. I'm not sayin those are bad mechanics and it's perfectly ok to want a game like that but it's really fuckin strange that people are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires about it when there's no inherent difficulty in time spent. Also, don't confuse WoW's accessibility with difficulty then pontificate about how easy it is without experiencing the higher echelons of content, like that One Guy. Lastly, WoW is a bad game!!!
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Feb 16, 2014 03:45
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Carew posted:People playing the game for fuckin 9+ years has a much stronger correlation with boredom and subscription decline than it being too hard/easy at any given time. I don't think so. You have different environments, different stories, mechanics evolve, it is not like you are still plugging out Molten Core runs after 9 years. For me and most of my friends who left it was about there not being enough to do at max level to keep us logged in, that was fun at least. Archaeology or farming or whatever poo poo they introduced wasn't our idea of fun. Once you log out and look for other things to fill in the time void you are prone to leaving for different experiences. I stopped playing EVE for burnout reasons, the games offer a vastly different type of experience. quote:I remain thoroughly unconvinced as to what makes World of Warcraft less difficult or strategic than old timey MMOs. Its core gameplay (combat) is identical to those games but inflated with unnecessary complexity. You do the same exact poo poo but with a million more buttons to press, more timers to keep track of, more things to not stand in. All the additional "layers of difficulty" of older games discussed so far seems to strictly be difficulty as a function of time. More time spent = harder. You die? Lose hours of progress. Want to run a dungeon? Spend 30 minutes advertising in chat to fill up a group. Need to get to a town? Better clear my schedule for the next 2 hours. The mechanics became less brutal to human error, so you could bumble your way to victory. We had massive noob moments where we lost half the raid to idiocy and still managed to finish the encounter, as I said the Cataclysm heroics were more brutal than their raid content, you lost one player irrespective of their role and it was a wipe. The older content just required a highster standard of play to pull off the encounters, a few weak links in a 40 man raid and you were hosed. It was brutal because we all had jobs and sometimes you have good days and sometimes you have bad days and that is the same when you play these games, but to do the fights you had to be switched on as a group, you had to co-ordinate well, that complexity didn't exist outside of a few fights and even then it didn't have the scope of difficulty. It is great that more people got to see more of the content but the game just became a time investment, all you really had to do was put in the time, there was a very low bar in terms of actual competence. I have lost count of the number of single player games I never got to the end of, because they were too hard or too monotonous to finish. Too hard never stopped me from buying or playing games, hard just gives you more opportunity to play. Games that are easy to finish I uninstall and never play again. I loved Dragon Age but it was balls in terms difficulty, on the hardest difficulty it was still pretty trivial. Other games that were harder I put in more and more time. Games aren't books, you don't have to get to the last page for them to be rewarding. quote:I'm not sayin those are bad mechanics and it's perfectly ok to want a game like that but it's really fuckin strange that people are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires about it when there's no inherent difficulty in time spent. Also, don't confuse WoW's accessibility with difficulty then pontificate about how easy it is without experiencing the higher echelons of content, like that One Guy. Wut? I only said the older raid content gave us something to do for far longer and with each expansion the content thinned out, you had MOAR encounters but they became easier and easier to do and you had less reason to login and ran out of stuff to do so you went somewhere else to find something to do with your time. That destabilizes the community. We had consistently 100ish raider in the guild I was in from vanilla through to end of Lich King. It dropped to 40ish by mid way through Cataclysm and is hovering around 10ish now. It really isn't elitism, it is about the game engaging you from one tier to the next, from one expansion to the next. WoW just ran out of content to keep us entertained and it did for a combinations of reasons discussed. People weren't sick of the franchise or the lack of elitism, an MMO that just keeps me engaged for a few hours a week is one I will get bored of.
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Feb 16, 2014 06:18
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Shut up about WoW, this isn't a WoW thread.
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Feb 16, 2014 15:46
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This thread is only for talking about not-yet made really bad games, not real, already made bad games.
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Feb 16, 2014 23:43
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amusinginquiry posted:This thread is only for talking about not-yet made really bad games, not real, already made bad games. You'll be eating those words when you're put up against the wall by the Pantheon Supremacy Army in a few years, just you wait.
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Feb 17, 2014 01:01
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Yeah! 2017/18/19 is just around the corner!
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Feb 17, 2014 01:26
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Node posted:You'll be eating those words when you're put up against the wall by the Pantheon Supremacy Army in a few years, just you wait. ^^^^^ thanks. E: being a nice guy to brad and his "amazing groundbreaking game..." FreeWifi!! fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Feb 17, 2014 |
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Feb 17, 2014 03:09
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Node posted:You'll be eating those words when you're put up against the wall by the Pantheon Supremacy Army in a few years, just you wait. I don't think this is ever coming out. If they couldn't pull off a kickstarter they don't have much of a chance of massive investor support.
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Feb 17, 2014 03:35
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randombattle posted:I don't think this is ever coming out. If they couldn't pull off a kickstarter they don't have much of a chance of massive investor support. Probably. The Pathfinder Online and Camelot Unchained kickstarters were intended to prove to investors that there was demand for the games rather than to completely fund them on their own and I can only imagine it was the same case with Pantheon. They might've pulled it off with the last day rush too had McQuaid held off announcing his fallback plan until it was actually necessary. Matthaeus fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Feb 17, 2014 |
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Feb 17, 2014 04:23
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Bearserker posted:They might've pulled it off with the last day rush too had McQuaid held off announcing his fallback plan until it was actually necessary. Not to mention the fallback plan being hilarious and scummy. Hey if Chris Roberts did it why can't I? 
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Feb 17, 2014 04:52
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Space Pussy posted:Not to mention the fallback plan being hilarious and scummy. Hey if Chris Roberts did it why can't I? I don't even understand the thinking in dropping that bomb a week before the kickstarter ended. Chris Roberts only talked about their plans for investors when they said that they would no longer need to do that.
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Feb 17, 2014 05:37
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Node posted:You'll be eating those words when you're put up against the wall by the Pantheon Supremacy Army in a few years, just you wait. Who will then be lined up against the wall and shot by the People's Liberation Army of Pantheon. Who will then be lined up against the wall and shot by the Popular Liberation Front of Pantheon. Splitters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gb_qHP7VaZE
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Feb 17, 2014 08:32
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Post-KS plans: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1588672538/pantheon-rise-of-the-fallen/posts/750645 Yep, paying a subscription for forums, in two tiers. Am I alone in thinking this is terrible?
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Feb 17, 2014 20:42
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xZAOx posted:Post-KS plans: Fragmenting the community of a niche MMO with tiered forum subscriptions can only end well for Pantheon.
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Feb 17, 2014 21:10
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They have some of the reward tiers up on their onsite wiki with prices. The forum subscription tiers are:quote:Player (FREE) quote:Supporter ($5.00 Monthly) quote:Champion ($15.00 Monthly) jabro fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Feb 17, 2014 |
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Feb 17, 2014 22:16
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jabro posted:They have some of the reward tiers up on their onsite wiki with prices. The forum subscription tiers are: My forum name being navy colored is worth the 15 a month. No doubt.
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Feb 17, 2014 22:34
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iminers posted:My forum name being navy colored is worth the 15 a month. I screwed up the copy/paste job. $5/month is navy. $15/month you get orange!
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Feb 17, 2014 23:11
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This is all starting to sound a bit too eternal darkness 2 for me. I was curious to see how much they raised on their site but well good luck with that website. https://www.pantheonrotf.com
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Feb 17, 2014 23:20
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Myspace the mmo.
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Feb 17, 2014 23:37
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It's a shame the game isn't even near an alpha build or they'd be asking for $30/month to test it for them.
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Feb 17, 2014 23:44
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