En Fuego posted:

I was going to give you poo poo about doing research on the recommended specs, and I couldn't find it.

Anyone know if they have posted these yet for people? I just a spent a ton of cash on a new rig (not related to this), so I had no issues with just getting the game right away and knowing I would be cool, but I know there are more people in Obscurity's boat...

quote:

Salvage: Remember all those picks you discarded on your way to Rubicite and beyond? Well…you can reclaim part of those resources now. You can also “remake” a crafting result so that you don’t have to be quite as disappointed that your brand new axe you finally got to make is “Inferior”.

grrarg posted:

Yes, salvaging is part of phase 2 (~March-Aprilish) of the Roadmap.

The delete button on the inventory screen was a salvage button when the Alpha started. They changed it in preparation of folding salvaging into the crafting screen.

Loving Life Partner posted:

The minimums are something like 64 bit OS, 4 gigs of RAM, an i7 or i5 processor, and at least a 5000 generation Radeon or something or other GeForce.

I'm actually just under on all of them (except RAM)

blastron posted:

Just opened my customer support ticket to get a refund. While the core building mechanics are really good, the resource grind required in order to actually build anything (or even get to the cool building tools) is a massive turn-off. The roadmap looks interesting, but all of the stuff that might make the game fun for me to play is so far down the road that the game will probably be in open beta (or even released) before I find it enjoyable to play. This, coupled with the fact that it seems like the non-cosmetic perks (the vault access, the crafting/harvesting buffs) are or will be craftable in-game, makes it not seem worth it to hold on to the Trailblazer pack.

Have fun, guys! I'll probably be back closer to release.

En Fuego posted:

Do you ask for refunds on movies you see too?

jabro posted:

Sony is offering a refund for people who want it. I don't see what the problem is.

Obscurity posted:

Aside from all the random crashing, and the stupid bouncing around bug..I think I got my graphics settings tweaked well enough that game is playable. I get some lag spike stuttering still, but nothing I do changes that.

Arthil posted:

What settings did you use? And what specs do you have?

quote:

The Sandbox MMO
POST FEBRUARY 11, 201486 COMMENTS
A lot has been made about how much we’re pushing this concept of “Sandbox” mmos being the future. Not a lot has been said about what that means.

To date most MMOs have been what I would call “content driven” mmos. What that specifically means is we have made things for the players to explicitly do either by themselves or as a group. This can come in a lot of forms including things like Dungeons, expansion packs, quests… or things as simple as a large area with wandering monsters in it that drop loot from some kind of fixed table. There have been a lot of innovations over the years.. things like Battlegrounds, or public quests… but by and large this idea of the MMO company making stuff for the players to do has become the defacto.

My belief is simple – the content driven model is not where we should be aiming as an industry. Why? It’s unsustainable. When we first began making these kinds of games 18 years ago (I mean no disrespect to the Muds and other games out before Everquest) there was nothing to compare our games to. Players were so excited about being able to be a part of these virtual worlds that just about any content was exciting. Over the years the quality has really been steadily rising to the point where we have some brilliant narrative and exciting storylines in many MMOs today. We still thrill at completing a quest to kill the dragon or save some poor townsperson who was unlucky enough to get kidnapped by orcs. The real issue is a simple one – our ability to consume that content as players has gotten to the point that most content is done by the players nearly immediately after it’s released. It’s also laid out for all to see on any number of websites that contain complete spoilers up to and including the loot drop percentages.

I won’t argue why I think that part sucks. It’s too subjective. The thing that is tough as a game maker is that players are going through the content we make so much faster then we can make it that we’re constantly in a state where our players are looking for stuff to do.

A great example of this happened with SWTOR. I happen to think it’s a very well done game and the team at Bioware should be proud. However people that played the game went through the content so quickly that they became bored a whole lot sooner than the developers wanted them to.

This is a problem we all face. We all as game makers have to deal with the fact that we’re not just competing the content of WoW at launch. We’re dealing with 9 years of it. That’s a very daunting task and it makes the genre unapproachable if people try and fight that fight. Don’t get me wrong.. someone with deep pockets can still pull it off. TESO looks like it’s going to follow the content model and it’s going to have a lot of players. I’m willing to bet that it hits the same problem that SWTOR did. Just not enough to do.

So if that’s the problem what’s the solution?

In my opinion the solution is focusing a lot more on letting players make and be content for each other. Battlegrounds are an excellent example of an Evergreen style of content where it’s the players themselves that actually create the content. Auction houses are another example. So are things like storytelling tools in SWG.. or the brilliant music system in LOTRO. Building systems into the games that let the players interact with each other in new and unique ways gives us the ability to watch as the players do stuff we never anticipated. We’ll see a lot more creativity in action if the players are at the center of it. Imagine an MMORPG of a massive city.. and the Rogue’s guild is entirely run by players. Where the city has an entire political system that is populated by players who were elected by the playerbase.

There’s a great example of this today with Eve Online. It’s a brilliantly executed system where the players are pretty much in charge of the entire game. Sure there is a lot of content for players to do, but anything that’s important in the game is done by the players. This is a shining example of how this kind of system can thrive.

Our belief at SOE is that it’s smarter to head in this direction now rather than waiting. We want to innovate and let players be a part of everything we do including make the game in the first place. We’re going to take the idea of sandbox gaming and we’re putting it at the core of everything we’re doing. We’ll obviously still be making awesome stuff for players to do, but we’re going to aim very high in terms of letting players be a part of the game systems. The more emergent sandbox style content we can make the less predictable the experience will be.

Smed

ChickenMedium posted:

He's definitely right that it makes more sense from a development perspective to go with a sandbox over strongly scripted game, it just remains to be seen if enough players will go for it (like well all know they should) or if they will stick to WoW style, highly polished but static gaming.

And with his mention of player-created content (and not just players-as-content in his PVP example), it got me thinking to what extent that could reach. I've got this idea that they should let players put monsters anywhere in the game world. A player could make the monster as powerful as they want (cost increasing with power) and choose where to put it (cost increasing with proximity to population centers) and determine how long it will remain in the world, if it remains unkilled (cost increasing with duration). If someone with enough will (and money) wanted to plop down a raid boss level mob in the center of town for an hour, they could do it. Or someone could build a whole dungeon and plop it down in the buttcrack of nowhere for someone to find (or for his friends to play through).

joebob posted:

One of the reasons I think Planetside 2 and now this game are so interesting to me is the overall shift in approach that SOE is taking with it's MMO's.

Smed tweeted a link to his blog http://smedsblog.com/ the other day but I don't think anyone on here mentioned it. It only has one post at the moment but it's about SOE's current view of mmo's.

ChickenMedium posted:

He's definitely right that it makes more sense from a development perspective to go with a sandbox over strongly scripted game, it just remains to be seen if enough players will go for it (like well all know they should) or if they will stick to WoW style, highly polished but static gaming.

Subjunctive posted:

The ideal endgame of this is that the people who play the tools make content for the people who play the game. If you have a successful content production flow from players, then there can be lots of supply to satisfy themeparky demand.

Or so the story goes. Getting there probably requires giving players good procedural tools, like many "real" game designers get, to amplify the impact of the creative work they do. I don't know if that can work in the balance, given that there's been very little exploration of how to deal with adversarial designers wielding powerful tools, but EQL seems as good a place as any to find out.

Al Borland posted:

I like what he said, but its coming from Smed... I don't know what to think.

Obscurity posted:

Does anyone know why sometimes when I copy and paste something, it glitches out like this:

Edit: Logged off and back on and it's fixed. Must just be a visual bug.

Obscurity posted:

Droid Washington posted:

• The crafting window will now close automatically when you move away from the crafting station.

Nalin posted:

I know this was a bug that needed fixing, but man if it wasn't ever convenient to click start on a 300 item build and be able to drag the window to the corner of your screen and run away to do stuff. It's like how they made it so when the game client loses focus, you stop chopping wood. They are bugs/exploits that need to be fixed, but it really makes things inconvenient for the players.

Kenny Rogers posted:

In The Secret World, each "level" is divided into three progression bars. Each bar is 40k XP, and each "level" is 120k XP. FOREVER. Each time you level up, you get points to spend on *access* to new abilities - but you have a limited number of abilities you can equip at any given time. So "levelling up" is equivalent to gathering more flexibility, not power, for your character.