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Meme Poker Party
Sep 1, 2006

by Azathoth
Now that's value!

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Verbose
Apr 23, 2006

Mike believed in the shooting star, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then,but that's no matter. Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther... and then one fine morning-
So we beat on, subs against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Dont forget your sub fee!

Ulvirich
Jun 26, 2007

Verbose posted:

Dont forget your sub fee!

About that. So, normally, it's $15 a month, with a slight discount if you purchase it in 3 or 6 month lots. Blizzard has introduced a game time token that one can purchase for in-game gold which has a variable point based on supply and demand. The supply is completely done via people purchasing the token, for $20, and posting it on the AH for in-game gold. A shrewd method of increasing the monthly subscription income up 25% for those that interact with the token.

LordSaturn
Aug 12, 2007

sadly unfunny

Ulvirich posted:

About that. So, normally, it's $15 a month, with a slight discount if you purchase it in 3 or 6 month lots. Blizzard has introduced a game time token that one can purchase for in-game gold which has a variable point based on supply and demand. The supply is completely done via people purchasing the token, for $20, and posting it on the AH for in-game gold. A shrewd method of increasing the monthly subscription income up 25% for those that interact with the token.

PLEX is such an obviously good idea, I'm glad so many games are using it.

Meme Poker Party
Sep 1, 2006

by Azathoth

Ulvirich posted:

About that. So, normally, it's $15 a month, with a slight discount if you purchase it in 3 or 6 month lots. Blizzard has introduced a game time token that one can purchase for in-game gold which has a variable point based on supply and demand. The supply is completely done via people purchasing the token, for $20, and posting it on the AH for in-game gold. A shrewd method of increasing the monthly subscription income up 25% for those that interact with the token.

EVE Online has the same system ($15 dollar sub, $20 reedemable-for-sub token) with the added hilarity that the token is a physical item that can be destroyed if you are retarded. Every once in a while some idiot gets killed while inexplicably carrying sub tokens on his ship which basically means that somebody paid CCP number of tokens x $20 except the tokens have all gone poof but CCP still has the money.

Valatar
Sep 26, 2011

A remarkable example of a pathetic species.
Lipstick Apathy
Everquest was actually really cool about it. Your race/religion/class combo determined how people felt about you. That allowed for neat stuff like druid enclaves, animals not attacking druids/rangers on sight, or having an easier time of making friends with the goody-goods if you weren't worshiping a god of murder. It was always pretty cool to wander through a good/evil city and see a member of a normally-hated race just chilling out there. It was also a somewhat tricky balancing act, as lots of things that you could kill to improve one faction would hurt another, so you had to take care not to ruin your reputation with other factions while improving one.

Everquest with a fresh coat of graphics and a more involved combat system is something I'd still go for. At least for a month until all of the horrible corpse runs, de-levelings, and grind go and drive me right off.

mp5
Jan 1, 2005

Stroke of luck!

so everquest next

DapperDraculaDeer
Aug 4, 2007

Shut up, Nick! You're not Twilight.
I guess you haven't heard the bad news about EQ Next. It's more like EQ, Not at this point.

DeathSandwich
Apr 24, 2008

I fucking hate puzzles.

Valatar posted:

Everquest was actually really cool about it. Your race/religion/class combo determined how people felt about you. That allowed for neat stuff like druid enclaves, animals not attacking druids/rangers on sight, or having an easier time of making friends with the goody-goods if you weren't worshiping a god of murder. It was always pretty cool to wander through a good/evil city and see a member of a normally-hated race just chilling out there. It was also a somewhat tricky balancing act, as lots of things that you could kill to improve one faction would hurt another, so you had to take care not to ruin your reputation with other factions while improving one.

Everquest with a fresh coat of graphics and a more involved combat system is something I'd still go for. At least for a month until all of the horrible corpse runs, de-levelings, and grind go and drive me right off.

Boy does Brad McQuaid* have a game for you.

There's even a pre-alpha stream of it available here.

*Noted opiate addict and full of questionable design decisions if his previous projects are anything to go by.

Valatar
Sep 26, 2011

A remarkable example of a pathetic species.
Lipstick Apathy
There's no question that McQuaid was a one-hit wonder at this point. Vanguard had a lot of good ideas buried under terrible mismanagement, but this latest thing is only ever going to be godawful if it even sees the light of day. I think he's a really good idea guy (the drugs may be helpful on that front) but terrible at actually implementing anything.

Mr. Neutron
Sep 15, 2012

~I'M THE BEST~

Chomp8645 posted:

EVE Online has the same system ($15 dollar sub, $20 reedemable-for-sub token) with the added hilarity that the token is a physical item that can be destroyed if you are retarded. Every once in a while some idiot gets killed while inexplicably carrying sub tokens on his ship which basically means that somebody paid CCP number of tokens x $20 except the tokens have all gone poof but CCP still has the money.

I knew that the tokens in EVE were physical items but I had no idea they could be destroyed :stare:

Psykmoe
Oct 28, 2008

Valatar posted:

Everquest with a fresh coat of graphics and a more involved combat system is something I'd still go for. At least for a month until all of the horrible corpse runs, de-levelings, and grind go and drive me right off.

Oh god, you're giving me flashbacks to grinding up my Iksar faction by invisibly handing some guard hundreds of bonechips for a newbie quest so I could do that lengthy tiered weapon quest for Shadowknights on my troll. Greenmist!

I think you had to walk up to the guy in invisibility and then use the Shadowknight's barely developed Hide skill (magic invis didn't allow interaction with npcs I think) to hand them in from behind (because nonmagical sneak/hide was governed by some basic vision mechanics?)

God, EverQuest rep grinds were a gigantic timesink. But when I started playing EQ I didn't speak English all that well and the constant exposure to quest texts, in-game books and social interactions, plus all the online resources needed really got me motivated to do better in class, so that was a plus :v: The fact that I did well in English but not other languages is mostly attributed to EverQuest and Magic: The Gathering. I never could summon up the will to give a poo poo about French and Latin, so I failed those bad.

Also, the gnome city? Totally not troll accessible. Nowadays MMO architecture (including in later EQ expansions) is loving gigantic to allow easy play in third person, but early EverQuest cities were really scaled to their inhabitants, I think a lot of those were meant for first person navigation. And larger races could get stuck in doors for smaller folk. It could look really crowded.

EverQuest also used to leave in legacy items when they nerfed things. My Shadowknight still has an infinite charges/instant cast invisibility clicky in the bag. They nerfed those to have a cast time, but any that already dropped stayed as they were, and since early EverQuest was pretty light on 'No Drop' items, those were traded for a lot of money.

Of course in the later expansions no one remembers because there's like 15 of the loving things they really pulled back from the relevance of your personal class/race/deity for accessing content. I think the third expansion, well before WoW came out, already only had two instances of that, where the ice giant grind was mildly easier for people worshipping the god of war, and the dragon grind was a little easier for bards worshipping the dragon goddess. They did add updated Epic weapon quests though, so class content can still be a thing, I guess.

Also, EQ totally adopted the PLEX thing as well. I think they're called Kronos or something. They stole a LOT of quality of life features from other MMOs and desperately kitbashed them into their 1999 game engine to try and retain at least a few players. I guess it helps that the all-access account covers multiple games?

Psykmoe fucked around with this message at 12:30 on Mar 23, 2016

Truga
May 4, 2014
Lipstick Apathy
It feels so dumb that some games don't have a PLEX system. It's good for everyone involved.

John Dyne
Jul 3, 2005

Well, fuck. Really?

Psykmoe posted:

Also, the gnome city? Totally not troll accessible. Nowadays MMO architecture (including in later EQ expansions) is loving gigantic to allow easy play in third person, but early EverQuest cities were really scaled to their inhabitants, I think a lot of those were meant for first person navigation. And larger races could get stuck in doors for smaller folk. It could look really crowded.

I got my troll warrior stuck in a chimney in the dark elf city one Christmas. I had to get a GM to yank me out. Because of the timing it got slapped on a community site as an 'event' which was funny since it was just a dumbass kid exploring and getting stuck in geometry.

EQ also had loving pit traps and other poo poo, the kinds of things that are really cool the first few years of the game's life but then everyone knows about them so it's common knowledge that after so far into this hallway you need to juke right or you'll fall to the bottom floor and get gangbanged by a pack of skeletons.

DeathSandwich
Apr 24, 2008

I fucking hate puzzles.
The best was having a shaman friend because they could make you bigger or smaller. I raided in Velious back in the day as a gnome wizard and every raid one of our shamans would cast grow on me until I was bigger than an ogre. I was the anchor point that people would look for if they got lost or went AFK and we left them behind because I was a big red signal flare with a bald brick head.

Macdeo Lurjtux
Jul 5, 2011

BRRREADSTOOORRM!

Valatar posted:

Everquest was actually really cool about it. Your race/religion/class combo determined how people felt about you. That allowed for neat stuff like druid enclaves, animals not attacking druids/rangers on sight, or having an easier time of making friends with the goody-goods if you weren't worshiping a god of murder. It was always pretty cool to wander through a good/evil city and see a member of a normally-hated race just chilling out there. It was also a somewhat tricky balancing act, as lots of things that you could kill to improve one faction would hurt another, so you had to take care not to ruin your reputation with other factions while improving one.

Everquest with a fresh coat of graphics and a more involved combat system is something I'd still go for. At least for a month until all of the horrible corpse runs, de-levelings, and grind go and drive me right off.

This lead to dwarf characters that worshipped Brell Serrillis being non-Kos in one of the earlier dungeon/raid zones, The Hole. Now because whenever a raid boss would use the standard Death Touch attack he would yell out the name of the player he killed, my brother made a dwarf, named it the same name as the premier raiding guild, and ran it down to the final boss. Anytime the guild started clearing to the boss my brother would log in get Deathtouched and freak the guild out because they thought the boss had coding to know who was killing his subjects.

Morglon
Jan 13, 2010

Safe and sound, detached from reality.
Just like your posting.

Mr. Neutron posted:

I knew that the tokens in EVE were physical items but I had no idea they could be destroyed :stare:

They can be but rarely are because you can transfer or remotely redeem them or whatever without carrying them on a ship. If you ever do load them in a ship and they get destroyed it's your own drat fault and happened because you're retarded.

Meme Poker Party
Sep 1, 2006

by Azathoth
Yeah, nobody should ever lose a PLEX but it still happens. They can be spawned in anywhere in the universe and redeemed anywhere in the universe, and the only reason to spawn them in the first place is to trade them (if you are using them for yourself they can be redeemed from the character selection screen without ever touching the game world). So theoretically there shouldn't ever be a need to transport them and thereby risk destruction because you can just spawn them in wherever the transaction is taking place, sell them, and then the buyer can redeem right away from anywhere. But, for reasons that escape sensible persons, every once in a while some bozo loads 20 PLEX into his cargo bay and gets himself exploded on his way to wherever he is taking them.

LITERALLY MY FETISH
Nov 11, 2010


Raise Chris Coons' taxes so that we can have Medicare for All.

Chomp8645 posted:

Yeah, nobody should ever lose a PLEX but it still happens. They can be spawned in anywhere in the universe and redeemed anywhere in the universe, and the only reason to spawn them in the first place is to trade them (if you are using them for yourself they can be redeemed from the character selection screen without ever touching the game world). So theoretically there shouldn't ever be a need to transport them and thereby risk destruction because you can just spawn them in wherever the transaction is taking place, sell them, and then the buyer can redeem right away from anywhere. But, for reasons that escape sensible persons, every once in a while some bozo loads 20 PLEX into his cargo bay and gets himself exploded on his way to wherever he is taking them.

Some people trade in plex. The people who get blown up probably aren't the people who are either buying from CCP or eventually using the plex.

Secret Spoon
Mar 22, 2009

Also, the dude who lost 1500$ in plex.

People are stupid

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Secret Spoon posted:

Also, the dude who lost 1500$ in plex.

People are stupid

Wasn't it found out this guy was blown up intentionally in some daffy RMT isk laundering scheme?

Minera
Sep 26, 2007

All your friends and foes,
they thought they knew ya,
but look who's in your heart now.
they added login and logout screens that tell you to come back

rip wildstar

Archonex
May 2, 2012

MY OPINION IS SEERS OF THE THRONE PROPAGANDA IGNORE MY GNOSIS-IMPAIRED RAMBLINGS

Minrad posted:

they added login and logout screens that tell you to come back

rip wildstar

Okay. That's just depressing. :(

And kind of darkly funny, but still. Depressing too!

Bombogenesis
Mar 27, 2010

Mekkatorque 2016
Dinosaur Gum

Minrad posted:

they added login and logout screens that tell you to come back

rip wildstar

Please tell me there are screenshots of this. :stare:

Baller Time
Apr 22, 2014

by Azathoth

Bombogenesis posted:

Please tell me there are screenshots of this. :stare:

http://imgur.com/a/VDgdT

Login rewards are pretty standard for f2p games now, though.

Asimo
Sep 23, 2007


Yeah, it's basically for the same reason lovely mobile games do it. By giving players some soft encouragement to log in and check on things, they're more likely to get involved in other content and spend money on the game rather than just never booting it up and forgetting it exists entirely. Pretty transparent psychology stuff, but eh. :effort:

John Dyne
Jul 3, 2005

Well, fuck. Really?

Baller Time posted:

http://imgur.com/a/VDgdT

Login rewards are pretty standard for f2p games now, though.

Yeah that's been there for awhile as far as I recall. I remember something similar when F2P launched, at least.

super sweet best pal
Nov 18, 2009

I don't think I've ever seen a game push the daily reward on the logout screen before.

Mayor McCheese
Sep 20, 2004

Everyone is a mayor... Someday..
Lipstick Apathy
Marvel Heroes lets you know what the next daily reward is. Unsure if any other games do that, though.

Pesterchum
Nov 8, 2009

clown car to hell choo choo
Guild Wars 2 and Blade and Soul. Must be an NCSoft thing.

Thursday Next
Jan 11, 2004

FUCK THE ISLE OF APPLES. FUCK THEM IN THEIR STUPID ASSES.

John Dyne posted:

No one's really done two faction systems well, except maybe SWTOR, because they always try to make things too drat unique and that always causes balance issues.

SWTOR is an example of one of the worst faction imbalances in any game ever made.

Isn't that the game where you had one or two rebel alliance player for every three or four hundred empire player? I remember stories of a sea of empire players all desperately trying to do a single point of damage to one lone rebel so they would get kill credit on the only rebel player on the server.

Regardless of whether or not the available classes are balanced, factions are always, always, always terrible. At best they fracture your playerbase along arbitrary lines. At worst, they are complete jokes like the above.

Phi230
Feb 2, 2016

by Fluffdaddy

John Dyne posted:

It feels like WoW took the idea of locked in factions from DAoC, since it was the only other game that had it; even in EverQuest, you could build faction reputation outside of the specific PvP servers to let yourself run around in enemy cities and such.

No one's really done two faction systems well, except maybe SWTOR, because they always try to make things too drat unique and that always causes balance issues.

SWTOR kinda just gave everyone the same classes with different names and balanced them equally, and the only differences were in the story and aesthetics of the classes. It was a boring implementation but it made sense storywise, but it did keep things pretty balanced.


Yeah the race/class restrictions are pointless by now, but what I REALLY want are all hair styles for all races/genders. I want the loving Jane Fonda haircut on my dwarf paladin, goddammit.

Star Wars Galaxies did factions great.

Everyone starts neutral, you join Empire/Rebs by actively seeking them out. Factional warfare was in the background and was left to organized clans and was actually fun. Plus Jedi were rare so it was good

AbrahamLincolnLog
Oct 1, 2014

Note to self: This one's the shitty one
APB by far had the worst faction imbalance ideas.

Enforcers could initiate combat on a Criminal player whenever they saw them breaking a law, which basically meant any free-roam battles were immediately 1-0 and the Criminals starting at a huge disadvantage, because of course they'd just wait until the Criminal was carrying something or otherwise busy to start the fight, then immediately light them up. Even better, Enforcers got to use less-than-lethal weapons on Criminals. This allowed them to then arrest the Criminal player instead of kill them which took them out of the round three times longer than a kill.

Criminals had absolutely nothing to balance it. It was literally just "yep, Enforcers get to do this stuff because ~realism~".

SneezeOfTheDecade
Feb 6, 2011

gettin' covid all
over your posts
Apologies if this is against the rules, but Google doesn't give me anything useful. Has anyone had any success building a private server for Wildstar? I enjoyed the hell out of (most of) the writing and art, but so many of the gameplay decisions were so disastrous that I get depressed every time I try to log in. I figure whoever runs a private server might choose to fix some of the gameplay "issues", so...

mp5
Jan 1, 2005

Stroke of luck!

short of re-writing entire sets of creature mechanics and questlines idk what you could do

AbrahamLincolnLog
Oct 1, 2014

Note to self: This one's the shitty one
Doesn't seem to currently be one, no. Most newer games don't have private servers yet simply because server side tech has gotten so much stronger. Like, APB still hasn't gotten private servers even with multiple groups working on it for years.

Sea Lily
Aug 5, 2007

Everything changes, Pit.
Even gods.

Plus the primary motivation for private servers being a thing was usually 'I want to play but not pay a sub' and everything's F2P these days so nobody cares enough to make them most of the time.

General Maximus
Jul 14, 2006
Standard models come in white labcoats for inexplicable reasons.
And by the time a F2P game outright dies there's usually no one who cares enough to try to reverse engineer it. Aside from the ocassional notable exception but let's be honest, the City of Heroes community is even more mental than the people who still play this lovely game in a lot of ways. And I say that as one of them, so.

Gaybee
Jul 16, 2002
Any new Wildstar news? The only thing I could find was an NCsoft earning preview which doesn't look good...again.

https://www.kdbdw.com/bbs/download/207104.pdf?attachmentId=207104

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Rainbow Knight
Apr 19, 2006

We die.
We pray.
To live.
We serve

Gaybee posted:

Any new Wildstar news? The only thing I could find was an NCsoft earning preview which doesn't look good...again.

https://www.kdbdw.com/bbs/download/207104.pdf?attachmentId=207104

I guess the most recent news is from some German MMO site talking about some layoffs in March and the studio being in a bad way (:shrug:), but it looks like most people have just stopped giving a poo poo. The only people who care now are the people still finding the motivation to play. We'll see if the threat title holds true within the next 5 months.

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