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Schubalts posted:That and UO being listed with 100k SUBSCRIPTIONS in 2009 should immediately make you skeptical of that graph. I believe it. People are still playing Second Life and Everquest and poo poo.
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# ? Sep 2, 2016 23:18 |
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# ? May 10, 2024 18:40 |
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Yeah people *still* play UO.
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# ? Sep 2, 2016 23:31 |
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warhammer died because they had literally no idea what balance was
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 00:35 |
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Everquest released a very overtuned expansion that was also extremely tedious near the launch of WoW, and decided to launch EQ2 near then too
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 00:47 |
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sword_man.gif posted:warhammer died because they had literally no idea what balance was That was so painful to find out, because it had such a strong start that just kind of... Fell apart as you leveled. The flaws became more egregious and leveling in any way other than RvR became a bigger and bigger slog. Which is a shame because, as people have said, it had some really good ideas. I'm still waiting for an MMO to steal the offensive/defensive target thing because it was the best. And the Oathfriend mechanic Ironbreakers had. And the entire Black Orc class just pull it straight out assets and all copyright be damned.
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 00:49 |
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:I believe it. People are still playing Second Life and Everquest and poo poo. Truga posted:Yeah people *still* play UO. sword_man.gif posted:warhammer died because they had literally no idea what balance was
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 00:50 |
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I'll buy there was 100k subs for UO ~9 years ago. Probably much less these days though, yeah.
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 00:52 |
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Yeah my guess today would be something closer to 30-70k. Which sounds like a lot but consider that only like a tenth of those actually play each evening and there's probably a statistically significant number of subs who are players who quit years ago but never removed the billing from their card. As for second life, it's harder to say since they consider anyone who ever made an account to be an "active subscriber" since there's no sub fee, but I'd be shocked if there were more than 1-2k players on daily.
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 00:57 |
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It's impressive how much wilds far is failing holy crap. I'll have to check our the death march sub Reddit
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 01:05 |
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Berious posted:It's impressive how much wilds far is failing holy crap. I'll have to check our the death march sub Reddit Don't bother, they're in denial and any talk about it dying gets deleted, the No Man's Sky subreddit is the same way.
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 02:47 |
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The thing with UO is (or at least was) that they ended up folding The Sims Online's house builder into the client, and they limited house ownership to a single dwelling per account... which led to a lot of the more obsessive carebears paying for multiple subs. 100,000 worth? I doubt that, but I wouldn't be surprised if ten to twenty thousand were essentially expensive bank alts scattered across all of their servers.
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 03:15 |
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Bieeardo posted:The thing with UO is (or at least was) that they ended up folding The Sims Online's house builder into the client, and they limited house ownership to a single dwelling per account... which led to a lot of the more obsessive carebears paying for multiple subs. 100,000 worth? I doubt that, but I wouldn't be surprised if ten to twenty thousand were essentially expensive bank alts scattered across all of their servers. Multiboxing was always huge in EverQuest, since you could effectively run a small party on your own. I don't know if it still is but I can't imagine that it's not, now that the whole thing went freemode. If it is, that would probably account for large EQ account numbers.
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 06:00 |
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Bieeardo posted:The thing with UO is (or at least was) that they ended up folding The Sims Online's house builder into the client, and they limited house ownership to a single dwelling per account... which led to a lot of the more obsessive carebears paying for multiple subs. 100,000 worth? I doubt that, but I wouldn't be surprised if ten to twenty thousand were essentially expensive bank alts scattered across all of their servers. Single dwelling was implemented during T2A days, with some people of course being grandfathered.
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 06:08 |
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sword_man.gif posted:warhammer died because they had literally no idea what balance was I don't know if it's true or not, but I recall reading that the devs purposely overtuned the Order faction. Even if it's not true, many of their classes had a more nuanced kit that made PVP/RVR a real pain in the rear end.
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# ? Sep 3, 2016 07:06 |
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Baba Yaga Fanboy posted:How many of you folks tried out the dead/dying MMOs on that spurious graph? What is it that you think caused them to die off? It really doesn't take much to kill an MMO. A couple gently caress ups on the part of the developers, or something else similar coming out, starts people leaving. Once the populace gets below a certain threshold, the game feels empty, and new players stop sticking.
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# ? Sep 4, 2016 01:21 |
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It isn't like the good old days either, when competition was so thin you'd might as well stick with poo poo World Online because there's nothing to jump to. Amuses the hell out of me that, even with the genre being twenty years old (or older, if you want to include stuff like MUDs), the player base still whips itself into a frenzy for the most unlikely promises of hype and vapor.
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# ? Sep 4, 2016 01:44 |
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Mayor McCheese posted:I don't know if it's true or not, but I recall reading that the devs purposely overtuned the Order faction. Even if it's not true, many of their classes had a more nuanced kit that made PVP/RVR a real pain in the rear end. I suspect it was more that Mythic just fell into the trap of thinking that "separate but equal" for faction abilities would somehow work even despite all of vanilla WoW showing why it never would. Liquid Communism posted:It really doesn't take much to kill an MMO. A couple gently caress ups on the part of the developers, or something else similar coming out, starts people leaving. Once the populace gets below a certain threshold, the game feels empty, and new players stop sticking.
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# ? Sep 4, 2016 01:59 |
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sword_man.gif posted:warhammer died because they had literally no idea what balance was It also looked like garbage, ran like rear end, and had a dramatically pared down version of what the endgame PVP was supposed to be (and which required repetitive PVE dungeon grinding, to boot). It felt like a patchwork of rough ideas that were never fully knitted together.
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# ? Sep 4, 2016 06:27 |
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IIRC I read an article a year or so back that said UO was hovering around 25k subs but that the player retention was rock solid. That's notable because a lot of MMOs do better numbers but have rear end for player retention and player retention is important if you want to build an actual community for your game.
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# ? Sep 4, 2016 08:14 |
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Vermain posted:It also looked like garbage, ran like rear end, and had a dramatically pared down version of what the endgame PVP was supposed to be (and which required repetitive PVE dungeon grinding, to boot). It felt like a patchwork of rough ideas that were never fully knitted together. You should grab that free server install and try it again. It still runs like garbage and looks like arse.
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# ? Sep 4, 2016 10:43 |
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Anoia posted:They had no clue how to balance classes in WHO, so PVP was always a roller coaster ride where your preferred class would dominate, then get nerfed into oblivion, and then improve by sheer virtue of some other class getting hamstrung. The back and forth was almost comical. CoX was the first game to have a modern achievement system that I know of. Not that I've played every MMO or anything. e: meant to say first MMO. The Moon Monster fucked around with this message at 01:50 on Sep 6, 2016 |
# ? Sep 6, 2016 00:38 |
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I adored running around and finding the little compasses in fixed and sometimes hidden locations. They'd give you some lore, XP and some were grouped into giving you extra powers.
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# ? Sep 6, 2016 00:44 |
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The Moon Monster posted:CoX was the first game to have a modern achievement system that I know of. Not that I've played every MMO or anything. Also the first game to have alternate builds, which it took WoW maybe a month to steal so it might actually have been developed independently rather than stolen.
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# ? Sep 6, 2016 01:48 |
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The Moon Monster posted:CoX was the first game to have a modern achievement system that I know of. Not that I've played every MMO or anything. It's possible WoW was already working on it inspired by CoX and then lifted the achievement book design wholesale from WHO. I remember popping back one day and being astounded at how similar it was.
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# ? Sep 6, 2016 02:34 |
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Asimo posted:I suspect it was more that Mythic just fell into the trap of thinking that "separate but equal" for faction abilities would somehow work even despite all of vanilla WoW showing why it never would. WAR was also a great example of why non-WOW games shouldn't divide the players into two non-interacting factions at all. I'm not sure any MMO has ever had its population crater that hard that fast, and if you didn't have enough people from both factions to PVP on your server the game was virtually unplayable.
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# ? Sep 6, 2016 22:11 |
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The Moon Monster posted:CoX was the first game to have a modern achievement system that I know of. Not that I've played every MMO or anything. I feel like CoX was a pretty fun and special MMO and that I missed out by not really playing it, but I also know that it's colored by nostalgia because it's not around anymore. I'm also super interested in stories about older MMOs that I never played, so I like reading about the good times people had with CoX.
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# ? Sep 6, 2016 22:44 |
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Has anyone even tried to have UI mods on par with WoW (which it's had since vanilla)? WoW has all kinds of crazy tech now adays that make it extremely accessible, which is really pretty much mandatory after the first 3 months or whatever of MMO launching. Atleast as far as linear progression RPGs go
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# ? Sep 6, 2016 23:46 |
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darkhand posted:Has anyone even tried to have UI mods on par with WoW (which it's had since vanilla)? WoW has all kinds of crazy tech now adays that make it extremely accessible, which is really pretty much mandatory after the first 3 months or whatever of MMO launching. Atleast as far as linear progression RPGs go there were a lot of good UI mods after launch, I doubt anyone's developing for it anymore though
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# ? Sep 7, 2016 00:00 |
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Harrow posted:I feel like CoX was a pretty fun and special MMO and that I missed out by not really playing it, but I also know that it's colored by nostalgia because it's not around anymore. If it helps most of my joy from CoX was creating heroes/villians. I found it to be very bland combat-wise with some neat travel abilities for its time. To me, it's like reading that people loved Spore outside of its creation tools. MMOs are weird like that where they just sometimes click with you or not.
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# ? Sep 7, 2016 00:01 |
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Cryptic's MMOs have a lot of really inventive and unique mechanics and quality of life features that other games don't think of or can't possibly implement with their server architecture. At the same time the actual gameplay tends to be relatively shallow and poorly balanced. Once you realize this It's kind of easy to see why CoH, STO, and all those have devoted long-term players but never really became big popular hits.
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# ? Sep 7, 2016 00:07 |
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30.5 Days posted:there were a lot of good UI mods after launch, I doubt anyone's developing for it anymore though The Secret World has some pretty amazing UI mods.
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# ? Sep 7, 2016 03:05 |
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Yeah, when you take the superhero skin off CoX's gameplay and look at the bones of the game directly it was pretty standard - but for me the exception was my Storm defender. The crowd control via actually throwing enemies around rather than just debuffs and stuns (though I think I could do all that too) was stupidly fun, and the most epic memories I have of the character involved basically saving entire parties with the Hurricane toggle. I once got to pull a "you shall not pass" against a ton of zombies and that zombie archvillain doctor guy while the rest of my party fled the sewers to regroup. I died, of course, but it owned.
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# ? Sep 7, 2016 05:28 |
Asimo posted:Cryptic's MMOs have a lot of really inventive and unique mechanics and quality of life features that other games don't think of or can't possibly implement with their server architecture. At the same time the actual gameplay tends to be relatively shallow and poorly balanced. Once you realize this It's kind of easy to see why CoH, STO, and all those have devoted long-term players but never really became big popular hits. If it was still up I'd still be playing it, and I do see what you mean about shallow combat, but at the same time it let you make any hero or villain you could think of. My favorite character was a force blaster, but I also had a super strength Japanese schoolgirl, a burning Valkyrie brute, a ninja zombie, and a lord of the rings dwarf that accused people in pocket D of being elves and calling the drinks pisswater. You could get anything from gun fu to super regeneration to being Big Business, a mastermind that summoned thugs whose catchphrase was "I CAN BUY AND SELL YOU!" Along with that, almost every power set had absolute horse poo poo broken stuff for pve, so you could have cool awesome moments, like diving into a giant stack of thugs and tanking the alpha as a brute, then setting everyone on fire and pulling out a fire sword while your party came in with their bullshit. It was just about fun with super heroes, and the qol stuff made it that much better.
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# ? Sep 7, 2016 09:15 |
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The Moon Monster posted:WAR was also a great example of why non-WOW games shouldn't divide the players into two non-interacting factions at all. I'm not sure any MMO has ever had its population crater that hard that fast, and if you didn't have enough people from both factions to PVP on your server the game was virtually unplayable. Allods online, a Russian WoW clone that I find charming in principle because it's WoW meets Soviet Russia, complete with red stars on armor, crashed and burned amazingly fast. It also had an extreme player bias towards the Alliance/Workers Revolution faction from day one. But the main reason it tanked so hard is they launched with an absolutely absurd F2P model that required you to drop to make the basic free play stop outright loving with you. There were harsh penalties for dying you had to pay real money (for tokens) to remove, for one thing. They overhauled the system to be less overtly antagonistic towards players, even added paid servers, but by then it was too late. There's a core player base that's so small they just huddle in one mega guild, and PVP is all but nonexistent due to the lack of the other faction. It's a shame. For the most blatant WoW ripoff second to Order & Chaos, the art style and music were pretty (well, ARE... It's still surviving off dedicated whales) neat.
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# ? Sep 7, 2016 12:01 |
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I though Algalon was the biggest WoW ripoff ever? Amazingly it is apparently still running.
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# ? Sep 7, 2016 12:30 |
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Harrow posted:I feel like CoX was a pretty fun and special MMO and that I missed out by not really playing it, but I also know that it's colored by nostalgia because it's not around anymore. CoH was a good game. Much of the mechanics were pretty mediocre, but they were all skinned well, and felt good from a player perspective. One of the most important things it did was include variable scaling, so that pretty much any group composition could do the vast majority of the content, and people who were super casual could have fun in the game without the terrible shitfests that were WoW endgame content in Vanilla. Or you could mentor up a lowbie to run high end content with you at 1 level below yours. Or go down to 1 level above his and re-run early game poo poo. Game didn't care. The travel powers were a huge quality of life thing too, being able to just up and fly over a zone, or jump 15x your character height on a whim was huge for getting rid of the grind of dealing with open world trash mobs. mushroom_spore posted:Yeah, when you take the superhero skin off CoX's gameplay and look at the bones of the game directly it was pretty standard - but for me the exception was my Storm defender. The crowd control via actually throwing enemies around rather than just debuffs and stuns (though I think I could do all that too) was stupidly fun, and the most epic memories I have of the character involved basically saving entire parties with the Hurricane toggle. I once got to pull a "you shall not pass" against a ton of zombies and that zombie archvillain doctor guy while the rest of my party fled the sewers to regroup. I died, of course, but it owned. My main was an Energy/Energy blaster... specc'ed for maximum knockback. Crowd control via being a glass canon that punches mobs and sends them to the other side of the zone was a blast. Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 15:02 on Sep 7, 2016 |
# ? Sep 7, 2016 14:55 |
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Allods was a blatant WOW clone, but it had some interesting ideas. Like the reactive damage mitigation of the Paladin. You had a buffer that basically grabbed incoming damage and held it a few seconds before it hit your HP, and you had abilities to reduce in in different ways. Or the psionic character that got a MP cost reduction on your main target (that was chosen by a long cast-time ability).
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# ? Sep 7, 2016 15:31 |
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Oh you glorious stupid bastards. The unfriendly amp/ability tier system and how loving horrible it is for alts to deal with is literally why I quit the game, and naturally the response is to sell it for real money. poo poo like amps/abilities and runes, and how absolutely money sucking/hostile to players it all is literally loses players by the bucketloads. The response shouldn't be "Sell it for real money" the response should be "Make it easier to get". When there was a stable population people were spending money on costumes and poo poo like gangbusters. Meanwhile since I quit (Almost 7 months ago) only 4 costumes have been released, and most of those were reskins, and shockingly no one is buying them. I don't even have words for how bad the decision making process must be at Carbine. Rhymenoserous fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Sep 14, 2016 |
# ? Sep 14, 2016 00:17 |
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Nearly time to change to Wildstar: Inexplicably still "alive" a year later
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# ? Sep 14, 2016 05:34 |
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# ? May 10, 2024 18:40 |
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Rhymenoserous posted:
This is a system straight out of your average exploitative Korean MMO.
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# ? Sep 14, 2016 05:45 |