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That sounds more like the EQ shutin was also a scat fetishist. Which makes sense, since you'd have to love poo poo to devote your life to EQ. seriously how do you even poo poo in a sock
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May 21, 2017 08:21
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Checked SAclopedia, the old posts say the original poopsocker was unrelated to MMOs. https://forums.somethingawful.com/dictionary.php?act=3&topicid=431
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May 21, 2017 09:28
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I'm old, and still prefer the term 'cat rear end'. Oh god, this editorial brings back some fuckin' memories. http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/loadFeature/2988/page/1
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May 21, 2017 15:52
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I still remember Tweety ranting about cat assers in Everquest. Its weird how all those bitter, furious MMO bloggers ended up working for MMO companies. Also the true story of the poop sock is indeed way, way worse wow. DapperDraculaDeer fucked around with this message at 16:38 on May 21, 2017 |
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May 21, 2017 16:34
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rift gave away their most recent paid expansion for free and it brought up player numbers by like 500 to 1k total for about a week before returning to its original numbers. will Rift die before Wildstar?
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May 21, 2017 21:07
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Shadowlyger posted:It's running on CoH's old servers. This was literally a joke on SA that was repeated so often it became fact. Do you really think a 2014 game was running on 10 year old servers? CoH's shutdown story is fascinating but completely unrelated to WildStar. I'm sure it'll come out someday.
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May 22, 2017 00:05
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Minrad posted:rift gave away their most recent paid expansion for free and it brought up player numbers by like 500 to 1k total for about a week before returning to its original numbers. will Rift die before Wildstar? My most recent attempt to play Rift involved me meeting and interacting with well over a dozen different players who had full black tier loyalty rewards. Now different things you can buy give different amounts of loyalty, so there is no realistic way to determine how much it costs to get that, but you can ballpark it, and that ballpark is 5 digits.
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May 22, 2017 02:11
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 holy poo poo if true
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May 22, 2017 03:11
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I wouldn't doubt it. The only thing keeping that game alive is their whales in that game and in others. The few dedicated people that play Rift REALLY PLAY Rift. They'll have every cash shop mount and outfit as well as achievements for running in circles 500,000 times and other seemingly unattainable feats. I think every game has those kinds of people though.
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May 23, 2017 16:49
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Schubalts posted:Lol if you actually think Wildstar had anything to with CoH. CoH was slowly coasting towards losing money at the same time Paragon studios was proving it couldn't handle making new IP. CoH surely would have had like 5 new expansions by now if not for Wildstar.
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May 23, 2017 18:16
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Trion is really good at exploiting whales. You can open the wow store and buy absolutely everything there is to get long before a thousand dollars, and this stuff that you do buy won't really affect your gameplay experience much. You can open the rift store and the amount of money you can spend is multiple orders of magnitude higher, and the things you buy affect your gameplay so thoroughly that some people get addicted to the bonuses or the extra convenience or whatever.
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May 23, 2017 20:27
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Ad by Khad posted:Trion is really good at exploiting whales. You can open the wow store and buy absolutely everything there is to get long before a thousand dollars, and this stuff that you do buy won't really affect your gameplay experience much. You can open the rift store and the amount of money you can spend is multiple orders of magnitude higher, and the things you buy affect your gameplay so thoroughly that some people get addicted to the bonuses or the extra convenience or whatever. That is not the direction I ever thought Rift would go, back when it first started. Any good examples of the kinds of things people can pay stupid amounts of money for? I'm morbidly fascinated with F2P game whales and why they buy what they do and how games can exploit that.
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May 23, 2017 20:52
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I find f2p whales pretty interesting too. In a lot of cases they are basically gambling addicts who got sucked into these games and exploited by the developers. The fact that there has been more than one situation like this really isnt surprising. With games like Rift though I dont understand the allure. They are buying gear straight out of the cash shop arent they? No gambling via loot chests involved. I dont understand whta the pull is.
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May 23, 2017 21:05
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Harrow posted:That is not the direction I ever thought Rift would go, back when it first started. Any good examples of the kinds of things people can pay stupid amounts of money for? I'm morbidly fascinated with F2P game whales and why they buy what they do and how games can exploit that. Rift sells actual endgame equipment.
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May 23, 2017 21:59
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Harrow posted:That is not the direction I ever thought Rift would go, back when it first started. Any good examples of the kinds of things people can pay stupid amounts of money for? I'm morbidly fascinated with F2P game whales and why they buy what they do and how games can exploit that. Sure, here's a common one even though it's not stupid amounts of money: In Rift you enchant and I think also gem your gear, similar to wow. However these enchants and gems are actually really expensive, or at least were when I played last. So when you upgrade a piece of gear, the most common way to get it enhanced is not to get a completely new enchant or gem, but to use unlockers to remove the enchant and gem from the piece of gear you replaced, to put them on the new item. These unlockers can only be obtained via the rift store. There is (or was) no ingame method, at all, period, to get an unlocker, and if you didn't want to pay the rift store you had to shell out big bucks for new enchants. The unlocker only costs a dollar or two, but back when more than 50 people played the game this was a major deal when it came to the rift store. Edit: Little tricks like these (despite rift's slogan being "No tricks. No traps.") are where a major portion of the store's revenue comes from. You don't spend 20 thousand dollars on an MMO by buying mounts at 20 dollars a pop. You do it by buying consumables, xp boosts, gear upgrades, gear itself, things that won't last forever and will eventually need to be bought again. Even in other notorious cash shop games like Maple Story or Archeage or whatever, the story is usually the same - the whales spend big by spending often, and often in relatively small amounts at a time. Ad by Khad fucked around with this message at 23:06 on May 23, 2017 |
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May 23, 2017 23:02
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Ad by Khad posted:In Rift you enchant and I think also gem your gear, similar to wow. However these enchants and gems are actually really expensive, or at least were when I played last. So when you upgrade a piece of gear, the most common way to get it enhanced is not to get a completely new enchant or gem, but to use unlockers to remove the enchant and gem from the piece of gear you replaced, to put them on the new item. Guild Wars 2 has a similar system--once you put an upgrade in a piece of gear, you can't remove it without destroying that piece of gear, but naturally there's a gem shop item that lets you extract upgrades. The saving grace is that most of the upgrades aren't actually terribly expensive, so there's not a ton of incentive to do that. I'd rather just buy another gem or rune for a few gold. It's the same tactic, but aimed at making a little money from a lot of people rather than a fuckload of money from a few people. (Not that there aren't plenty of things to whale out on in GW2--locked chest gambling is there for pretty much exactly that purpose.) I remember Rift having a lot of promise, but I guess I can't help but be grudgingly impressed at Trion's ability to make money on a dead MMO.
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May 23, 2017 23:14
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CoffeeBooze posted:I find f2p whales pretty interesting too. In a lot of cases they are basically gambling addicts who got sucked into these games and exploited by the developers. The fact that there has been more than one situation like this really isnt surprising.
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May 23, 2017 23:55
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Here's another few examples: When Rift was getting ready to release its second expansion, some plane of water type thing, they announced a series of packs you could buy. It was advertised that you didn't actually need to buy any of these, but if you wanted to support the game and get cool rewards, you could do so. Cheap pack ($25): In addition to a couple of things that were totally meaningless, this pack gave you two things. First, and most important, it unlocked your earring slots, giving you two extra gear pieces and therefore a very major, very noticeable stat advantage over everyone who didn't have this. It was advertised that you could get earring slot access via ingame means, but this was a crock of poo poo. The amount of grinding you had to do to unlock your ears without paying money was such that it was a laughingstock among the playerbase, and Trion eventually removed the ingame functionality to unlock your ears altogether, leaving only the store method. In addition to this, the cheap pack gave you "Planewalker Attunement" which allowed you to equip certain pieces of loot that dropped from dungeons and raids. If you did not have this mcguffin that came from buying the pack, roughly 12-15% of all items that dropped from dungeons, raids and I think even quest rewards would flat out not be equippable by your characters. You'd have to find some other piece to fill that gear slot, sorry friend. Middle pack ($50): You get all the poo poo from the cheap pack, plus a free instant level boost to 60 for one of your characters, plus a pet, plus an extra bank slot. There were a few other meaningless things too, but this is effectively all you get. Top tier ($150): All the previous poo poo, plus a reusable black dye, a 36-slot bag, and a crab skin for your ranger pet. But that's not all, the big pack came with a limited-edition, exclusive (even though it did not remain exclusive for very long, they added recolors later) shark mount. The shark mount had weird stubby legs and could run around on land, but the real attention-grabber was that this shark mount was the only mount in the whole fuckin game that could swim at a decent speed. Going into a water-based expansion, people started thinking oh man, we gotta have this swim speed mount since surely there will be a lot of swimming! There was not a lot of swimming. Within a week of the packs going on sale, a full quarter of my in-game friends were riding shark mounts. Most of my friends who did raids had purchased the cheap pack for the earring slots. And while most raiding guilds never outright said to their members that you were required to have earrings unlocked, the implication was there, and the early raid bosses of the new expansion were tuned such that earrings were absolutely required if you wanted to beat enrage timers. Even after all of this, however, I still haven't mentioned the separate and most blatant cash grab of the whole ordeal - the Dream Souls pack. One of the major draws of the new expansion was that it was releasing new subclasses that you could incorporate into your character build. One new subclass for warriors, one for rogues, one for clerics, one for mages, and these subclasses they added were designed to make up for a certain weak point that existed in the class. Warriors and rogues got a healer spec (which they did not have), mages got a tank spec (which they did not have), and clerics got a support spec (which I'm pretty sure it did not have), and the addition of these new subclasses meant that any class could do any role. In practice, these new subclasses were intentionally overtuned and overpowered as gently caress, so that more people would buy them. But you couldn't buy a single subclass, you had to buy the whole pack of 4 - the Dream Souls pack. The Dream Souls pack cost $35. And it's not included in any of those three packs I already mentioned. You had to buy it on top of that.
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May 24, 2017 00:04
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Asimo posted:The real gambling addict snares are the F2P games with random boxes of crap with lovely drop rates for what people actually want. That's basically laser targeted towards exploiting people with gambling addictions, and it's so effective at it that even Blizzard's started doing it with Overwatch and HotS. Pretty much all of them have this poo poo. Wildstar even had it, though there as no particular reason to buy in as the fortion coins would kinda trickle in on their own and you could buy most of the poo poo off of the auction house for cheap. It's really loving insidious and should probably be illegal.
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May 24, 2017 00:37
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I think Japan's slowly started to make laws against it due to how blatant and prevalent it is in mobile games there, yeah, where you had poo poo like the desirable 'grand prize' being something like a 1/250 drop from a box that was a 1/300 drop or something similarly absurd. And of course the odds are always, always hidden and never actually checked or monitored for fairness. It should really be legislated as strongly as gambling is in the US too, but I can't imagine the federal government actually doing anything about it.
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May 24, 2017 01:11
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At least with mobile games they didn't strike back against it until there was some kind of huge uproar over it, and all they did as far as I know is make it so they have to display the real rates.
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May 24, 2017 01:17
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Asimo posted:The real gambling addict snares are the F2P games with random boxes of crap with lovely drop rates for what people actually want. That's basically laser targeted towards exploiting people with gambling addictions, and it's so effective at it that even Blizzard's started doing it with Overwatch and HotS. It boggles my mind that these types of "loot chests" are not considered outright scams at every level. I don't even think you can technically call it gambling, gambling implies there's a reasonable level of fairness in the games which is offset by a marginal house edge. CSGO is easily the worst offender in my book because at least in something like OW or HOTS you get some token items that you can use anyway, like ok you didn't get a skin but here have a cute spray and some voice lines, that's kinda cool right? In CSGO 99.5% of the items in a crate are totally useless, like even if you equip them you're unlikely to ever see them because they are for guns you use maybe once a game at best - I have skins that I have never actually seen in game because they are for poo poo like the pump shotgun or whatever it's called. This would be bad enough but you can also get duplicates of skins you already have, and there is no consolation prize for doing so - no credits, no extra spin, nothing. All of this in a AAA title that's consistently the biggest game on steam.
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May 24, 2017 08:33
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What bothers me about Rift was that the original free to play conversion was really good and it only started going to poo poo after that.
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May 24, 2017 11:47
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Yeah. The initial F2P experience was really good and fair, and the game itself was pretty good too. But then everything went to poo poo  Trion seems to like to take promising things and gently caress them up. I think the only game they currently have that's still doing well is Trove, unless they hosed it up too since the last time I heard about it.
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May 24, 2017 11:59
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This is basically the general MMO thread right now, right? So I'm not stepping on anyone's toes by continuing to post about games that are not Wildstar?Asimo posted:The real gambling addict snares are the F2P games with random boxes of crap with lovely drop rates for what people actually want. That's basically laser targeted towards exploiting people with gambling addictions, and it's so effective at it that even Blizzard's started doing it with Overwatch and HotS. It's a really good thing I'm not really given to gambling, because otherwise I'd have spent a shitload of money on Overwatch, I'm sure. There are several Overwatch skins that I'd gladly just outright pay  for, but the fact that I have to gamble for them is enough to make me not spend a fuckin' dime past the initial purchase price, so I guess that's nice, at least.abigserve posted:It boggles my mind that these types of "loot chests" are not considered outright scams at every level. I don't even think you can technically call it gambling, gambling implies there's a reasonable level of fairness in the games which is offset by a marginal house edge. Loot box stuff is amazingly bullshit. To a degree, I get it when F2P games go that route, but when games like Overwatch do, god drat it feels scummy. I've had this conversation with bigger Overwatch fans than me and they always point out how much easier it is now to get loot boxes without paying, and if that's the case (I haven't played in a while), that's good. But while a cash shop where you can just outright buy cosmetics is a little scummy but ultimately something I'll deal with (for example, I like Guild Wars 2 quite a bit), having to only go through loot boxes with lovely drop rates and no duplicate drop protection feels terrible on every level.
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May 24, 2017 14:10
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On the subject of Trion, what the hell happened to them? When they released Rift they had built up a stellar reputation which they actually managed to maintain for quite a while after the games launch. Then things just absolutely went off the rails, Rift became a cash shop nightmare, games with some promise like Defiance were left to wither on the vine, there was the whole ArcheAge fiasco and Im sure there were more than a few other dumpster fires I am forgetting. Was there some kind of hostile buyout or something? Because the dramatic shift in their style and tone has been very abrupt.
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May 24, 2017 15:49
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I'm assuming it's this: Trion received two rounds of venture capital funding in 2007 and 2008 worth 100 million dollars. They took that money, made their game, released their game Rift in 2011. Off the back of that successful launch, they did another round of VC funding in 2012 that got them 85 million more. Venture capital don't last forever.
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May 24, 2017 16:32
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What I generally remember about RIFT is that everything about it was WoW but not quite. The world wasn't quite as compelling as WoW's, the combat wasn't quite as immediate as WoW's and the abilities didn't feel as fun to use as WoW's. The graphics also went for realism (or as much as they could manage) over a more stylised aesthetic so the art design wasn't even that notable. It's other features (housing and the rift system) were good but also easily adaptable into other MMOs which leaves basically only the soul system as the one major unique feature it had. Then the F2P bullshit got heaped on. The goon house loving ruled though I'll give it that.
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May 24, 2017 17:09
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Harrow posted:It's a really good thing I'm not really given to gambling, because otherwise I'd have spent a shitload of money on Overwatch, I'm sure. There are several Overwatch skins that I'd gladly just outright pay Overwatch has like, the least offensive version of loot boxes I've ever seen. The moment an event starts, all loot boxes are now converted to event boxes for the duration of the event, which guarantee that at least one of the four items inside is an event item. You get more boxes by just playing the game and leveling up (which happens every like five games) or up to three more per week by winning nine games in arcade. Unless you're some kind of tryhard completionist that needs every skin, even if you're insanely unlucky you will end up with enough gold from dupes to buy your favorite one by the time the event ends, just by playing the game normally. If the issue is that you don't want to play the game that much but still want skins that's a problem on your end, not the game.
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May 24, 2017 18:05
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Rift's graphics aged very quickly because of that focus on realism over style, which is unfortunate. The one thing I thought was cool about Rift was how it handled the WoW-style talent trees. Only four classes, but each one had like 12 talent trees each that you could mix and match in groups of three, and every class could do at least two of the "tank/healer/DPS" roles. It was really cool and I enjoyed how you could sorta freeform create classes by mixing the talent trees you used. I have no idea how that turned out in the endgame because Rift being basically WoW but less fun made me stop playing by level 20 or so, but it was at least a neat concept. Wrist Watch posted:Overwatch has like, the least offensive version of loot boxes I've ever seen. I don't at all mean to say that Overwatch is the worst example of it or anything. I don't like the concept in a game that also has an upfront price. If Overwatch was totally free to play, I'd have absolutely zero problem with its loot box system. As it is, I just think they're really unsatisfying to earn because the drop rates from them combined with the small amount of gold you get from duplicates means that, as a casual player at least, you're unlikely to find exciting things just opening the boxes you get from leveling. Maybe that's just my experience, I dunno. I agree that the way they handle events is much better than most similar systems, and like I said, I've heard that it's much faster to earn boxes in Arcade mode (which is good!). I think I would just prefer steady rewards from leveling rather than loot boxes--I don't often get to open boxes in bulk, so I don't often find anything I actually care about in a box, which makes me just not care about the boxes. If leveling just straight gave you gold while Arcade mode and the cash shop gave loot boxes, I'd probably feel a bit better about it. Harrow fucked around with this message at 18:11 on May 24, 2017 |
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May 24, 2017 18:06
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Harrow posted:The one thing I thought was cool about Rift was how it handled the WoW-style talent trees. Only four classes, but each one had like 12 talent trees each that you could mix and match in groups of three, and every class could do at least two of the "tank/healer/DPS" roles. It was really cool and I enjoyed how you could sorta freeform create classes by mixing the talent trees you used. I have no idea how that turned out in the endgame because Rift being basically WoW but less fun made me stop playing by level 20 or so, but it was at least a neat concept. I never played Rift very much, but unsurprisingly people calculated the best builds and that was the end of the creativity they were touting with their system. It didn't even take long.
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May 24, 2017 18:59
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Harrow posted:The one thing I thought was cool about Rift was how it handled the WoW-style talent trees. Only four classes, but each one had like 12 talent trees each that you could mix and match in groups of three, and every class could do at least two of the "tank/healer/DPS" roles. It was really cool and I enjoyed how you could sorta freeform create classes by mixing the talent trees you used. I have no idea how that turned out in the endgame because Rift being basically WoW but less fun made me stop playing by level 20 or so, but it was at least a neat concept. neat concept until you get to endgame and realize that your special snowflake build has no place in a dungeon or raid when it's doing 20-40% less damage than a properly specced build nowadays they've just tripled down and if you don't just pick every single talent in your primary tree You Are Stupid because the ability you get for 61 points in a tree always makes the spec really work
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May 24, 2017 19:03
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Office Surprise Store posted:neat concept until you get to endgame and realize that your special snowflake build has no place in a dungeon or raid when it's doing 20-40% less damage than a properly specced build I also remember the "correct" way to play most specs was to have 3-5 giant macros that used the excessive number of abilities each talent tree gave you. Unlike in WoW, the macro system was really permissive. This had the side effect of causing the game to be nearly unplayable without said macros.
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May 24, 2017 19:11
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Yeah, the goodness of that system definitely started and stopped with the concept. There was no way to actually execute that with the massive branching talent trees they were using. There might be a way to do it with something more stripped down, but hell, no system that allows for players to customize their character's abilities will ever avoid people figuring out the optimal builds sooner than later.Dockworker posted:I also remember the "correct" way to play most specs was to have 3-5 giant macros that used the excessive number of abilities each talent tree gave you. Unlike in WoW, the macro system was really permissive. I'm now even more glad I never really played very far into Rift.
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May 24, 2017 19:27
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Dockworker posted:I also remember the "correct" way to play most specs was to have 3-5 giant macros that used the excessive number of abilities each talent tree gave you. Unlike in WoW, the macro system was really permissive. yes, classes like cleric especially, you just had one big castsequence macro you pressed over and over for max dps
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May 24, 2017 19:59
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Its so hard to believe that Rift released in 2011. It really does feel like it is way, way older than that. I remember when it came out being really psyched about the talent system and the accessibility of multiple specs, but WoW has had its multispec system since 2009. Also the massive number of abilities Rift has is such a throwback to older MMOs like EQ and EQ2 and an earlier era of WoW when down ranking was still a thing.I really did thing Rift came out in 2008 or something like that, and if it had a lot of its game systems would have been a pretty big deal.
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May 24, 2017 20:41
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Pierson posted:the abilities didn't feel as fun to use as WoW's Man I may be in the minority but WoW's abilities were loving drab since it was basically the same animations for everything, so this is a serious accusation.
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May 24, 2017 22:13
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RottenK posted:Yeah. The initial F2P experience was really good and fair, and the game itself was pretty good too. But then everything went to poo poo Devilian. Trion taking a new class that was originally unlocked by getting to max level with any other class, and making it cash shop only.
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May 24, 2017 22:48
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Ad by Khad posted:Edit: Little tricks like these (despite rift's slogan being "No tricks. No traps.") are where a major portion of the store's revenue comes from. You don't spend 20 thousand dollars on an MMO by buying mounts at 20 dollars a pop. You do it by buying consumables, xp boosts, gear upgrades, gear itself, things that won't last forever and will eventually need to be bought again. Even in other notorious cash shop games like Maple Story or Archeage or whatever, the story is usually the same - the whales spend big by spending often, and often in relatively small amounts at a time. The rift thing sounded less insane and way more believable the moment you mentioned Maple Story and I remembered I knew a guy who spent over 10,000 dollars on that game. 
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May 24, 2017 22:58
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John Dyne posted:Man I may be in the minority but WoW's abilities were loving drab since it was basically the same animations for everything, so this is a serious accusation.
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May 24, 2017 23:37
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